Groton Municipal Television, CT Downtown Mystic Sustainability & Resiliency Plan, 1 Nov 2022

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From YouTube: Downtown Mystic Resiliency & Sustainability Plan Public Workshop - 11/1/22

Description

Downtown Mystic is one of the quintessential historical and cultural resources of New England. Unfortunately, much of the Downtown Mystic area is low-lying and prone to flooding. The risk of flooding is likely to increase in the future due to impacts from the changing climate, including sea level rise.

In response to the current and potential future flooding risks, the Town of Groton is developing a Resiliency and Sustainability Plan for the Downtown Mystic area within Town limits. The area to be covered by the plan is shown above outlined in red. The Town hired GZA GeoEnvironmental, Inc. to help with plan development. GZA, with significant support from Town staff, will conduct a full vulnerability assessment of the study area. They will then develop and prioritize action items that will help decrease flood risk and protect natural and built resources, both of which will help support the local economy. Recommendations will also be developed to help Downtown Mystic homeowners and local business owners increase the resilience of their properties.

We need your help! Public participation in the project will be key to its success. This video is the first of three public workshops that will be held to provide information, hear your input, and gain feedback on the plan as it is being developed. Please share your experiences with flooding in Downtown Mystic by using the interactive mapper and filling out the survey at the link below and joining us for the workshops.

https://www.greatergroton.com/downtown-mystic-resiliency-sustainability-plan

A

Sean's good recording, oh all, right! uh Thank you for coming. Everybody uh welcome. My name is John Reiner I'm, the director of planning and development for the town, and we welcome you to our kickoff meeting, looking at uh resiliency and sustainability in downtown Mystic on the Groton side of things, a couple house uh keeping items we're talking into the mics, not for a PA system in here, but and I should be doing it.

B

A

The introduction for the recording that's happening uh there. It is on if it's red um exits there and that door there there's a bathroom uh right behind Mr Paul Bates there if he waves his hand um in that back corner, there's also one up those stairs over there behind uh Greg Hill Hanover, our director of Public Works, so um Megan Granado is going to go through a presentation.

A

uh We also have um Deb Jones here, our assistant director of Planning and Development uh Greg Handel for our director of Public Works, and then uh our Consultants here, both Sam and Wayne, from GZA and Megan can wave her hand and introduce herself. So uh thanks for coming I'm going.

C

To hand it off.

A

To her and we look forward to your participation and hearing from you tonight,.

D

Thanks so much for the introduction.

D

So welcome welcome. um This is our very first public workshop for the downtown Mystic sustainability and resiliency plan and, first and foremost echoing what John just said, Thank you thank you for coming out. This was a fantastic turnout. We are so excited that you're here spending your time with us. We know there's a lot of things. You can't hear me.

D

I'll yell, you want maybe sure.

D

I'll stand on this side since no one took up the first row option of seating here, so we know that you had a lot of things you could be doing with your time this evening. Thank you for coming and spending it with us. We very much appreciate it. um Please do not be shy. There's snacks I won't be distracted. If you come get a snack seriously, please enjoy make yourself comfortable and again. Thank you so a little breakdown of how we're going to be spending our time together.

D

Tonight, I'll continue with the introductions and then I'm going to present some slides, providing an overview of the projects, the ins and outs of what it's all about. Then we're going to be doing small group discussions, so we can hear more about your experience with flooding and other climate impacts in the study area. From there we'll hand it over to Sam to talk about next steps and we'll wrap up by 6 30., so continuing on the introductions. Again, I am Megan, my pronouns. Are she her I?

D

Am the sustainability and resilience manager for the town of Groton I've been here about two to three months, so I'm excited this is the first time I'm getting to actually uh do a public meeting, and so I'm really excited to talk to you all tonight. You just heard from John. We also have Deb who's here, some there. She is sorry, I couldn't see behind Sean and then uh GZA Geo environmental is our consultant team for this project, and here we have Sam Bell, who is a senior resiliency planner with GZA Sam?

D

If you could weave you'll be hearing from him a little bit, we have Wayne cobley who's. Vice president client services and David Leone associate principal is working with us on this project wasn't able to join us tonight, but we appreciate all of his input.

D

We also have a fantastic steering committee for this project, so our steering committee is meeting with us throughout the project. Duration, to give input and advice, bring in resources, ask good questions and we really appreciate all of their inputs.

D

uh They're listed here not in any particular order, but I'll run through the names and if you could wave your hand, I'd appreciate it. First we have Dr Frank Bolin Yukon, Marine Sciences, professor emeritus, he's also representative of the gra and resiliency and sustainability task force. Thank you. Frank. uh We have Jim O'donnell, executive director of Connecticut Institute for resilience and climate adaptation, also known as Circa, and not sure. If Jim's with us tonight, uh we have Chad Frost principal with Kent and frost landscape architecture.

D

We also have Todd Brady, who I know is here: managing director of coastal funding, Co LLC and representing the Groton historic districts Commission, and then we have additional colleagues from the town of Groton. We have Mark Berry our director of parks and rec. We have Greg Hanover director of Public Works who's right over there, Captain James B, director of Emergency Management and Delia Morrison, who is our acting Finance director.

D

So we were hoping to learn a little bit about you all who are spending your time with us here this evening.

D

Since most people have smartphones, we actually set up an online poll that you can access two ways you can either go to that address shown at the top or you can actually text that code to a certain number and if it's not just working, we can do it the old-fashioned way and raise hands. That's fine, too, but folks want to give it a try.

D

Sure. The first question asks about your relationship to the study area. So if you live in Mystic, if you work in Mystic, if you're someone who visits Mystic.

D

A

Yeah so to um you, can text Wayne w-a-y-n-e.

A

-C -o-b-l-e-I-g-h.

A

A

So it is the number two.

D

Two three three yeah and your phone will automatically put the two two three three in another. You got it all right. We have one person successfully in two people successfully in.

D

D

E

E

E

What's called what is l-a-I-g-h or c h,.

E

C, not g G, he isn't George, he is in GCA. Thank you.

E

So this is the first question that should come up on your smartphone and all you have to do is vote with a number. You pick as many.

F

As you want that apply to you personally, as you're as you're answering we'll see how many of you live here work here, is it here.

F

And that the ID number again is at the top of the slide is.

G

It cap sensitive so now.

H

I

D

Sure so you can.

F

Your messages Wayne.

I

Probably 2-300 wait what.

F

Copley, my last name.

J

All one word, so it's w-a-y and E. We got.

G

E

And it doesn't matter that it puts little knife, that's okay,.

E

We should have like the Jeopardy music thing.

D

It's playing in my head.

I

Own a business in business this year come on there.

H

I

I

E

Does anybody need help.

I

G

I

I

Oh I see you're gonna. Do this.

I

I

D

Now don't close, it.

I

I

I

I

A

So this is a little bit of an experiment yeah, so maybe we'll just kind of move on yeah.

I

D

Think from here we'll do it the old-fashioned way.

H

D

A

D

I could do a raising.

K

Hands-Fashioned way.

A

D

Think that sounds good. So thank you for your patience like John, said I thought we'd try something new uh little hookups, um but the first question. So if you could just raise your hand- and you can raise your hand more than once- who here lives in downtown Mystic, okay, good, a number of people- oh.

E

D

Okay, how about folks who work in downtown Mystic?

D

Okay, only a couple people that don't live or work there, but visit downtown Mystic right. So that's me so most folks in the room, um it looks like at least one person owns a business in downtown Mystic, okay, um who here owns a home in downtown Mystic handful of people, okay,.

D

Okay and the next question, if Wayne you might as well still Advance it, if you can.

D

We will not do on the poll. We'll just raise hands is we're just trying to gain a feel for how long people have been working or living and visiting Mystic, so um anyone uh have lived, worked or visited in downtown Mystic for less than a year.

D

All right welcome uh one to five years: okay, a couple of folks five to ten excellent, more than 10 years. Okay. This is great. This is excellent. That's very valuable for.

I

D

To know so, thank you, okay, so I think we're back to slideswane. If you could make that switch.

I

A

Technology works great other times it doesn't just maybe we won't use this platform again, but they are helping us with that experiment. We're always trying to find new ways of getting some interactive information.

D

Exactly um last piece is for our housekeeping, for us is a very important piece. This is our funding acknowledgment, the town of Groton, received funding to support this work from the national Fish and Wildlife Foundation through the Long Island sounds Futures fund grant program. We are very very appreciative of their support because it's made all of this possible and so wanted to recognize them, and then there is a disclaimer that anything we say today is our opinion. Only not reflecting the federal government.

D

Okay, so let's actually get into talking about the project itself, so, as you could probably guess from the title, the entire purpose of.

E

D

Is to develop a resiliency and sustainability plan for downtown Mystic as an important first step, and then you know implementing projects to make Mystic more sustainable.

D

The study area is shown in red and I know that's kind of small on the screen. We do have a website for this project that I'll be showing later on, that you can access and see it much much larger sustainability and resiliency are big words that people use in a lot of different ways. So I wanted to kind of break down how we are applying them here.

D

So when we say resiliency we're talking about the ability to withstand risks and negative impacts which is sort of similar to being able to bounce back after having something you know negative happen and specifically with this project, when we're talking about risks and negative impacts, we're talking about those related to climate change.

D

Sustainability, then, is making decisions today with an eye towards the future. So how are we making decisions today that are going to impact the study area for future Generations.

D

This is the first study of its kind that the town has embarked on, and so some folks might ask well why are we starting with Mystic and there's a number of reasons why Mystic is no stranger to flooding being a coastal town built right on the river partially in that River's floodplain right? So we have a long history of flooding in Mystic. Mystic is also fairly densely populated, especially compared to other parts of the town. So you have a lot of people that call Mystic home a lot of people that work in Mystic.

D

It's also a major tourist attraction, so it's part of the economic driver of the town, and it's also a historic district and I think about two aspects of that. um The first is that a lot of the buildings in Mystic were built a long time ago. The streets were built a long time ago. The systems were also built a long time ago, so we have stormwater systems, for example, that were built much before today's current standards with historic buildings as well.

D

There's different um processes that apply for how to do work on those buildings like flood mitigation projects. So it's just something else that we need to keep in mind as we're going to be working through this project.

D

So I mentioned before that we are focused on climate hazards and we have sort of binned them into three main groups: the first being sea level rise, storm surge and coastal flooding and the associated impacts on Coastal erosion.

D

The second is Extreme precipitation and its resulting causing of stormwater flooding and riparian or riverine flooding and the third being heat. So in the next couple of slides, I'm going to be showing projections for each of these hazards in the study area.

D

To give you a good idea of what the planning team is going to be folding into all of our work, thinking again about how to make Mystic more resilient, so the first I want to talk about is sea level rise and I'll, see if I can get closer to the screen and actually use a laser pointer. So the advice from Circa, the Connecticut Institute for resilience and um and climate adaptation is that we plan for 20 inches of sea level rise by the year 2050.. So that's almost two feet.

D

Circa has a really fantastic online mapper that I took these images from so it allows you to search for locations and then toggle between different scenarios of sea level rise and storm surge.

D

So this image on the left shows our study area with 20 inches of sea level rise. The yellow blobs are just low-lying area. The blue light blue areas.

D

Oh no I pressed the wrong button. There we go okay, so see here. These light. Blue areas. I know it's kind of challenging on the screen, but we will be uploading these onto the website. These are areas that um essentially are going to be inundated with 20 inches of sea level rise. So you see here right along the coast right along the river. We have infrastructure, that's going to be impacted.

D

This story gets a bit different. If you look at the second image this one over here, which is again 20 inches of sea level rise, but with a hundred year storm on top of it. So a hundred year storm is a storm that has, on average a one percent chance of happening in any given year, although those odds are also changing with climate change right.

D

um So looking at 20 inches plus 100 Year storm, now we're seeing far more infrastructure at risk. So this right here where my cursor is, is Pearl streets, so we're seeing flooding essentially through the flood plain up to the escarpments, far more buildings, roads, critical infrastructure, that's going to be impacted.

D

But it's not just large storms that we have to plan, for. We also need to look at just the impacts of high tide flooding on a daily basis, and this image has a lot of uh variables and parts I'm going to try to walk through it. I will say also to give credit. This is from the climber climate Explorer toolkit, which is another really great online tool that you can look at impacts by location.

D

So this is high tide flooding based on the New London tide gauge um and what they consider to be high tide. Flooding is about half a meter over mean higher high water, which is pretty much talking in Greek. So half a meter is about a foot and nine inches, so one and three quarters feet mean higher high water is the highest tide level at any given day, measured over a whole bunch of other days to give that number so think of it as like the highest kind of high high tide stage.

D

So this image shows on this access here annual days with high tide flooding at the bottom. It has decades. So this right here is 1950 over here is 2020., so all of these teeny tiny little bars that you can barely see are the historical records of how many days had high tide flooding, and you see, they're very, very small and now I will point out this over here is 50., so we're talking about a couple of days a year.

D

The two big colored curves, however, show us the projections for the future, so the red curve shows us a high emissions pathway. So that means, if globally, we don't decrease our emissions significantly. This is the pathway we're on the blue. One shows us if we do decrease our emissions significantly. What we can expect.

D

So here we are in about 2020. The projections for 2025 based on Lower emissions is about eight days a year of high tide flooding higher emissions about 14..

D

If you look at 2050 right so now we're somewhere over here, the lower emissions projection is 33 days. That's over a month combined. If you can sell it all those days of high tide flooding, it's a 156 days of the projection under the high emissions scenario.

D

2090 is outside of really the the scale of what we're looking at for the focus of the project, we're mostly looking at risk up to 2050, but we're keeping an eye to these projections further out. Also, knowing that um the more distant projections right, there's a bit more uncertainty in that as we as time continues, and as we get more and better information, those projections will tighten up but right now the projections for 2090 is that under high emissions, Pathways we'd be looking at high tide flooding just about every single day.

D

So this is clearly something very significant that we have to plan for, and um we've had a couple of users on our interactive website. We have a map where you can actually go in there and put pins, and we encourage you to to show us where it floods, you can upload photos, you can describe it to us and there was a user who put a number of pins along gravel. Street was saying every every high tide. We have flooding on the road here. So we understand that this is you know.

D

This is already an issue that Mystic is dealing with. It's an issue that, unfortunately, is going to be getting worse.

D

In addition to all of the sort of like coastal flooding hazards, we're also looking at the impact of precipitation, so rainfall and snowfall, and how that impacts flooding. So this graphic is from I believe actually from 2014, but it shows between 1958 and 2012. the change in the amount of precipitation falling in very heavy events. So essentially it's showing us the change in those really big.

D

You know the rain bombs, the really really big storms- and you can see here the Northeast- we're seeing a huge upward Trend in the amount of rainfall coming in these really big events. This matches research that Circa has done that has said um I think it was since 1980 the amount of precipitation we're receiving in the state is going up, but the number of wet days is going down.

D

So that tells us that the days that it does rain we're getting much more rainfall at a time, and so again you know most of our bill environment. You know those systems might be decades old. They were not necessarily designed with these kinds of conditions in mind, so that's something else we're going to be looking at.

D

We also want to take a look at heat. Heat is not just a hazard for the Western half the United States, so this first graph is average daily maximum temperature in degrees Fahrenheit for New, London County. So again, I'll walk you through the different variables here. This is the historic record, so this is average daily maximum temperature from 1950 all the way.

D

Through present day again, the red blob shows High emissions Pathways, the red line in the middle is the average and then the the top and the bottom of the blob right scientific term is it shows. The range blue again is for the low emissions pathway, so between 1961 and 1990 average daily maximum temperature was about 60 degrees in New, London County by the end of the 2020s. That average is expected to go up to about 62.

D

in 2050. The average projection for the low and high emissions scenarios are 64 and 65 degrees respectively and by 2090 we're getting up to 65 and 69 degrees and again that's the average line. That's not values up here, no longer, no more as it values down here. It's the average, but even with the averages, we're seeing significant differences between what we observed from 1961 to 1990 versus what were projected um to be moving towards, and so with he it's also really important to look at those more extreme conditions.

D

So this is a similar chart, but this is days with maximum temperature, more than 90 degrees days, 90 degrees. So those really hot days. Historically, in this County we had about four of those days a year.

D

The balance of this decade tells us we're probably going to experience more like nine in 2050s uh we're going up to about 15 and 21. and by the 2090s we're getting into somewhere between maybe 21 and 54 days.

D

So a really big increase in the number of days with that, you know really tough Heat, but Heat isn't just about the temperature Frank.

D

He is also about humanity and since the 1970s humidity has also increased uh I think globally. By about three and a half percent, so with climate change, humidity is going up, that's also feeding into what we talked about rainfall and incidents of storms, um and it's also impacting how he affects us. So heat index is a combination of heat and humidity, and so that's really how A temperature feels the hottest months here are July and August. That's no surprise and humidity in those months tends to be about 71 to 73 percent.

D

So if you look at this chart from NOAA this column, sorry, it's too far away my hand's too shaky. This is 90 degrees and this is 70 degrees or 70 percent humidity. This is 75., so I put a purple circle around where we are for heat index, so at 90 degrees with those humidities. Your experience of heat index of like 105 to 109 degrees.

D

The chart at the bottom gives you the classification of what that means. So orange is danger and in that orange Zone, heat, cramps and heat exhaustion are likely, but heat stroke is also possible, with prolonged exposure or physical activity.

D

So that of course raises a whole host of questions for a project like this. We have a lot of people who work outside who are going to be experiencing this type of heat. We have a lot of homes that were not built with cooling systems because they previously didn't need them. We have a huge number of tourists that come to downtown Mystic and they walk the sidewalks and they go from business to business. But you know how are?

D

How are we going to try to raise awareness about the impacts that heat are going to have on people spending time outside or even in their homes?

D

I'm, not going to ask you to do the poll again we're going to raise some hands and we're going to have a group discussion about these kind of impacts in Mystic, but we just wanted to get kind of like a quick feel of the room with a couple of poll questions. When could you bring them up on the screen?

D

Please, and thank you.

D

Oh no put you on the spot. I can never remember my passwords.

D

Yes, please, okay, so the question and we're going to raise hands and you can raise your hand more than once is asking you about your experience with issues related to the following hazards that I'll read out. So please raise your hand if you feel like you've, experienced storm surge, causing flooding during storms in downtown Mystic, okay, so about a third to a half of the room uh sea level rise, causing high tide, flooding or other nuisance flooding.

D

So again, more than half the room on that one, increasing rainfall, depths and intensity, causing flooding during heavy rainstorms again I'd say most folks in the room, increasing temperatures causing or worsening health issues or limiting activities.

D

Okay, a couple hands up: I think we have one more question.

D

Okay, has anyone actually had an event? They were going to attend, canceled or other recreational activities, impacted due to heat one, okay, new or worsening, wear or tear on property buildings and other sense of equipments?

D

Okay, um anyone feeling like they're, they feel a connection between new or worsening health issues and heats okay, a couple folks for sure. Okay,.

D

Well, we could just go back to the slides.

D

D

The types of impacts that we're going to be studying as part of this project I want to explain the project approach, so there's really two main components of what we're going to be doing here. The first is a vulnerability assessment of the study area and then the second is trying to figure out what we do about those vulnerabilities and Sam's going to talk about this in more detail.

D

So just really wanted to briefly explain the vulnerability assessment is going to consist of a couple different things, including a field survey that Sam's going to be talking about a desktop analysis that GZA is going to do looking at. You know: geospatial layers of everything from flood zones to critical infrastructure, to socioeconomic factors, um to soils and topography and all those sorts of things, as well as the climate layers.

D

uh We we just looked at together and others as well, and um your community input today is going to really help directly inform our understanding of the area's vulnerability and then the second part is again once we understand the vulnerability of the area a bit better. How can we put together recommendations that the town can take the individual property owners could take to try to increase their resilience to these hazards?

D

To give you an idea of where we are in the process? We're really still in the beginning stages.

D

Gza is going to be doing field surveys in the next couple of months, hopefully wrapping by the end of the year they're going to continue doing their.

D

um You know, mapping, work December through February and then um I think by that point, we'll have a pretty good understanding of the area's vulnerabilities and we'll be doing a second public meeting to report that out and again to run it all by you who live and work in this location.

D

The draft report will be prepared in the summer and there will be a third public meeting to kind of report out on that report and what its contents will be in any like last minute, adjustments that we need to make with the project concluding hopefully in early fall of 2023..

D

You are always welcome to reach out to me. I encourage you please reach out to me. If you have questions, if you have comments, if you have inputs, I'm happy to give you my card, my information is also on our greater groton.com site. So this is the website we have for the project that I mentioned earlier.

D

If you go to Greater groton.com, you look for the rectangle that looks like this and that's where we're going to be posting meeting recordings materials as we develop them. There's also the interactive flood mapper that I mentioned and there's a survey. Some survey questions that people can use to give us information again about their experiences.

D

And, at the end of the day, we are working towards developing an actionable plan with identified recommendations for projects that will improve mystic's resiliency. This Project's also going to help us gain an understanding of the economic impact of sea level rise on the the study area GZA through all of their mapping work and their field. Surveys is developing an inventory of vulnerable infrastructure and natural resources, and just as important as all of these things is the community dialogue that we're having through meetings like this hearing from you about the issues and talking about possible interventions.

D

So with that we're going to break into small group discussions, we have some kind of like guiding questions, but before we do that, does anyone have a clarification questions we'll have some time at the end free q? A? But if there's anything, I said that you're just like hold on Megan I, really didn't follow that or you know any kind of big Frank yeah.

D

It's on greater Groton yep.

K

D

K

One will you use the word infrastructure? What does that include? Does that include houses and commercial buildings, as well as things like sewer, correct.

D

Yep Utility Systems streets, roadways, culverts.

A

Bridges Bridge sidewalks one.

L

Clarification, that's all publicly available data, so we're.

J

Not we'll be collecting some limited, we'll do field surveys and I'll get to that in the next steps. After the discussion, but I'd say over 95 of the data is just what's publicly available um that the town can provide and other in other data from Connecticut GIS.

I

K

A historic record as well as what's happened here in the past I'm thinking, particularly of the 1938 hurricane. What that impact had on the humidity.

L

The short answer is yes, we'll.

J

Be talking like historical events that have impacted this area and the 38 is obviously you know the.

A

J

Of a record um for many of you who are familiar with those events, sorry one more question.

K

How will this be coordinated with Stonington.

D

Yeah well we're excited that we have a couple folks from Stone in here today. Stonington here today, um including Tom Norris, um and we are Stonington- has already done similar type planning right. So I'm really hoping that this project will allow us to then better coordinate with Stonington on things that we can be doing, maybe even in concert moving forward and.

A

We've been in contact with their planning department and their staff over at town hall. They're aware of this project, they're planning director actually worked in Groton for about 15 years, so we have really good communication between the two municipalities, but this project is focused solely on the Groton side of the bridge. uh The Groton Mystic side.

M

Do you know, has Stonington hired a Megan for their side of the uh no.

A

They don't know, no, they don't have a beg him yet.

E

Are you able to use the lines any data that they collected when they did their resume help with.

D

Your plans, that's a great question: I mean we can certainly reach out to them and do a little cross comparison and see if there's any gaps, because we've already put together sort of our our Master list of all the different data layers. We plan to use so it'd, be good timing to compare and see if there's anything that they utilize that wasn't on our list.

J

Yeah and I think that would primarily probably be just the state data um at GZA. We've done several of these throughout Connecticut, but what we always evaluate, neighboring communities, to identify when we're doing that initial kind of data assessment. So we'll we'll be looking more at the climate adaptation plan that stoning tins developed, but the the local data is largely the town of groton's um data, but it'll be primarily probably the state and then any federal sources. But we've got a good handle on what those are already.

J

But we'll do it analysis to see if we're missing anything.

N

Passing the bridge.

D

Yeah I mean the bridge is infrastructure. That's certainly on the Groton side will be part of the footprint of the study and factored in we'll.

L

Be looking at that Department of Transportation has data on that and if we can get.

J

You know deck elevations. A lot of that would be what the top of the deck would be in relation to the existing flood elevations. That Megan was referring to the one percent annual recurrence flood, which is the kind of regulatory marker that FEMA has that drives a lot of your your building regulations.

J

um With the town and the state of Connecticut, but we'll definitely be looking at that, because I know during high tide, you can see that water, it's probably at a different higher location than it was several years ago, and that was a good put. The maps that Megan had just one clarification.

J

The map on the left with the 20 inches was just like the mean high water, so it didn't have any wave action in it and the one on the right had um wave action um of of you know up to three feet: feet of um of waves and in some areas over three feet and then some areas between one and a half and three feet: I, don't want to get into too much of the details, so um that'll be included later in more written format.

D

Okay, one last one.

K

Yeah I have to ask um so will the final actionable plan um also include structural potential structural solutions to the issues that you've laid out.

D

Yes, I mean not developed extensively right, but I mean this plan is going to have actionable recommendations of targeted projects that need to be done in the back.

N

All right, I.

D

I

N

If you've already said it, but the timetable for the completion of.

D

The study yeah we're talking to have the entire thing Wrapped Up by Fall of next year, so in about a year.

N

A

Not yet so that's another, um if any of you have been, you know uh watching and paying attention what happens in town town government, Town Council, often Town, Council RTM wants to hear from you the people, so some.

O

A

Where not only analyzing this information, but we're also um we're also trying to get public input on this. We want to have a very open, very transparent process, so that once and it's not just this meeting after this meeting, you know, as Megan said up on our greater Groton website. If you haven't visited that site.

A

Yet please check it out not only this initiative, but there's a lot of other initiatives that we're working on right now, um there'll be survey, questions there'll, be a lot of other ways for people to input and interact that can't attend a meeting and we'll be getting public input throughout this entire process.

A

So then, once we have that final plan, we can take that to the Town Council to the RTM talk to them about the financial needs that we have working with public works with Parks and Rec, our other Town departments look at Capital Improvement projects and how we can budget those over years again. Talking to the council they'll be further debate on that and with the RTM right now, there's also a lot of grant money out there for these types of projects. So hopefully we can match some Town funds with that.

A

So the short answer is no. We don't have money committed to these future projects yet because we don't entirely know what they are. We haven't designed them and we don't know what the cost of those are, but I think that's something you know we can help inform, but we need all of you to be a unified voice about hey. This is something we have to address sooner than later. You know once we end this project, so it's not just hey. We did the plan. We came up with a plan. Great we're all done.

A

This is the easy part coming up with the money, designing it and building it. That's the hard part.

D

So, oh sorry, one last question.

E

One more one, more storms, Storm surges, magnify as it goes up the river. How are you coordinating whether there's buffer zones with Stonington and how you address that?

E

um It would seem to be like a necessary kind of coordination, Point yeah.

D

And I think once we get into the planning process, it will help us have more informed discussions with Stonington um Dr Jim O'donnell who's on our steering committee is also involved with a research project they're doing over by the Mystic Aquarium. So that will give us really great information. We can fold into all of this and help Foster that larger conversation.

G

The model that was.

D

Developed in Circa.

G

Has been improved in terms of.

B

Small area for the Mystic River so.

G

That's a new model, so it could be you'll. Take a look at that surge mapper. We can actually have a surge mapper for the Mystic River. That is better fantastic, yeah. Well,.

B

G

The floor for a second I.

B

G

I want you to think a little outside the box when you think about impact.

G

I had a strange one. This afternoon, I happened to go into the army, navy store, I call it. The Army Navy store downtown to see if they heard about the meeting at all, and they said he ever bothered with flooding, because it all looks pretty low grade yeah, oh yeah, just last September we had a rainfall event and the water was six feet up on my floor here because of vehicular wakes the cars driving through the water on the street. It wasn't all that high but produced a wave.

G

Wayne talked about waves out there I said I'll be dead, it's something you never really think about, but with all of our four-wheel drives High suspension trucks in the rest. These days, maybe getting awake from Vehicles is more common than it was would be 30 years ago, when we were kids around here. So that's what I thought it was a little outside the box.

D

Fantastic sorry, we were just um figuring out last second Logistics, so we have some discussion questions that we're going to break you up into small groups to work on and I think honestly folks, working at tables if you could discuss amongst each table folks in the back, if you want to chat in your rows, feel free to move the chairs.

D

um We have an empty table up front and Sam's yeah Sam's going to be uh passing out. Some worksheets there's also easels. If someone feels the need, they want to get a marker out and put things on. Easels writing down. Some notes is very much appreciated, because then we can take that back right. We can't listen to every comment in the conversation, so if you can make sure to jot down the really you think the most important parts for us to hear that would be great and um for timing. Maybe.

J

Which will probably pick I'd, say maybe 10 10 minutes 10 to 12 minutes, and then we have heat related questions um which will probably be about seven to ten minutes, and then we have kind of discussion, questions which will get that tie into more of the impacts as it relates to both of those types of Hazards and that'll, be kind of the Capstone discussion. That'll, probably be more like you know, five to eight minutes, just because there's only a few questions um and what we've done is I've got 20 of these.

J

So we we need some note takers at each table and then um so I would just suggest having you know having a couple people at each of the each of the groups. It looks like we have about 40 people here.

J

um The folks want to use the easels.

A

J

Can just write on the paper we'll pass out.

A

The paper and the pen, and then maybe uh if at the end we can just talk about it a little bit in a bigger group session yeah. Let's just do that. So, let's pass those out. Okay, give me something to pass out yeah all right.

A

So this is one small group.

E

I

I

L

Right, if I can get everybody's attention, please we get everybody's attention again, so we're gonna do we're gonna. Do a quick, 20 kind of 20 second report out for each group, just kind of just one key thought that came out from your table as it related to each of these discussions.

A

So I'm going to walk around with.

L

A

We have reporting courses if uh people want to report out to again, as Sam said about 20 seconds, if there was one topic or one thing, that your group really uh discussed in detail or felt strongly about, give me 20 seconds.

H

Someone's responsible development, um not putting people In, Harm's Way with new buildings and making more permeable services for parking lots, and that kind of thing.

A

Excellent. Thank you from this group.

M

Well, we had controlling water that might have to be controlled outside of downtown Mystic. You know rain Gardens and retention or Wetlands. You know farther out. uh You know in the concept of retaining an inch of water in the storm before you discharge. You know if rain flooding is the issue. Okay,.

A

Thank you, dude.

F

Yeah a couple of points, one is that we didn't think that heat should be a the priority against some of the other issues, uh and I won't go into all the reasons why the other one is that that this needs to be just phase one that there's additional surrounding areas outside of what was presented. That really have similar problems right that need to be addressed and the problems there, the the third one I think is. We talked about the economic impacts. There's a lot of things you can do. That would cost enormous amount of money.

F

How do we get it down to the actions which are affordable versus things that are gee we'd like to do and that that, in terms of trying to manage the I guess the results or the output of the recommendations, it really has to be affordable? And to that point, if 10, what 10 11 we think of the population are in those areas? If you count up everything, not just what you had that says, 90 of the rest of the Town says I'm going to pay for that 10 percent.

F

So there needs to be an economic perspective that says we all get hurt, even if we're not on the parcel that immediately affected by water.

A

O

I think one of the important issues very important issue is that cooperation among towns and communities- three of us at this table have just been appointed to a a flood control Commission in Stonington, and uh we we have a mutual interest in what happens in Groton, because if one side of the river and the other uh and I think we need to work together, and we look forward to doing that. Thank.

A

You again we'll just try to keep these like 30 seconds 20 seconds. Ideally, somebody table.

P

So we had a lot of similar things that they had said at table four over there about the cost, and how would you do that? But one of the other things that why would we not take what others have done already there's a lot of places that are already dealing with this and have mitigated. So are we looking at whatever they might have done already and what you know, what what did they do and then the other thing is about insurance. You hear that flood insurance is almost impossible. So how do we mitigate that.

A

Thank you good yeah. Somebody from this group.

B

Do I take it. Okay, all right, uh we were actually talking uh write down, John's uh Street here, a land use policy. I know everybody really uh likes to get single family homes around here, but really multi-family developments make better use of the areas and leave more open space, and we really want to increase the amount of porous surfaces so that water doesn't run off.

C

Echo a lot of the ideas that everyone said, it's also great to just see all the great ideas and engagement.

C

um Definitely, second, the idea of working with sort of the River Basin engagement across the town and uh both sides and interesting from different levels as well as communities, local national. uh Our partners in this were telling us about their house. That was just lost in Fort Myers, so it's uh it's everywhere. The same kind of a storm could hit here and looking at both the big sides of it and the the small sides of it. So it's great to start uh start right here.

Q

A

F

Q

To make a comment about cost, this issue is rising higher up in government, so I think we could see help from the federal government and others so I I would rule out cost. Yet.

A

Okay, all right! Well, thank you, everybody for your feedback on this we're going to take. um If you didn't give us your written results, please do give those to us we'll compile all that information and we'll get these questions out on greater Groton. Also, with that said, I'm going to hand it over to Sam he's going to talk for about five to seven minutes. We'll have a few more minutes for questions if we want to wrap up at 6 30, but we'll all be hanging around. If people have questions or want to chat.

J

This was outstanding, um so what I'm going to do is go over some examples. It was nice to hear a lot of the feedback and I'm not going to be able to answer all of your questions, but I'm actually going to be able to address some of them and what we go over, starting off with kind of example, strategies and actions. So we're not just starting with a blank sheet of paper here, we're kind of looking at it from a couple of key strategies.

J

We're looking at protect and accommodate protect means we're going to be staying here and we're going to be building flood protection like increasing the height of sea walls. Other areas accommodate means we're going to be staying here and we're going to be adapting existing structures to the flood water, so I'm going to show some examples of those in the following slides, but within both of these strategies we have kind of three key um actions we have structural and that was kind of brought up earlier.

J

Looking at you know, improvements to storm water infrastructure, improvements to Coastal structures, using your natural landscapes to help support. You know, nature-based actions. We have non-structural, so what does that mean? That means integrating existing policies, plans and programs, integrating this into existing policies and plans and programs going back and and also integrating existing plans and programs into this process as well, because we need to not only identify technically feasible, but we also need to identify actions that can be built based on your existing building codes.

J

Zoning Etc integrated projects, so it's not really we're not just going to do one or the other. We're going to be trying to look at this holistically from your Lifeline systems, which include storm water, Wastewater um transportation systems also looking at support and in vulnerable populations, we'll also be looking at historic structures. It was brought up earlier. You know, Mystic is, is a very important Town.

J

Historically, there are lots of historic structures, so that will be a big piece of this um and to the right here is an example of a protect strategy in Stratford Connecticut, that's been very successful so far, there's about 18 to 20, protect actions that were identified, of which I'd say about four to five are already in engineering and design, and a couple of them have actually gotten federal funds for projects up to about 8 million for for major flood protection.

J

um Looking at kind of some other examples here, a lot of these are going to be based on National kind of examples, FEMA examples, um so we're going to be looking at drainage upgrades. You know your existing storm water, it wasn't all developed at one time. The design flood for the storm water probably was not a one percent annual flood right it. You may be lucky if it was like a 10 annual flood, we'll be looking at elevating structures as an option. You have some structures already on Piers.

J

You know that type and then elevating utilities as well- and you can see these are some examples here. Up to the right is a new bridge that had kind of an up size, that's at high tide to help improve drainage, and then there are examples you can see what the elevation on the bottom, where structures are elevated, some are not the ones that are are going to be more resilient, so natural nature-based solutions are going to also be a key part of this. You can see here we're looking at rain Gardens.

J

We also have a couple examples here of this is kind of a restaurant, Beach, restoration, type examples. These are kind of applicable examples that we've evaluated already. That could really be a part of this project tree trenches, green streets. You know we have a lot of pavement. You can even look at this back parking lot right, I know, they've actually had flooding into this building as a result of intense precipitation and then flood barriers. So one thing I just wanted to point out- was we're looking to be looking at community actions with a big umbrella.

J

What can the town do also in in coordination with neighboring with Stonington, but also? What can Property Owners do? So? It's Property Owners, there's examples that we're going to look at of temporary and permanent solutions that you could do in the near term. That could help you know, provide protection. You can see here. This is kind of a fire department where you have floodgates that can can help in the more of a shorter term solution. This right here is actually more of a longer term solution.

J

It's more of a flood wall that helped provide protection to a major medical facility, sample references I just wanted to show kind of some. We were looking at National examples. We also have a number of examples from Connecticut communities. We've worked in that will be applying Lessons Learned From, but this first one here is kind of the FEMA's natural nature base.

J

It's from 2021 a lot of those examples you saw earlier were from from that document, and and we we try to look at those because that will help position the town in terms of pursuing future Federal funding. uh The middle one is more of a connecticut-based sustainability and resilience for storm water improvements.

J

Looking at ways to improve your storm water infrastructure, and then this this last one is kind of looking at what I was talking about before that second umbrella of kind of actions that we can help educate, Property Owners on that you can actually take on and also will be identifying areas for potential funding that private property owners can look for I'm almost out of time. But our next steps I'm not going to get into great detail on the vulnerability assessment, because it can get very complicated with lots of data sources.

J

But right now we're in line to be doing some field, surveys of downtown properties and we're going to be looking at properties that are located within the FEMA special flood Hazard area, because because that's kind of the guide that FEMA the last guide, that I showed you on the right on the previous slide, we're using a checklist from FEMA and it's really important to kind of use existing standards and that's the one that we've we're going to be. We've actually created a template already we're going to be completing the assets and Hazard inventories.

J

We've got a lot of that. We're probably about 80 to 90 percent done with the data collection and that'll be integrated into a over a comprehensive shape file that will be used.

J

The vulnerability assessment will be looking at current flooding based on FEMA's flood insurance rate, Maps we'll be looking at circa's sea level rise viewer, but we'll also look at some NOAA data in Army core data, just to have a comparison to see how those compare and a lot of times the the future projections are pretty similar and then we'll be doing that preparing the asset and Hazard mapping.

J

That's really going to show you the visualizations of exposure, what properties are going to be impacted today and then 2050, and if we're able to we'll look further out to 27 to 2070, but the town's only required, as Megan noted earlier, to look out to 2050 for those 20 inches and then we'll be doing that second Workshop I'm, going to end on this note here at the field visits we're going to be coordinating with downtown tenants and Property Owners, with kind of a marketing blast to let folks know when GZA staff will be in the field and and really we're going to be using.

J

It pays this. This form here that we've created is based on FEMA guidance and then we're really looking at um collecting information. That's not included in the Assessor's data and with that I want to thank everyone for coming this evening. We've got about two to three minutes, I think for questions. We can make it longer if people want to, but with that I'd like to open the floor to any questions that folks have.

J

uh One of the questions is the flood insurance rate.

M

Maps from Pima put in floods of the 100 Year storms, you mentioned building codes, say build build to this, but is that accommodating the 20-inch rise? You know we could build our house today to meet the code and then, in less than 25 years, we're going to have a problem. Yeah.

J

That's a very good question so when so, when we look at, we look at the FEMA's, What's called the base flood elevation, and that is pretty much the one percent. That's just what your your that's! What your regulatory! You know! That's what the building code is based on, but when we're looking into the future, when we look at the base flood elevation we're adding the 20 inches on top of that. So, for example, if you have 10 10 foot base flood elevation and this is all commonly applied.

J

You know, and it's something Circa has has advanced as well, but that's the number we're using that we'll be adding on to uh to look at other elevations and with respect to the the downtown.

P

It's probably a premature question, but what steps are you taking to make sure we're not moving the problems somewhere else? Let's just say we solve it here. Are you moving to problems somewhere else is like? Is there a scope of area where, if we do this, this is now the an impact. That's.

J

A that's a very, very good question, so pretty much when you are developing flood protection projects, you're required to to do an analysis that, um like a modeling analysis that demonstrates that you're not gonna, it's not going to result in increased flooding elsewhere, um but so a lot of times. What we'll be including that as a part of of the recommendations for consideration. So you know the building code's not going to. Let you in the state of Connecticut I can guarantee you based on deep regulations, they're not going to let the town create flood protection.

J

That's going to.

B

J

It worse, for example, and we keep a Keen Eye to make recommendations that that we'll avoid to the best that that you can um those actions, but um at the end of the day, once you get into the final project, implementation you'll have to do modeling to verify that that you're, not resulting in flooding uh elsewhere, and that that's pretty standard practice for that type of consideration. So that was a good point to bring up.

A

Anyone else, um if not one, please on your way out, sign in on the sign-in sheet, so we have your information. We can include you on any updates on the project. If anybody has any of the sheets left with some information filled out, please hand that to Wayne right, just raise your hand up now we'll come around and collect it, and thank you very much for your time. This is meeting one there'll be two more and uh have a great night. Everybody also it is dark outside. So just watch your step, leaving the building.