Alison Higgins, Key West Resiliency Manager, joined Good Morning Keys on KeysTalk 96.9/102.5FM this morning to talk about what’s going on in the city.
The environmental chapter of the adaptation plan has been in the works for a while.
Higgins said, “We have been working on this adaptation plan for a little bit over a year now. There are seven different chapters. So most of the time when people really focus on adaptation, they’re looking at the big infrastructure, the storm water, the pipes, the roads, but we wanted to make sure that when we did this effort, smaller things didn’t get overlooked, that everything was given the same amount of attention. So we divided up into seven chapters. We have the infrastructure piece, we have one piece that is just power and water. How does our energy and our potable water get to us? We have one chapter that is just about health and social issues. So as things get hotter, it’s a bigger toll on our health. We also have a housing and shelter, so how do we make sure that we get our houses elevated? How do we make sure we get them stronger against hurricanes? We also have an economics chapter. So how do we make sure we bounce back better? How do we make sure that we’re not just tourism dependent? As we saw with COVID, a lot of businesses were hurting because we didn’t have the people coming down. The environmental chapter, which, as I’ll walk you through, we’re kind of talking about both on land, but to the edge of our land and out into the open water itself.”
There are a lot of different assets that are being considered.
Higgins said, “What I really like about what we’ve done with the plan, we weren’t concerned with ownership. If something needs to be fixed, we need to know about it. It doesn’t mean we’re going to do it for them, but it might mean that we help, and we bring them along for the ride, and we help try to find funds. So on the big picture, on land, we’re looking at our big spaces. What are these big areas that are still left, like parking lots, that we can actually get more habitat into? What are places, since the sea is still rising, we said our best habitat is at the Botanical Garden. It’s our biggest contiguous area. Can we focus on giving them more dirt over time? You can’t elevate a tree. It needs to be in soil. So we’re looking at that, and then with our low spaces, how can we make our natural areas natural places to hold water when rains or big storms come? So Indigenous Park is a really good example of a place that is usually dry, but when floods come, it really acts as a reservoir for the neighborhood just above it. Could we do more things like that? And then even for our little spaces, can we focus on our tree diversity? Because there are a lot of different species that are here, and not on the mainland and not south of us, for our migratory flight way, but also just for diversity in general. So even if we’re just doing a tree planting that’s going to give us some shade, can we make that count environmentally as well?”
How do we prioritize what we want to go after?
Higgins said, “The prioritization piece is still happening. On each of our chapters, we had a stakeholder group that had a couple people from the city, but a variety of people that are practitioners in their field. So for the environmental section, we had somebody from DEP, somebody from US Fish and Wildlife, somebody from the Nature Conservancy. They all helped us talk about where we’re at, what they’re doing, what we could do in our own lands? The part that I’m most excited about, because we’ve been doing some of these diversity and canopy stuff for a bit, but the edges is the new part for us. The buzzword is living shoreline. So instead of just having what they call great infrastructure, so just a seawall, over time, as we’ve found at Mallory pier and other places, the erosion and the pounding of the waves over time can completely degrade that infrastructure. But if you have an area that has, say, mangroves around it, or like at a beach, if you got a dune behind it, those natural processes help gather the sand back up again, help lessen the waves on that great infrastructure to the interior. So we’re going to be looking at, where can we put some more mangroves? You’ve got that beautiful drive on South Roosevelt, but we’ve seen it in, I believe, Palm Beach County, where they planted mangroves, but they keep them trimmed. So the mangroves are protecting the road, but you still preserve your view. Then my one of my favorite parts, and so we haven’t really done any specific living shorelines. They just happen to happen here. We’ve never done one on purpose, but the one I’m most excited about is on the sea walls themselves. Usually a sea wall is just a flat, straight piece of concrete, but they’re making these bio engineered walls now that have crevices and stuff like that in them, so that things can more easily attach to and live on them. So you could have a coral wall that you’re going to go snorkel against. You can have a sponge wall. So that one I’m really excited about, because, again, having that extra buffer of biology before you get to your cement is going to lessen the pummeling of the waves when they come during hurricanes. The thing about adaptation, we are combating a long term trend. So we’re not going to get these things done tomorrow, and in this environmental side, like some of these things aren’t even on our purview, or may take a long time through permitting, so when we get to the things that are outside the edge into the water, that’s when you’re talking about working with FDEP and the National Marine Sanctuary, but we know that they have done sea grass restorations, coral restorations, the one thing that we’re the most interested in is, instead of the sea grass people working over here and the coral people working over there, can’t we line them up with each other? Where one actually protects the other and vice versa? Can we actually make a little line of defense and so that’s the kind of thing we’re really interested in now.”
What’s the timeline for the adaptation plan?
Higgins said, “At this point in time, they are getting us the draft chapters back which have projects, but those projects haven’t been actually ranked yet. So first they wanted to make sure, like, did we get these right? Then each one of these projects has eight, 10 different scoring rubric, things that it goes through, so that in the end you have, here’s your top five, and then that’s for each chapter. Then what they’re going to do, which I’m really excited for, is turn that into a 10 year plan. They’re going to figure out basic level funding and then they’re going to tie that to potential grants. So in the end, each chapter will be a standalone but in the end, it’s going to say year one, here’s your environmental project, and it might be for something like a seagrass restoration, like year one is just, let’s start talking to people, let’s convene the team to start getting people’s heads around it. So then you can move in year two, you move to permitting in year three, actually, get something on the ground. So timeline total, we’re looking to bring the entire ranked list back to commission December or January-ish.”