Town’s coastal resilience coordinator outlines risks, projects and funding needs

Leah Hill, the town’s coastal resilience coordinator, told the Advisory Committee for Non‑Voting Taxpayers that Nantucket faces five principal coastal risks — erosion, groundwater‑table rise, coastal storm flooding, stormwater (rain) flooding and high‑tide ("sunny day") flooding — and summarized a suite of recommended projects and funding options the town is pursuing.

Hill said the town’s island‑wide risk assessment found more than 2,000 structures at risk through 2070, including 34 essential community facilities, and that, "if we take no action...the projected damages and losses due to erosion and flooding...is as much as $3,400,000,000" from the plan’s baseline out to 2070. She emphasized that planning now reduces long‑term costs: "for every dollar we spend on coastal resilience projects, we'll be saving money in the long run." (Leah Hill, Town coastal resilience coordinator.)

Why it matters: Hill told the committee the Coastal Resilience Plan (endorsed by the Select Board in 2022) lays out 40 recommendations across policy, nature‑based and structural measures. The plan uses NOAA’s high sea‑level‑rise scenario and estimates approximately $900 million to implement all recommendations to 2070; projects targeted through 2030 total roughly $155 million at the high end (Hill said much of…