Engineers, policymakers and analysts at a conference focused on waterfront resilience last month agreed that communities need to be better prepared for drastic changes in water levels, whether they’re rising or falling. The most contentious issue was whose responsibility it was to make these preparations and pay.
The question came up during the opening plenary of the conference, organized by the Waterfront Alliance, which explored how coastal cities around the world manage waterfronts. In the UK, the Thames Estuary 2100 Plan sets out targets that municipalities should meet every five years to improve flood defences. But the program is not legal, which makes it difficult to enforce, said Charlie Wood, London area director of the UK Environment Agency.
Who has responsibility for overseeing flood prevention was the subject of a separate panel on designing for rising groundwater levels. In the Queens neighborhood of South Jamaica, groundwater flooding became a recurring problem after the mid-1990s. That’s when the New York City Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) bought the city’s last private water company, which had supplied well water to area homes and businesses and connected residents to the larger Catskill municipal system. When the wells stopped pumping, the groundwater rose. By 2007, groundwater levels in the neighborhood had risen 35 feet since well pumping ceased in 1996, according to DEP.
York College, a branch of the City University of New York based in the neighborhood, has hired Arcadis to help contain water seeping into its basement. The school pumps between 15,000 and 100,000 liters a day out of this level of its building to minimize damage to its mechanical equipment. Arcadis is injecting grout into the subbasement slabs, though that’s only a temporary solution, acknowledged Michael Escobar, the company’s water engineer.
Other residents and business owners with flooded basements in the area have asked the DEP to resume pumping wells, said William Scarborough, president of the Southeast Queens Residents Environmental Justice Coalition. According to Scarborough, DEP’s official position is that it is not responsible for mitigating groundwater flooding in the area. The agency has installed reverse seepage basins (a type of underground catchment basin) in some areas to help drain water into Jamaica Bay. “We have not received information about how successful they are, if they are successful at all,” Scarborough said. “I know it’s on everybody’s radar screen.”
A DEP spokesperson who responded to an ENR inquiry said the agency recognizes that Queens communities are experiencing a number of flooding challenges, including stormwater, sewer capacity and groundwater. “We remain committed to collaborating in efforts to understand the scope of the problems and the feasibility of potential solutions. It is also important to note that DEP has made and continues to make significant infrastructure investments in Queens, including the $2.8 billion sewer construction in southeast Queens that will reduce street flooding and groundwater recharge.”
Experts at the meeting also discussed the logistics of what shared responsibility looks like. Which parties bear the risk, for example, have changed over time. NYC Ferry has split management: the New York Economic Development Commission is responsible for development and maintenance of the landing, while the Hornblower Group handles the ships and day-to-day operations. Previous contracts between the city and the private company put most of the risk on the operator, though the balance has since shifted, said Jeff Brault, vice president of global public affairs for the Hornblower Group.
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For its part, Moody’s has tried to be more transparent about how climate risk influences its credit ratings, said Jennifer Chang, vice president and senior credit officer at Moody’s Sustainable Finance Group. Available relief funds and insurance affect credit ratings, he said, as do physical defenses.
Rebecca Fischman, principal resilience planner at Arcadis, added that she would like to know how insurers can become more active investors in projects. “The elephant in the room is the insurance companies.” Figuring out their role in funding could be very important as federal funding for coastal defense infrastructure in cities like New York dries up.
In the past, the availability of federal funding reduced the need for state and local governments to seriously consider their own strategies for funding projects. Now, with federal funding drying up, the pressure is on, said Alison Branco, director of climate adaptation at The Nature Conservancy in New York. “We are having [a] conversation about how to be a little more self-sufficient in terms of financing … and I think that’s a good thing.”
A $4.2 bond measure passed in New York in 2022 could set a good example, said Kisha Santiago, assistant secretary of the New York State Department. The funds are used for stormwater management, coastal rehabilitation and other infrastructure projects. There are other methods for funding resilient options, including state legislation that would allow stormwater to be regulated the way it is wastewater and could allow water authorities to charge runoff-related fees. The Inflation Reduction Act created a “wild time of opportunity,” Santiago said. The funding may have been clawed back, but it generated some lasting benefits. “This also helped bring state agencies together in ways that local governments need to work together,” he said.
