Express Sessions: Montauk, On The Front Lines Of Climate Change, Must Begin To Plan Ahead

The Express News Group’s Express Sessions series will return to Montauk on April 28 for a conversation with community leaders, business owners, town officials and environmental experts about how the hamlet should plan to guard against and adapt to rising sea levels in the coming decades.

Perhaps more than any other hamlet on the East End, Montauk will be on the front line of the region’s impact with climate change: Its downtown sits just yards from the ocean, pinched between waters rising from both sea and bay, and isolated from the rest of the South Fork by a narrow strip of low-lying dunes and marshland.

Officials and community leaders have already started the push to prepare Montauk for a changing future.

East Hampton Town fought a losing battle to get LIPA to build its new power station on higher ground, but is assured that the new station, slightly higher than the last and built with survival of a storm in mind, can ride out rising sea levels for the next 40 years.

A long-range planning study offered a glimpse of the possibilities for redeveloping the downtown to protect against the worst potential impacts of rising and warming seas that may spawn more severe storms and will some day again send a hurricane to the South Fork — sparking a debate about how drastically the downtown needs to be remade.

And after a pitched battle, East Hampton Town convinced the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to include a major beach nourishment project for the downtown area as part of the Fire Island to Montauk Point project, or FIMP. Community leaders have been discussing whether trying to raise more money locally to expand the work while the federally-mobilized dredges are in the vicinity, while some environmental advocates wonder whether the project is an elixir or a band-aid that will only delay the inevitable.

As part of the Express News Group’s ongoing series “The Rising Tide,” looking at how climate change is impacting and will impact the South Fork in the future, next week’s Sessions event, “Montauk 2042: A Changing Landscape At Island’s End,” will bring together a group of experts on Montauk, on the forces it faces, and on how it can or should approach the looming threat.

The lunchtime discussion will be held at Gurney’s Seawater Resort & Spa and will be moderated by Express News Group Executive Editor Joseph Shaw.

The panel for the luncheon discussion will include Alison Branco, Ph.D., the director of climate adaptation for The Nature Conservancy; Leo Daunt, co-president of the Montauk Chamber of Commerce and owner of Daunt’s Albatross hotel; East Hampton Town Councilman David Lys; Kevin McAllister, the founder and president of Defend H20, a coastal ecology advocate; Aram Terchunian, a coastal engineering expert and the town’s liaison to the FIMP project; and Laura Tooman, executive director of the Concerned Citizens of Montauk.

McAllister has been a critic of the shore-hardening work that was done across the front of downtown Montauk in 2014, and is skeptical that the plans for the beach nourishment will be effective or sustainable in the long-term. He has advocated for the town embracing the “managed retreat” strategy of using transferable development credit and redrawn zoning maps to remove the dozen-or-so buildings that sit directly on the beachfront of downtown Montauk, most notably a collection of large hotels.

The town’s hamlet study, adopted in 2020, laid out some possible strategies for how to affect such a retreat, but leaves it to the town and community to advance the ball with legislation.

“Nobody talks about the issues with beach nourishment because it’s the easy way out — it’s a panacea,” McAllister said. “But there are a whole host of issues that are being sold and not being addressed. Incompatible sand will just wash away, it creates turbidity issues. And it’s not sustainable for Montauk in the long-term because of the distance to get to suitable sand, eight to 10 miles. And you’re digging 100-acre holes in the sea floor.”

McAllister thinks the town needs to implement the “managed retreat” idea basically immediately.

Tooman, whose group has championed modernizing Montauk with an eye toward the changing environmental conditions and who sits on multiple town committees dealing with climate change issues, says that the issues with beach nourishment, in Montauk in particular, are well known but that in the relative short-term at least, it buys some time.

“We know that beach nourishment is not the complete solution — it’s not sustainable financially, it’s not sustainable environmentally — but it’s a short-term solution while we develop a long-term plan that will work,” Tooman said. “The end goal can’t be when do we get more sand. The goal is when do we have the harder conversation about what makes sense for Montauk.”