There once was a coastal resiliency project on Nantucket . . . A cautionary tale.

Yesterday the Sconset Beach Preservation Fund announced it would comply with a Nantucket Conservation Commission enforcement order and remove a ”soft” coastal bank stabilization project it had constructed on the eastern bluff of the island.   

Everyone agrees that the bank stabilization project paid for by neighborhood property owners is the only thing keeping their homes, a public street to the Sankaty Head Lighthouse, and various public utilities from tumbling into the Atlantic Ocean.

On the one hand, the decision to concede defeat in a decade long battle with the Conservation Commission isn't surprising.  A Massachusetts Superior Court Judge upheld the Commission's order and the Judge's decision to do so wasn't going to be reversed by the Appeals Court.  For more on that, see my September post at https://insights.mintz.com/post/102hwdx/dramatic-shoreline-realignment-in-store-for-nantuckets-eastern-shore-as-bitter.

On the other hand, it was hard to believe that the Sconset Beach Preservation Fund and the Board of Selectmen, which strongly supports the project, and the Conservation Commission weren't going to find a way to put the past behind them to avoid the certain catastrophic consequences of their failure to do so.  But here we are with the Fund saying it is ready to remove the stabilization project and the Conservation Commission left to determine whether it will pull the pin in the grenade that it is holding.

There are two lessons for everyone to draw from this sad story that could be about to get much sadder.

First, whatever the context, don't agree to permit conditions that you can't meet.  At the heart of the toxic dispute between the Fund and the Conservation Commission is the Fund's non-compliance with the Commission's specification of the amount of sand the Fund was required to add to the ecosystem every year to make up for the sand that the Conservation Commission determined wouldn't be contributed to the ecosystem by the stabilized bank.  It seems pretty clear that the Fund hoped that the Conservation Commission would later reconsider that condition after the project was in place.   That hasn't happened.  The better course if the Fund couldn't live with the condition would have been to appeal it to the Department of Environmental Protection which is authorized by the Wetland Protection Act to supersede decisions by local Conservation Commissions.  When the Fund failed to do that, this became a political dispute, not a legal one.

Second, it is altogether too hard to implement coastal resilience solutions in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts and dozens of coastal communities are suffering miserably as a result.  Legislative or regulatory action is needed immediately to facilitate nature-based solutions to the havoc our GHG supercharged climate is causing on our coastline.  Regulations drafted in the 1980s era of "let nature take its course" make no sense in the face of our 21st century climate emergency.  We can't expect our neighbors to heed calls to retreat from their communities before our leaders have done what they can to increase the resilience of those communities.   

It may be too late for Sconset but we can't let what might happen there happen elsewhere.