Lack of National Policy

Now that the East Hampton Town Board has a problem on its hands of a long queue of people willing to be arrested in protest of the Army Corps of Engineers’ project in Montauk as well as some 250 others who pressed the matter at a meeting on Tuesday, the question is where the town can go from here. But it is even more important to consider whether coastal policy all the way from Town Hall to Albany and Capitol Hill must be overhauled.

Several local figures who sought money for the sandbag seawall, including former Town Supervisor Bill Wilkinson and his then-allies on the town board, have remained out of the limelight although they more or less handed those who followed them into Town Hall a done deal.

However, the final responsibility for what is going on rests entirely with the current board, which signed off on the project and helped negotiate necessary access agreements with adjacent property owners. To be charitable, perhaps they, like many of the past days’ protestors, could not envision what the project would actually look like until the bulldozers rolled.

Up to last week, only a handful of individuals and just one organization, Defend H20, were on what we see as the right side, arguing against the seawall and pushing for a sensible, long-term program of moving endangered businesses and residences away from the shore — or condemning them and building a resilient dune in their places.

Supervisor Larry Cantwell and the rest of the town board had a chance early on to apply the brakes but chose not to. Perhaps they, like the project’s individual supporters and the Montauk Chamber of Commerce, allowed themselves to be conned by the idea of a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow in the form of millions of federal dollars to be spent here as part of the Army Corps’s Fire-Island-to-Montauk study. They should have known better: Destroying a beach and setting aside years of environmental regulation on the mere wisp of a promise of cash from Washington was outrageous.

As we have argued before, local governments, as well as the State of New York, are doomed when it comes to managing a rapidly changing coast unless a major change of policy occurs. The Army Corps, with its single-headed focus on preserving property, is the wrong agency for the task. Change must come from the very top after a frank national conversation about how sea level rise and storm risk is going to be dealt with, and by whom.

What is happening today on the Montauk beach makes it clear that the current regulatory structure is a failure, and that new, more far-sighted leadership will have to come from Washington.