7/20/2018 – I had an interesting meeting with a well-connected civil engineer on site here at Money Island yesterday afternoon. Hours earlier, I had a long telephone conversation with the Money Island project manager for The Nature Conservancy (TNC). Both conversations added valuable insights.
The Environmentalist
The TNC official echoed an opinion that I hear often from environmentalists: although they personally support Money Island’s sustainability plan, they believe that certain people in mid-level state management at NJDEP do not. Some state employees would prefer that people abandon Money Island to nature. This is commonly referred to in environmental discussions as a “retreat strategy”. The retreat strategy is certainly worth full consideration. Eventually, with three feet of sea level rise, our town and millions of acres of shoreline will be gone. My response is always the same two points:
- Higher water levels are actually good for the future of aquaculture!.It may not be good for roads, buildings or traditional infrastructure but we can certainly work around that with currently available construction modifications. Our core mission of providing public, industry and government access to local waterways will not be impaired by future water level rise. (I usually continue the conversation to discuss how Rutgers’ most recent forecasts of tidal impact and flooding trends for the next 30 to 50 years are built into our sustainability plan but don’t need to go into that detail here).
- Life is too short to fight the government. If we suspected that the retreat path was the opinion of state leadership, including NJDEP leadership, then we would change course. Life is too short to be in a battle against the prevailing force of government. But this is not the case. Every high-ranking official in NJDEP and state government that I’ve spoken with – probably more than two dozen by now – have all told me that they support the project and urge m to ‘stay the course’. Some warned me that the path to enlightened sustainability management will be difficult and that I will need to be persistent and ‘keep fighting’. Many of these government leaders have even given me pep talks to keep me going through this current struggle, pointing out how important this mission is to future generations. That’s what motivates me. That’s why I stick with the project.
The engineer
An civil engineer generally familiar with our issues wrote online “The biggest challenge in fighting climate change is getting our institutions to let go of well-intentioned but obsolete policies”. The other engineer on site had more pragmatic comments:
- He agrees with the previously expressed project engineer’s opinion that NJDEP should not be taking the current prosecutorial actions against marina infrastructure (our infrastructure) that predate the beginning of permitting requirement laws in the 1970s. Granted
, there are a lot of factual details that muddy the situation (historic photography, old land surveys, post-Sandy reconstruction law, etc.) but the core fact remains that our original marina and docks were built in the 1930s before land use permitting were required and therefore should be grandfathered to some extent.
- He asked several times “Why are they…?” and my response in each instance was that we don’t have the legal muscle to show where the state has made factual or legal errors in their prosecution of Money Island stakeholders. In contrast, the state has unlimited legal resources and seems intent on using these resources against us rather than negotiate through traditional problem-solving channels. I referred these factual and legal errors in the courtroom but the judge did not seem to give my objections serious consideration. Without a budget for legal defense, I don’t see any reasonable chance of addressing the state’s errors.
- He says that the fundamental underlying problem is that the state has not yet come to grips with the impact of water level rise on our wetlands and the infrastructure resources in these locations. While viable management approaches are proposed, we aren’t making adequate progress toward implementation. We discussed different aspects of thin layer dredge spray that is part of the Money Island sustainability plan. I suspect that not many people are familiar with this proposal so I would say only that it is public policy that makes a lot more sense from a public policy perspective than our current strategy of pumping sand on the Atlantic coast beaches! Workable sustainability solutions are available if we choose to pursue them.
- The usual first step in planning a project like this is called a pre-permit meeting with a wide range of stakeholders. He doesn’t understand why our requests for a meeting were declined. We discussed the thinking of certain department officials and how those have been addressed in other similar projects. His opinion
, based on our exchange of bits of facts and third-party conversations, that our project does have the support of the most influential people who have been effective recently in getting the NJDEP to change their thinking about bayshore sustainability. We discussed the cost of this permitting and told me what I already knew: I would need to find a loan to cover the cost of land use permitting. we didn’t discuss that I’m already working on it or my frustration that the process is moving so slowly. Now that partial funding is available for compliance, we decided to try again.
