Coastal Resiliency Presentation Emphasizes Need For Immediate Action
Former chairman of the Coastal Resiliency Action Committee Charles McCaffrey told the Falmouth Planning Board on Tuesday, January 25, that there is a need for staff dedicated to coastal resiliency, noting there is pressure to act promptly on the outlined recommendations.
The presentation focused on action items specific to the planning board identified through the Coastal Resiliency Action Committee’s June 2021 final report. Coastal resiliency, in this context, includes building up the community to withstand the impacts from three distinct threats: sea level rise, major storms and frequent flooding. Mr. McCaffrey provided a list of items that fall under the responsibility of the planning board split into seven broad categories: administrative action, regulation, physical projects, education, policy adoption, planned redevelopment and further research.
The first and one of the more important steps to be taken, he said, is to hire more town staff with expertise in coastal resiliency who would be able to ensure town-wide compliance with coastal resiliency and environmental protection policies. Ultimately, Mr. McCaffrey said, the town would need more than one person designated to a climate resiliency and sustainability role.
“The important thing is not another committee,” he said. “The essential thing is getting staff resources, whether they’re assigned to the planning board and also work for conservation or vice versa….We need it to restructure how our decisions are made with an expansion of expertise with regard to the natural and physical development of the town.”
Implementation of many of the policies and physical projects will cost a lot of time, something town employees are already stretched for; and funding, which can come from a variety of different sources and usually requires constant monitoring on top of a lengthy vetting and application process.
“We need to really think [about] how the town, in the way it addresses its physical and economic development, is integrating consideration of resiliency in all relevant decisions,” he said. “We need to assure that actions are evaluated for consistency with policy.”
Rosemary Dreger Carey, a Town Meeting member from Precinct Five, later said that the Falmouth Climate Action Network, of which she is a member, is bringing a petition article to Spring Town Meeting to hire a sustainability director. The decision comes after considerable research by the group and is based on conversations with a handful of communities that currently have sustainability directors, including Martha’s Vineyard.
“We see a sustainability director position being created as a really good start to get this process going to look for the grants that are coming down the pike through ARPA,” Ms. Carey said. “There needs to be someone at this time looking out for those opportunities for Falmouth.”
Ms. Carey also said that through the group’s discussions with sustainability directors in other towns, it learned that sustainability directors bring in between eight and 12 times their salary in grants or savings to the town on a yearly basis, making it a worthwhile investment.
“The grant opportunities are the one takeaway that I hope that you remember that the sustainability director can focus on for the town,” she said. “A sustainability director is a good start and in getting those grants, they can show that the town has the capacity to pull it off, otherwise they would not be looked upon favorably by the grant makers. So it’s something we need to take action on.”
Additional action items that Mr. McCaffrey suggested were to adopt an official projection for sea level rise, which is currently being estimated at four feet by 2070, and to align Falmouth’s local comprehensive plan with state coastal zone management policies. Consistency is the basis for making decisions, he said, and using the Massachusetts Coastal Zone Management Program as a baseline for building a Falmouth-specific policy would be the best course of action.
In terms of physical projects, Mr. McCaffrey suggested that a berm be installed to protect town hall and other areas of Main Street that are most vulnerable to storm surges and flooding. The construction required to install a berm would also allow for the opportunity of mixed-use developments analogous to the Davis Straits Reset project that the planning board has been working on. The idea of a berm would require a feasibility study and is just one of the many concepts being passed around for physical projects to improve resiliency, he said.
The committee’s final report last summer divided Falmouth into 13 neighborhoods and suggested that planning efforts that mimic that of Davis Straits and Surf Drive be undertaken for each of the 13 neighborhoods.
“Surf Drive was the pilot study and taught the consultant how to apply to adaptive management approach, how to manage the area, and how it might evolve over time,” Mr. McCaffrey said. “We can recommend something now to protect an area recognizing that it’s maybe good for 10 or 20 years, but it’s not good in the long term. So it’s getting to where you have to make those shifts in planning and perspective.”
Mr. McCaffrey stressed that the time to act on these action items and begin the process of implementing them is now, and waiting any longer to begin the work runs the risk of losing out on some of those options for the future. Relocation and removal of infrastructure that exists in areas threatened with permanent water inundation are especially time sensitive, because if the infrastructure is not removed before it becomes inundated, he said, it becomes pollution.
“There’s going to be more and more willingness to do things that weren’t done before,” he said, “such as generally, you can’t abandon a road if it’s providing service. Those legal principles did not envision permanent inundation of roadways when they were formulated and applied, but we will have permanently inundated roads in the winter, frozen solid. So we’re going to have to say that at some point, infrastructure will be removed from certain areas….We need to prepare that land for the sea for when we can’t defend it from the sea.”
There are a variety of ways the town could explore redevelopment options—higher-density parcels farther inland through a transfer of development rights, amortization of buildings in flood zones to phase out vulnerable developments, and resilient mixed-use buildings—but there is still a lot of legwork to be done before planning and implementation can begin. That is why it is crucial for Falmouth as a whole—including staff, town boards, committees—to undertake the mission of coastal resiliency and integrate it seriously into their work. The Climate Resiliency Action Committee’s final report was intentionally broken down into broad categories, giving a macro-view of the issue, to allow town boards and committees to cherry-pick the specific action items that apply to them and implement those into their working mission, Mr. McCaffrey said.
“The thing that [Mr. McCaffrey is] urging is don’t put it off,” planning board chairwoman Charlotte Harris said. “Get going on it now…plan for it in the next year, pick out what you’re going to do, and get going on the part that’s yours.”
Geralyn Schad, another member of the Falmouth Climate Action Network, agreed, saying that she constantly reads things in the newspaper that point to a very serious climate issue and is concerned when she hears people respond with things like, “It’s 50 years away.”
“It may not be as far off as we think,” she said. “We really need to start to take those words and put them into action.”
Ms. Carey suggested that town boards treat coastal resiliency as a priority and address it first on the agenda. After seeing the moderate number of people that turned out to the board’s meeting that night, Ms. Carey said she was delighted to see so many people coming out to learn about coastal resiliency, but was disheartened at how long it took to actually get to that point on the agenda.
“It should be our first priority,” she said. “What a lost opportunity to educate everybody in the room and people tuning in who might get tired because the property issues don’t really affect them, so they tuned out.”
Implementation of coastal resiliency practices and policies outlined by Mr. McCaffrey will require interdepartmental cooperation. There was general agreement that some kind of structure that allows for collaboration is key.
Ms. Harris mentioned that Town Manager Julian Suso tried in 2016 to create bundled community services and development departments for the town, neither of which panned out. Coastal resiliency, though, could be their chance to get that coordination done right this time around, she said.
“It would have been so nice if that had happened; we’d have that structure now,” Ms. Harris said. “But we might get that structure in the reasonable future and be able to focus on the action that [the community is] looking for.”