Rockport cottages threatened by climate change, sea level rise

Jun 14, 2024

ROCKPORT — This time of year, life at Long Beach is easy. Kids splash in ankle-high waves. Adults sit with their toes in the sand, enjoying a book or a cold beverage. And up on the dune behind the aging seawall, groups lounge outside the 152 summer cottages that have been in some families for generations.

But beneath the summer splendor on this Cape Ann beach is a microcosm of the peril facing coastal communities, as climate change brings rising seas and dangerous storm surges that are predicted to grow in ferocity and reshape the coastline.

What’s especially complicated about Long Beach is that the cottages are all built on town-owned land. And at the end of this year, those leases are up.

To understand the situation the town is wrestling with at Long Beach, you need to start with what nature intended it to be, which is a barrier beach protecting a salt marsh. The swath of sand stretches nearly a mile along the coast, ending at a narrow creek that allows ocean water to curl in and behind the dune to feed the tidal marsh. Through its history, the sand moved and reshaped itself many times, as dunes do, storm by storm, gust by gust.

But in 1931, the town built a massive concrete seawall, running two-thirds of a mile, that anchored the dune and protected the cottages — some of which date to the early 1900s — from being undermined by ocean waves. The wall, however, offers no flood protection from the marsh in the back, where a big tide already floods the end of the road.

The entire development is in a flood hazard area, according to the Federal Emergency Management Agency, and by 2050, the Massachusetts Office of Coastal Zone Management predicts, nearly 100 percent of the cottages will flood in an annual storm.

“Would the seawall and 150 cottages be built today? I’d guess not,” said Sarah Wilkerson, chair of the town’s Select Board.

A few years ago, Rockport’s Town Meeting created the Long Beach Options Committee to look at the staggering number of factors — environmental, economic, and social — worth considering as the Long Beach leases got set to expire. On the table were three basic paths. The first was to renew the leases. These agreements could be unchanged; they could include terms such as indemnifying the town against losses in the event of seawall failure; or the leases could include conditions for so-called “managed retreat,” allowing the town to make corrections before the ocean does it for them.

“Managed retreat is not, ‘Let’s get rid of the cottages,” said Dianne Finch, who was on the options committee. “It needs to be looked at as a category, a long-term approach, which could start with something like saying if a house gets more than 50 percent destroyed, it doesn’t get rebuilt, or maybe it has to be built on stilts. Small, planned steps.”

The second path presented by the committee was to sell the lots and the seawall (with its coming replacement bill of $30 million to $60 million), but retain the beach for the public. It would be a one-time windfall for the town, but remove a steady source of annual income. The current leases, plus property taxes on the cottages (which the tenants own), collectively add up to about $2.5 million a year, 8 percent of the town’s annual budget. That’s a lot. So is the cost of maintaining or replacing the seawall, which neither the town or the tenants wants to shoulder. The town floated the idea of transferring responsibility of the seawall to the tenants in 2013 but settled instead for a short lease — 10 years versus the 30 the tenants wanted – with large rent hikes.

Selling the land — which would need to be approved by Town Meeting — has been an idea floated for years by the tenants, 32 of whom spoke in favor of buying at a 2022 public meeting. But it has also been tossed around by some in town, who want the weight of the seawall off the town’s shoulders before something extremely costly happens, such as the 1958 storm that toppled a quarter-mile section of the wall.

Steve Sheehan, whose family owns three cottages — his parents bought the first in 1967 — was a key player in a lawsuit against the town that in 2018 won tenants the “right of first refusal” should Rockport ever decide to sell the lots. But he said any purchase would require a long-term solution for the seawall, which stirs as much passion in town as the fate of the cottages. Some residents want the wall removed entirely, the “back to nature” approach that would allow the dune to move again and stop erosion of the beach in front of the seawall, where a phenomenon known as “downwash” causes the waves to take about a foot of beach sand per year, which must be occasionally replenished. Others want a new wall that is four feet higher, which is what would be needed to keep storm waves from coming over it, according to FEMA.

“Right now, I don’t know if I’m interested in buying the lot or not,” Sheehan said. “Are you fixing the wall? Would you be serious that you want me to buy a piece of land that has a dilapidated seawall in front of it? Who would sign up for that?”

In May, the town received a $2.8 million grant from FEMA to repair sections of the wall damaged in a 2018 storm, and will ask Town Meeting members to approve the required 25 percent match, roughly $700,000. But the Select Board has made it clear they do not have any immediate plans to replace the wall, or sell the land. Instead, board members have announced they plan to offer new leases, but have hinted it may just be a short-term extension as they consider a bigger long-term decision. The board has been meeting in closed session to craft their offer.

Beyond that, everything is unknown. Except perhaps the inevitable. Which is why the options committee presented a third idea, which was to remove the seawall and the cottages and the utility infrastructure and just let it go “back to nature.”

“Eventually, the ocean is going to take it back,” said Jayne Knott, a hydrologist who serves on the board of TownGreen, a nonprofit focused on climate awareness and action for Cape Ann. “We need to retreat, and the question is how. Do we retreat in a planned, organized fashion, or as a result of a catastrophic storm event?

“You hear a lot of folks say ‘We’ve weathered storms before,’ but we’re entering unprecedented ground with climate change. We need to plan with our eyes wide open,” Knott added.

Ian Crowne, a Rockport resident who has been a vocal critic of the Select Board, said further inaction just keeps the town’s taxpayers on the hook for a disaster.

“It’s a very complex situation, but it’s being treated as if we’re not really at great risk so let’s take the path of least resistance and just keep renewing the leases and bump the problem down the road,” said Crowne, who believes any new lease should limit liability for the town if the wall or cottages are damaged. “There’s so many ways this could go, and go badly, if we don’t do something now.”

Billy Baker can be reached at [email protected]. Follow him on Instagram @billy_baker.

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