BRUNSWICK COUNTY — With 45 miles of shoreline, all of it vulnerable to storm surges and flooding, Brunswick County has a lot to lose from rising sea levels. It’s not just the hundreds of millions of dollars spent by tourists coming to Brunswick County beaches, providing millions in tax revenue. Much of the county’s population is also located near coastal and tidal river shorelines.
So why were three strategies for dealing with sea level rise eliminated from the county’s most recent plan for dealing with large scale disasters?
The short answer is: no one seems to know.
But first, back up to the creation of hazard mitigation plans.
Hazard Mitigation
Brunswick County has historically included several strategies in its hazard mitigation plans. These five-year plans became requirements of all counties in the devastating wake of Hurricane Floyd in 1999, and cover a wide range of potential disasters, including those related to sea level rise.
Brunswick County shares a plan with New Hanover and Pender counties, but each county has a section with its own specific strategies, as do municipalities within the county. Brunswick County’s latest plan, approved by the Board of Commissioners in 2016, eliminates three strategies for dealing with sea level rise. They are:
- Strategy P-31: Support development within areas susceptible to sea level rise, shoreline erosion, and/or wetland loss which takes into consideration such conditions upon initial development. In the event such development is later threatened by shoreline loss, the County shall support the AEC use standards governing shoreline protection and management.
- Strategy P-32: Continue to support the installation of properly engineered and permitted bulkheads to protect against erosion and sea level rise.
- Strategy PI-11: Cooperate with local, state, and federal efforts to inform the public of the anticipated effects of sea level rise.
Each strategy was eliminated for the same reason, “(t)his strategy has been eliminated in response to the current state mandated prohibition on directly addressing sea level rise through plans and/or public policy documents and studies.”
HB 819
According to the plan’s author, Landin Holland, the statement refers to a 2012 law. Holland, whose firm Holland Consulting Planners was contracted by the Brunswick, New Hanover and Pender counties to write their hazard mitigation plans, said, “it was my understanding at the time that the statute prohibited certain terms and phrases.”
That law, initiated as House Bill 819, was a response to a 100-year study completed by the North Carolina Coastal Resource Commission (you can read the study here).
The study, which factored in the impact of human activity on global warming, predicted over one meter in sea level rise; the estimate said much of the coast would be underwater in the next century.
HB819 essentially banned the use of so-called predictive models, which show not only an increase in sea levels, but an increase in the rate at which sea levels are rising — an increase based largely on the idea of global warming that is caused by human activity. Instead, the bill would require the use of historical models, which showed sea levels rising at a much more modest rate. It would also limit scientific studies to 30-year estimates.
There was a fair amount of backlash to the bill, from scientific critiques in Scientific American, to legal critiques in the Columbia Law Review, to ironic mockery on the “Colbert Report.”
Although it was reported at the time of its introduction as a sweeping gag-order across the state, the final version of the bill was amended to affect only state-level operations. The amended bill reads, “nothing in this section shall be construed to prohibit a county, municipality, or other local government entity from defining rates of sea-level change for regulatory purposes.”
Phil Prete, former environmental planner for Wilmington, said, “there was some confusion when the law was passed, but there’s nothing in there that prevents a town, a city, or a county from addressing or passing regulations on sea level rise.”
Prete, who held the post for 13 years, added that the last-minute change to the bill freed local government from any prohibitions. In other words, the bill should have allowed Brunswick County to directly address – and plan for – sea level rise however it saw fit. But that’s not what happened.
‘Something changed’
According to Holland, the state never explicitly told him to eliminate Brunswick County’s sea level strategies.
“I don’t want to say the state told us to take it out, that wouldn’t be true,” Holland said. “But the state guidance, what we got from the state was that policy (HB 819).”
Holland also said that none of the municipal or county leaders involved with the planned pushed for sea level strategy but wouldn’t say if any of them asked for specific strategies to be eliminated.
“This went through each municipality and county, but it also had to go through the state and federal level. We went back and forth with the state several times. Look, I can’t say the state prohibited it, but that was their policy — on that state’s end — not to pursue sea level change, not to carry it forward or investigate it further,” Holland said.
Holland did say that previous plans specifically addressed sea level rise.
“If you look back two cycles ago, following (Hurricanes) Fran and Floyd, these issues were definitely raised in 2000, they were raised in 2005, and then in 2016 something changed, something shifted that year. The issue disappeared from the discussion,” Holland said.
Ultimately Holland couldn’t identify exactly where the decision to eliminate Brunswick County’s sea level strategies came from. He did say he received no requests from county or municipal leaders to add them back in.
“We did not receive any negative comments regarding the sea level issues, no one from the county was asking for those things,” Holland said. “At the end of the day, FEMA and the state approved the plan.”
FEMA and North Carolina
A letter from Robert E. Low, chief of the analysis branch of FEMA’s mitigation division, suggests that anyone in the “Southeastern NC Regional community” with questions about the plan should contact Shemeeka Hopkins, a program specialist at FEMA. However, Hopkins declined to answer questions about the plan, direction questions to the agency’s public affairs division.
When the public affairs division was asked about the eliminated strategies in Brunswick County, FEMA spokesman Garrett Wagley said he would forward the question to the “FEMA external affairs director in Region IV, which includes North Carolina.”
But the answer didn’t come from FEMA, instead it came from Keith Acree, spokesman for the state’s Emergency Management office of the Department of Public Safety, who would not comment on the plan directly.
Acree did say state law should not have impacted the county plan.
“It’s up to a locality to determine what hazards they include in their plan. Hazard mitigation plans are not considered ‘regulatory’ in nature,” Acree said. “The state and FEMA did not author the plan, they simply reviewed it to ensure that it met FEMA criteria.”
Acree suggested that any questions about the eliminated strategies should be directed to “the authors of the plan – the counties that created it.”
Acree did not respond to questions about Holland’s suggestion that state guidance may have directly or indirectly discouraged discussing sea level rise.
Brunswick County
Brunswick County Director of Economic Development and Planning Mike Hargett said he was not familiar with the specifics of mitigation plan, and directed questions to Senior Planner Marc Pages. So did incoming Planning Director Kristie Dixon, who said Pages “facilitated the Hazard Mitigation Plan.”
Pages had no comment about specific strategies in the Brunswick County plan, and referred questions back to Landin Holland.
Meanwhile, Brunswick County Commissioners have not returned individual calls or emails about the issue. Last week, prior to the board’s most recent meeting, a request for information about the eliminated strategy was forwarded to the entire board by County Manager Ann Hardy. No response has been received from the request.
Send comments and tips to Benjamin Schachtman at ben@localvoicemedia.com, @pcdben on Twitter, and (910) 538-2001.
