Leadership Missing In Albany’s Coastal Plan
New York State has released a first-draft plan for considering sea level rise. But for all the effort, and a self-congratulatory public relations flurry, there is little promise of improving coastal policy. This is a regrettable failure.
The problem is this: Though the overwhelming evidence is that sea level is creeping upward, threatening low-lying and beachfront areas, government officials from New York’s villages to the state capital have been unable, or unwilling, to respond in ways that matter. East Hampton’s project to sandbag the downtown Montauk ocean beach, consistently opposed by independent experts, is a case in point. So, too, is the entire region’s continued expansion of development in the danger zones.
Three years after Hurricane Sandy and decades after warnings were issued, the state is only now getting around to making official predictions about how high the water is expected to go. But the state is not taking the next logical step of imposing new construction standards and changing permit requirements. Instead, Albany is handing responsibility down the line to those who might or might not be able to incorporate the predictions into routine decision-making.
The Montauk Army Corps effort was to a large degree the product of a misrepresentation by the previous town supervisor, Bill Wilkinson, who claimed Sandy was to blame for ongoing erosion. Those who followed him in Town Hall were hamstrung: Had they blocked the work and some of the motels begun to fall, the responsibility would have been theirs.
The East Hampton Town Board recently named a coastal resiliency committee to study the issue and make policy recommendations. The obvious risk is that whatever the committee comes up with will be left to elected officials to enact. Consideration should be given to changing the way shoreline projects are evaluated, especially in East Hampton Town. It might be better to give erosion-control project review to the town planning board, whose members’ seven-year terms are supposed to insulate them from politics. Free from fear of being turned out of office, planning board members might indeed be more likely to make the most difficult decisions.
Whatever the solution, it is clear that local governments cannot by themselves meet the political and emotional challenges of saying no to certain waterfront property owners and beginning a program of managed retreat. Albany’s estimate of how bad the problem will be for shore areas is a start, but falls short. Without real guidance from the top, business will continue as usual along the coast, with slow-moving disaster the most likely outcome.