All posts by Corky Bucek

Critical Meeting this Weekend

May 21, 2019 Corky Bucek Leave a comment

This Saturday, May 25th at 3:30pm in Village Hall (Court Room), Quogue’s mayor and trustees will be holding a public hearing of great consequence for the future of Quogue’s natural beach.

The special meeting has been called to approve or deny a proposal by Save the Dunes and Beaches Foundation (“SDBF”) to establish an erosion control district in Quogue.

The special tax district is intended to socialize the costs of a long term beach engineering project, which will be launched following the formation of the district. Its creation would impose SDBF’s project and its costs upon all homeowners within the district, absent consensus support.

As the Village Beach falls within the planned district, all current and future Quogue residents will be affected, while the unintended environmental consequences of dredging will impact the entirety of Quogue’s beachfront.

SDBF represents a small subset of homeowners who have been advocating for variations of a beach engineering project since 2011.

In 2015, the Village appointed an equal number of SDBF and CCQ representatives, in addition to “nonpartisan” advisers, to a Beach Advisory Committee. The Committee concluded in 2017 that SDBF’s engineering project was unnecessary, instead recommending less invasive and more affordable methods of erosion control. CCQ maintains that the measure would be ecologically harmful and fiscally unsustainable.

The mayor and trustees will be voting to approve or deny the creation of the tax district following the meeting. Thus, Saturday’s public hearing constitutes the community’s only opportunity to register feedback regarding the plan.

We encourage all members of the community to reacquaint themselves with the science, potential consequences, and precedent of the matter, and please attend on Saturday to make your voices heard.

If you are unable to attend, you are invited to write a letter to the mayor at PSartorius@villageofquogueny.gov.

Please spread the word to your family and neighbors.

Louisiana Unveils Ambitious Plan to Help People Get Out of the Way of Climate Change

May 16, 2019 Corky Bucek Leave a comment

Below excerpts are from a May 15th article in Bloomberg. The full article is available here.

The state [of Louisiana] on Wednesday issued a sweeping blueprint—the first of its kind in the U.S.—for managing the ongoing population movement away from its coastal areas, and preparing inland communities to receive an infusion of people.

Officials around the country are being forced to confront whether, and how, to help people get out of the way of the effects of climate change. None has gone so far as what Louisiana is proposing.

The document calls for high-risk areas to “transition away from permanent residential development.” For those residents and structures that remain, the report urges local officials to impose stronger building codes and stormwater management systems.

D.C. Is First to Plan to Remove, Retrofit Flood-Prone Buildings

April 30, 2019 Corky Bucek Leave a comment

According to Bloomberg, Washington D.C. is announcing a goal of retrofitting or removing all of its flood-prone buildings by 2050, the first major U.S. city to set such a policy.

“In some cases, we’re going to have to figure out how to do managed retreat and relocation,” said Kevin Bush, Washington’s chief resilience officer and the lead author of the strategy.

The Congressional Budget Office recently projected that hurricanes and storms will consume 0.3 percent of the nation’s GDP, while bond rating companies warn that ignoring extreme weather will hurt cities’ credit ratings.

The same may be true for towns, like Southampton.

To read the full article, please visit this link: “D.C. Is First to Plan to Remove, Retrofit Flood-Prone Buildings”.