Falmouth Planning Board To Discuss Coastal Resiliency
Falmouth Planning Board is looking to jumpstart its involvement in long-term planning for coastal resiliency in town and will host Charles T. McCaffrey Jr., chairman of the Coastal Resiliency Action Committee, at an upcoming meeting for a discussion on the topic.
The discussion will focus largely on what can be done in terms of zoning and planning to prevent damage to and loss of Falmouth’s coastline and coastal communities in the future. Regulatory action items for the town were outlined in the Coastal Resiliency Action Committee’s final report—the culmination of three years of research—that was presented to the select board in June 2021.
“It has [everything] down the ranks, beginning at the top with policy changes all the way down to suggestions to where more planning efforts are needed and implementation can be,” said Charlotte Harris, chairwoman of the planning board, in a phone interview. “It’s a really great report.”
Among the eight regulatory action items recommended in the 50-plus page report were three strategies that involve planning and zoning as they relate to the board. Those three items are to restrict new development and redevelopment projects in the flood velocity zone, to phase out of development in areas threatened with permanent flood inundation and to utilize a transfer of development rights to facilitate the phasing out of existing developments from highly threatened areas and allow a transfer of density to undeveloped areas not subject to flooding risks.
“First is avoid, and that’s avoiding building anything else in the v-zone as much as possible,” Ms. Harris said. “Then we need to accommodate, so that if you’re going to build near the v-zone, [we ask] how you’re going to build that: building on piles or filling in your basement, so that the water won’t come in there and rise up and swamp you from below. How can you accommodate the rise from there? What are the things that we want to protect and where do we think we really just ought to retreat?”
Protecting and configuring Falmouth’s various existing wetland areas is another strategy. According to the report, maintaining these areas could help mitigate erosion, attenuate floodwater, and provide a buffer between upland terrestrial ecosystems and marine ecosystems.
“Really, coastal resilience management is all about water storage,” Ms. Harris said. “There’s going to be more water, so where is it going to go? And when is it going to go there? So that’s sort of the big overall question that the coastal resiliency plan is looking at and trying to prepare for.”
Ms. Harris said that over the next five or six years, the town should adopt the same approach that is being used in the Davis Straits Reset and apply it to each of the 13 Falmouth neighborhoods identified in the coastal resiliency report. The planning board’s goal for the Davis Straits project is to revitalize the area for mixed-use and multifamily residences, but also allow for the reclamation and preservation of some wetland areas in an attempt to mitigate and control flood risk in the area.
The biggest areas to focus on next, she said, would be Falmouth’s Main Street and downtown, and Woods Hole, both of which are highly susceptible to flooding.
“The Davis Straits reset plan is the first of the neighborhood plans,” she said. “We’ve kind of done what we need to do for now on Davis Straits; we need to start beating the drums to get the funding for planning for downtown and Woods Hole and get those in place. And then after that would come planning for the other neighborhoods that are named in the plan, but [we need to] at least get those started, so that we have a schedule that we’re working on that will get our preparedness going.”
While there are still a number of questions regarding the best strategies for planning for coastal resiliency and how the town can implement those plans in a productive and expeditious way, Ms. Harris wants to assure residents that this work has been underway for quite some time now. The town is not at the beginning of this process nor is it working alone, she said.
“The main point for Falmouth people to realize is that this is a problem everywhere there is a coastline,” she said. “It’s a regional problem, and Falmouth is part of a regional effort, so we’re not acting like we’re alone and we’re not alone… The federal and state government are there, and Falmouth has been on top of this; we’re not at the beginning of anything. We’ve been moving along, actually ahead of a lot of communities, way ahead. And we don’t want to leave out our regional planning, the Cape Cod Commission, so it all fits together.”
One project that definitely lies ahead for the planning board is an update to Falmouth’s Local Comprehensive Plan. The plan was last updated in 2014 and has some coastal resiliency recommendations already, but Ms. Harris said it needs to be revised to be in compliance with the updated overall plan for the region put forth by the Cape Cod Commission and the Massachusetts Office of Coastal Zone Management.
“We’ll be going to Town Meeting [and] we’ll be asking for funding to begin our update,” Ms. Harris said. “We’ve been working on this for several years and we have a foundation on which to build, but we need to update all of that and we need to involve people.”
Community-wide collaboration will play a big role in preparing Falmouth for rising sea levels and other threats to its coastline, Ms. Harris said.
“The planning board coordinates—and that’s an important word. It’s not like we’re going to go in a room, write a plan, and bring it to Town Meeting,” Ms. Harris said. “We have to establish a process that gets many of the town departments actively engaged, because they’re experts in their own areas, and get townspeople to be part of the thinking that goes into that. So it’s coordinating a big input process and then synthesizing and writing it down.”
The board will further address coastal resiliency planning with Mr. McCaffrey at an upcoming meeting. The next scheduled meeting of the planning board is Tuesday, January 25.