Express Sessions: Remaking Montauk In The Face Of Rising Seas

The future of Montauk’s downtown and the long shadow of rising sea levels was the focus of a panel discussion with experts in coastal dynamics and community leaders at the latest installment of the Express Sessions series, held in Montauk on Thursday, April 28.

The conversation among the panelists and more than 50 members of the Montauk community, in a room overlooking the Montauk coastline at Gurney’s Montauk Resort & Seawater Spa, ranged across topics: the threats the hamlet faces from rising seas, what the residents, business owners and local government can do to protect against them in the near future, and how the hamlet itself may need to change to accommodate a shifting coastline in the long term.

“You have water coming at you from the ocean, water coming at you from the bay, and water coming up from underneath, because as sea level rises, groundwater rises, too,” said Alison Branco, a climate adaptation expert at The Nature Conservancy and co-chair of East Hampton Town’s Coastal Assessment and Resiliency Planning Committee.

“And Montauk is sort of unique, because unlike most places on Long Island where the downtown is up by the highway … the whole economy and center of life in Montauk is in one of the most vulnerable areas.

“You really have to change the face of Montauk to adapt to sea level rise,” she added.

That sentiment — that the physical make-up of Montauk will have to change, substantially, to accommodate sea level rise — is the foundation of a debate that has been simmering since it was first introduced in 2016 as part of a long-term planning analysis of the five hamlets between Wainscott and Montauk.

The release of the first draft of a second long-range planning study, this one focusing specifically on the town’s coastline and the anticipated impacts of rising sea levels, adds weight to the discussion — which also draws in the ongoing considerations of a Montauk sewer system and paying for long-term sand replacement for the hamlet’s beaches.

Consultants have suggested that in the long term the town will need to use redrawn zoning maps, transferable development rights and likely tens of millions of dollars in public funding to wholly relocate some components of the downtown — a process the consultants dubbed “managed retreat.”

The effort would only have to focus on some specific areas of the downtown: primarily the “front line” of oceanfront hotels and condominiums and a handful of businesses, including the hamlet’s only grocery store, that sit in a low-lying saddle on the western edge of downtown between the ocean and Fort Pond.

How that kind of migration — which carries with it the abandonment of valuable private property — can be mobilized, and how quickly it may be necessary, are topics of substantial debate.

The first component at issue is beach nourishment and how long it can offset the impacts of sea level rise in downtown Montauk.

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers — after much arm-twisting by local government officials — plans to pump nearly 1 million tons of sand onto the beach across the front of downtown Montauk in 2023 as part of the Fire Island to Montauk Point Reformulation, or FIMP. The work will restore the natural sloping contour of the beach below the water line, providing better dampening of storm waves before they reach the shoreline.

“Montauk is really the beginning — the beginning of a sand transport system that runs from here all the way to the Rockaways,” said Aram Terchunian, a coastal geologist whose Westhampton Beach-based company, First Coastal, has shepherded local municipalities through the planning of beach nourishment projects over the last 30 years.

“Beaches and dunes are always going to give you the best protection, because that is what nature designed,” he said. “How to maintain that is the challenge.”

Terchunian pointed to the six-mile-long nourishment project that was conducted in 2014 in Bridgehampton and Sagaponack, which restored once anemic beaches where the water flowed beneath oceanfront homes during Superstorm Sandy. In the absence of any major storms in the years since, the rebuilt beaches in some areas still remain more than 120 feet wide.

In Montauk, beach nourishment projects present a particular logistical hurdle not faced by other areas of Long Island, because the seafloor directly offshore of the downtown is not the sandy plain it is to the west. To get enough sand to rebuild the Montauk beach, it will have to be dredged up from the bottom several miles to the west and pumped into a hopper that will carry it east and pump it ashore — a tedious and costly process.

Beach nourishment itself is also seen as fool’s gold by many environmentalists, because it requires the excavation of huge swaths of the ocean floor, for what is often a temporary improvement.

It is also expensive — the work planned for Montauk in 2023 is likely to cost in the neighborhood of $15 million. The federal government will pay for 100 percent of the work the first time but only 50 percent of anticipated replenishments, leaving New York State and local municipalities to pay for the remainder.

“To pump miles of beach is going to be untenable over the long term,” said Kevin McAllister, founder of Defend H2O, an environmental advocate who has long been a critic of artificial efforts like mechanical beach nourishment to protect coastal development. “With FIMP, we have these rose-colored glasses on that the federal government is paying for this. And it’s just delaying difficult choices, such as moving back off the coast.”

McAllister argued that regardless of other factors, beach nourishment alone will not be enough to protect Montauk’s front line and the lowest areas against rising seas — the only long-term solution is managed retreat and the restoration of a natural dune system along the hamlet’s oceanfront that can absorb the blows of major storms and rebuild itself naturally in between.

Removing the 3,000-foot-long sandbag revetment the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers built across downtown in 2014 also must be part of that restoration of natural processes, he said.

“That is not a dune — a dune is a sand reserve,” he said. “That is a veneer of sand atop an immovable structure.”

Like the sand bags, others say, beach nourishment will buy time for the town to figure out its long-term plans. Without it, the threat from the sea looms very large and very immediate.

“If there is no nourishment, no retreat, no changes to the building codes the next storm — and it doesn’t even have to be the next 100-year storm — Montauk will be under water,” said Laura Tooman, the executive director of the Concerned Citizens of Montauk. “There will be homes and business that will no longer exist.”

The concept of managed retreat introduces a much more complicated set of calculations to the equation, panel members admitted.

In the hamlet studies, the consultants introduced a package of possible strategies that would use the forces of the free market to incentivize the owners of buildings in problem areas to relocate — with the goal in mind that Montauk not lose any hotel rooms or other businesses, just that they move out of harm’s way.

The consultants suggested the town could create “development credits” that would be awarded to the threatened properties according to the number of hotel rooms or residential units or commercial businesses their buildings contain. The credits would be transferable to other sites and could be sold to the highest bidder.

The town would then have to identify areas of the hamlet that are elevated enough to be out of the flood zones far into the future — parts of the hamlet contain some of the highest points on Long Island, and even areas of the downtown are well out of even the most dire flood forecasts. Those areas could have special zoning designations put on them that would allow expanded commercial or residential development exclusively through the transfer of the development credits.

The strategy would allow current owners to either relocate their threatened business themselves or sell their credits to other developers who could use them to either expand an existing business — adding more units to an inland hotel, for instance — or to build anew in an area that would not otherwise be available for such major development.

The town could then purchase the raw land under the relocated business and restore it to natural dunes that would again become part of the natural fluctuations of the beach.

Figuring out where to move businesses would be a huge part of the chore. The hamlet study had identified high ground at the northeastern edges of the downtown, much of it now zoned residential.

“The available real estate available to move to is very small,” Tooman said. “It may end up being that we have to go higher instead of spreading out. We don’t have these answers yet.”

Following the release of the hamlet study, some Montaukers who had not been a part of the year-long public process bristled at the recommendations, which they interpreted as a blueprint for government decree.

The sentiment lingered at last week’s discussion.

“We’re island people, we’ll adjust … it doesn’t have to be government telling you that you have to do this,” said Jim Grimes, a Montauk native and East Hampton Town Trustee, and a business owner who was also representing the Montauk Chamber of Commerce. “The saddest thing that could happen here would be for the government to jam some policy down our throats.”

Other town officials were again quick to assure that whatever decisions about what could become the approach will be communitywide discussions that develop a strategy through consensus building and sound planning.

“Nothing can be done without the involvement of the community,” East Hampton Town Councilwoman Cate Rogers said from the audience. “They will provide the push and pull to find what solution will work for us.”

The example of the late-in-the-game blowback over the hamlet study spotlighted the dilemma of getting large segments of the community tied into the conversations early on. With topics that focus on issues decades down the road, doing that, and educating participants about why the subject is urgent now, is a high hurdle, those at the ground floor acknowledged.

“We have to pull in the people who are not as open to hearing about change as we are — there’s a lot of them out there,” panelist Councilman David Lys said. “We heard it with the hamlet study — at the last minute. We need to get those people to show up at the very beginning.”

“There’s a big education component,” Branco said. “Not everybody is going to understand how this kind of thing would work, and it won’t be easy. People have their own lives to focus on.”

The push and pull — even between well-informed participants — and the simple legal and logistical work of crafting such an unprecedented shift, will take a long time, Lys pointed out.

“We have to start talking about it,” he said. “It’s going to take us at least six years to get there. We have to all be looking at it together and know that not everyone is going to agree.”

Some said that a firm deadline should be put on the effort, lest the can be kicked down the road too long and sound planning discarded in the wake of calamity.

“It’s pretty obvious that the challenge we face is that some people will have to get wiped out, and then they’ll take it seriously,” lamented Krae Van Sickle, a real estate agent, Montauk homeowner and member of the town’s Energy Sustainability Committee. “The problem with that is if you wait until in you’re in a crisis situation, you end up making decisions that don’t have the collaborative benefits.”

“We need to start moving back,” McAllister added. “Whether it’s 10 years out or 15 years out. Government has to be willing to compel this.”