STONE HARBOR – The Borough Council has doubled down in its opposition to the state’s proposed Resilient Environments and Landscapes program, known as REAL, which tightens regulations on coastal development in the face of climate change.
Having previously adopted a county resolution urging the state to take an incremental approach to adopting the proposed rules, the council on Oct. 15 took the additional step of submitting an eight-page statement of objections to REAL prepared by its administrator, Manny Parada.
In the borough’s new comments on the proposed regulations, many of the objections stated in the previously adopted county resolution are restated, but new ones are added.
The borough continues to object to the long, 75-year planning horizon of the regulations and to the selection of a sea level projection that has a low likelihood of occurring. It restates criticism of the creation of inundation zones and significant additions to building elevation requirements.
The borough document speaks to the economic harm the regulations are likely to produce on the basis of uncertain projections of a turn-of-the-century reality. It criticizes the state for lack of mention of its responsibility for evacuation routes, for its lack of attention to debris management areas, and for what it calls overreach in wetlands regulations.
The document calls for a “comprehensive economic impact study” to address the implications of the regulations for the very coastal communities the rules purport to benefit.
The borough also takes the position that the proposed regulations violate the very commitment to economic justice that has been at the heart of the state’s environmental regulatory schemes. It claims that the regulations will “make the coastal communities an extremely exclusive society available only to the ultra-rich who can comply with these daunting regulations.”
Part of the solution offered in the document is for the state to institute a progression of the regulations “to play out by monitoring how close we come to predicted sea levels in the report at the years 2035, 2050, 2070, and ultimately 2100.”
Such a process, the document asserts, would allow the regulations to be scaled back if sea level rise is not occurring at the rate or height predicted by the science used by the state in creating the regulations.
Contact the reporter, Vince Conti, at vconti@cmcherald.com.
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