Coastal communities struggling to manage sea-level rise and increased flooding along with surging development are getting support from a network of state agencies, nonprofits and academic experts dedicated to building resiliency.
The Resilient and Sustainable Communities League (RASCL) provides technical expertise, networking and advice on funding for communities that may not have the expertise, the money, or the time to navigate a maze of public and private agencies on their own.
By bringing together diverse entities ranging from the state transportation department and emergency-planning agencies to environmental nonprofits and local government officials, RASCL has set itself up as a resource for communities that are at the forefront of the battle against climate change.
The group, established in late 2016, aims to fill a gap between the meager resources of many coastal towns and the global forces of rising ocean levels and bigger storms resulting from a changing climate.
In Fenwick Island, a beach community of around 400 people on a narrow spit of land just above the Maryland line, officials have been trying to find ways of reducing the amount of impervious pavement that is increasing with new coastal development, causing problems with storm water runoff.
The solution, said town manager Terry Tieman, is a proposed change in building regulations that would require a minimum area of pervious pavement for new development, allowing storm water to drain naturally into the ground rather than flooding streets and homes. The change has come out of a project in which Fenwick Island has worked with the Department of Natural Resources and Environmental Control, one of the 18 members of RASCL.
“We have a lot of redevelopment, building bigger houses with less pervious coverage, and that’s resulting in flooding,” she said. “Together, we’re looking at best practices and how do we improve some codes.”
Tieman recognizes the responsibility of preparing for natural threats in a community whose elevation – like that in many of Delaware’s coastal towns – is just a few feet above sea level. Having the support of RASCL’s members makes it easier for her to do that, she said.
“We prepare for emergencies just like anyone else does, but it’s a little bit more intense at the shoreline,” she said.
Tieman stays up to speed with the coastal resilience practices of other RASCL members partly by attending an annual summit, which helps everyone stay on the same page.
“The summit gets everyone in the room at the same time so you know what counties, municipalities and agencies are doing,” she said.
Asked why she didn’t directly approach individual agencies rather than working through RASCL, Tieman said just finding the right person to talk to can be a daunting task for a small administration like hers.
“To navigate all that on your own is daunting and as a town manager, I just don’t have the resources,” she said. “That’s how RASCL really helps.”
Information sharing lies at the heart of RASCL’s mission, said Danielle Swallow, a co-founder and member of the group’s steering committee.
Swallow, a former DNREC employee and now a coastal hazards specialist with Delaware Sea Grant, said RASCL was set up in recognition that smaller coastal communities were not getting the help they needed to deal with sea-level rise and climate change. At the same time, there was concern that the relevant state agencies weren’t always talking to each other about how to help towns, and risked duplicating their efforts.
“These are communities in Delaware that typically don’t have a very strong voice on the state or federal level, that maybe don’t know how to go about looking for funding, or how to get their arms around this concept of resilience, and how to plan for future climate change,” she said.
By connecting those communities to experts and sources of funding, RASCL has become a “force multiplier,” she said.
Building capacity in those communities is a long-term project for a young organization and so it’s too soon to show completed projects that have come about because of RASCL’s facilitation, Swallow said. But early measures of its success are more grant applications to DNREC for resiliency projects, and heavy attendance at both the annual RASCL summit and its quarterly “coffee” events when members swap information about their latest resiliency measures.
The first summit, a day-long conference at the end of 2017, followed a severe hurricane season that caused huge destruction in Houston and Puerto Rico, and focused on how Delaware would cope with such an event. With more than 200 people attending, “that told us we were on to something,” Swallow said.
Later, RASCL brought together communities and officials from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers who described how local resiliency projects are prioritized and funded, and then gave out their personal phone numbers for local officials to call, she said.
“The attendees came away feeling they were more empowered because they had a face and a name to talk with,” she said. “We are trying to connect people more to actionable information.”
In Lewes, officials are also trying to balance vigorous development with the need to prevent coastal flooding, and membership of RASCL has proved a valuable tool in that discussion, said the town’s mayor, Ted Becker.
The town benefits from the experience of other communities and the expertise of member groups, while also sharing its own solutions for the good of others, Becker said.
“As a small community, you become very myopic, and this broadens everybody’s vision of the scope of the situation,” he said.
Seven southern Delaware communities that make up the Association of Coastal Towns – Fenwick Island, South Bethany, Bethany Beach, Dewey Beach, Rehoboth, Henlopen Acres, and Lewes – have all benefited from a DNREC grant to study how to reduce the amount of impervious surface, and that funding was facilitated by RASCL, Becker said.
“Those communities would have never come together to work on that grant had it not been for the benefits of RASCL and the coming-together that RASCL has provided,” he said.
By being part of the group, he argued that each community is more likely to get its voice heard with the policymakers and funders who can help it build resilience.
“RASCL provides an opportunity for the coastal communities and others to come together and begin to speak with one voice,” he said. “When you’re dealing with communities that are less than 5,000 people, you don’t have much traction when you are that small.”
For example, RASCL has been able to attract national-level speakers such as officials from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to talk to the group about climate-change issues, offering members an opportunity they would never have had on their own.
Becker argued that those benefits of joining together apply to most if not all of Delaware’s 57 municipalities.
“None of us in the 57 municipalities, perhaps excluding Wilmington, would be able to attract that level of input, with a speaker and being able to ask questions at a level that we’ve been able to do it if it weren’t for this organization,” he said.
In an illustration of how the RASCL group can benefit from the experience of individual members, Becker cited Lewes’s decision about three years ago to create open space out of land in the local flood plain that had been slated for development – a policy that may be replicated by other communities.
“RASCL has used it to illustrate that there are things that communities can do to help reduce their vulnerability,” he said.
For the Delaware Center for the Inland Bays, one of RASCL’s nonprofit partners, membership offers the opportunity to share years of experience helping coastal communities with issues like controlling flooding and pollution while beautifying their natural environment, said Chris Bason, executive director.
For example, Inland Bays comes to the table with a longstanding relationship with South Bethany where it has installed storm water controls in a coastal drainage area that was developed before storm water regulations went into effect, and which has since suffered from pollution and some flooding, Bason said.
It is now planning to start construction of a wetland to control runoff from a high-rise development that is planned for Little Assawoman Bay, and has developed a storm-water control plan for the town of Dewey Beach.
All three projects can offer valuable lessons for other RASCL communities seeking solutions to resiliency issues, Bason said.
“They are complicated projects with lots of partners but they are worth it because they can generate a lot of working together among organizations that otherwise might not have a reason to,” he said. “A lot of these towns, they just don’t have the technical expertise or the time to do this.”