The National Fish and Wildlife Foundation, a nonprofit created by Congress in 1984, has awarded Concerned Citizens of Montauk a $323,000 grant to addressing coastal resilience in Montauk and on Napeague.
The grant, awarded through the foundation’s National Coastal Resilience Fund, will support planning and design work to address intensifying risks from coastal erosion, tidal flooding, and habitat degradation. The award is the group’s largest to date, she said. “This is a win for the community. We’re so excited,” Kay Tyler, C.C.O.M.’s executive director, said last week.
The money will be used to identify high-priority shoreline segments and conduct site-specific ecological and coastal risk evaluations. Conceptual and preliminary designs for erosion mitigation, flood protection, and habitat restoration will be developed, to be followed by permitting and implementation of nature-based coastal resilience solutions.
C.C.O.M. announced the grant on July 1. “We actually got word that we won it in December, but the contract wasn’t finalized until the other day,” Ms. Tyler said.
C.C.O.M. will focus on ocean beaches at Hither Hills, Ms. Tyler said, as well as Napeague. “While we’re working on Montauk beaches, we decided we really wanted to include solutions for Napeague,” she said. “We see it as an extremely vulnerable point for all of us.” With assistance from East Hampton Town, “perhaps other shorelines as well,” she said. “We are focused to be aligned with the CARP plan,” the town’s Coastal Assessment Resiliency Plan, adopted into the comprehensive plan in 2022.
Sea levels have risen about one foot over the last 100 years, but “future rates of sea level rise are projected to be much greater,” between eight and 30 inches over the next 30 years, according to CARP.
C.C.O.M. will develop a set of science-backed, vegetated shoreline features that work with natural coastal processes and adapt over time as living systems, according to the July 1 announcement. These features, intended to complement ongoing coastal protection measures, will provide ongoing erosion control, flood mitigation, and habitat benefits. They are designed to offer lasting benefits and deliver longer-term performance than many conventional shoreline treatments.
“Why introduce anything artificial when the natural stuff works?” Ms. Tyler said. “You have to be strategic about it, of course, and do it properly, but it’s already evident that this works. It’s not the complete problem-solver, but helps slow the process and buy us more time” to adapt to sea level rise and increasingly frequent and severe storms.
“This plan applies to a long-term, into-perpetuity-type of thing,” Ms. Tyler said. “To me, it’s a forever project. Our vision is that the community will take on this responsibility into perpetuity by hosting annual or even twice-a-year volunteer events to plant beach grass, or whatever the plan is, and do that as a ritual.” She likened the project to an annual fall festival. “We want to have a beach grass-planting event every year. Therefore, education, awareness, and responsibility take place.”
C.C.O.M. would not necessarily host such events, she said, suggesting the town or the volunteer-driven Montauk Youth nonprofit organization, or an alliance of groups. “Any of those organizations can take it on,” Ms. Tyler said, “but developing that plan is just the beginning.” The plan “relies heavily on our youth, because they’re the ones we’re trying to educate and show that we all have this responsibility.”
C.C.O.M. staff, the town, and “a network of experts that surround us already” will develop conceptual and preliminary designs for the effort, Ms. Tyler said. “It’s a collective effort to hire the right engineers and to approve plans that we all feel is the right thing,” she said. “It will be a very collaborative process.”
