(C) Virginia Mercury This story was originally published by Virginia Mercury and is unaltered. . . . . . . . . . . In Norfolk, an environmental headquarters plans to live with the water, then surrender to reality [1] ['Jim Morrison', 'More From Author', '- January'] Date: 2024-01-18 For Marjorie Mayfield-Jackson of Norfolk’s Elizabeth River Project, signing a groundbreaking agreement to tear down the organization’s new $9 million headquarters when waters rise too high was bittersweet. “It’s hard to not even have had the grand opening yet and we’re talking about celebrating taking it down,” she said. When, decades from now, time and tide can no longer be denied, the nonprofit will surrender the 6,500-square-foot Pru and Louis Ryan Resilience Lab in a final act of adaptation to the climate crisis, making way for the rise of wetlands on Knitting Mill Creek, a slender offshoot of the Lafayette River. The lab will be torn down, what can be recycled will be recycled, connections to utilities like water, sewer and electrical will be removed, and the site will be transferred to a land trust, never to be developed again. The Elizabeth River Project, which Mayfield-Jackson helped found 33 years ago, signed what’s called a rolling conservation easement on Tuesday. Mayfield-Jackson and Mary-Carson Stiff, the executive director of Wetlands Watch, a nonprofit that drew up the agreement, say it is the nation’s first privately held rolling easement, a legal restriction triggered by a change in circumstances — in this case, rising tides — that requires whoever owns the property at the time to return it to nature. Monitoring for the easement to take effect will begin when the mean higher high-water average reaches an average over 10 years of 4.5 feet above what it is now, a level estimates say will occur around 2065. Deconstruction of the building will be required when it reaches an average over three years of 6.5 feet, something projected to happen in 2085, and the property will be transferred to the Coastal Virginia Conservancy. Why is the agreement groundbreaking? The easement offers one tool for officials to address the coming conflict between rising waters and private property rights in cities like Norfolk, where portions of the waterfront will become uninhabitable. A rolling conservation easement skirts the tricky legal questions of when the government is responsible for compensating residents for the loss of private property and who is responsible for removing abandoned structures. It also makes the unpredictable predictable by placing a sort of expiration date on a site, allowing localities to plan for the loss of a tax base and the requirement to provide an area services. Stiff and Wetlands Watch shepherded the drafting of the agreement over three years of consultations with scientists, environmental groups and legal experts nationwide. It was signed after the bulk of construction was finished but before the grand opening of the building, which is scheduled for the spring. The nonprofit’s staff moved into their offices in October. The site was designed as a model of resilience, showcasing strategies homeowners and developers in low-lying areas like Norfolk can use to combat flooding. There is a living shoreline of native grasses with an oyster reef as part of restored wetlands designed to prevent erosion and mitigate flooding. Plans allow space for those wetlands to migrate upland as waters rise. Pervious paving and four rain gardens will absorb and store rainwater, keeping it out of the city’s overwhelmed stormwater system. What we're trying to demonstrate is it's possible to still, as we say, live, work and play alongside the river in ways that allow the river its space. – Marjorie Mayfield-Jackson, Elizabeth River Project To stay high and dry, the first floor of the building is elevated more than 10 feet above the ground. To combat rising carbon dioxide levels, the building has been engineered to have net-zero energy consumption. A solar array generates electricity and heats water. A green roof guttered to drain to 5,000-gallon cisterns and the rain gardens collect water for use in toilets. A southern-facing green wall reduces the need for cooling in the summer and heating in the winter, bolstered by insulation that exceeds building code requirements to save energy. Sustainably harvested wood is the primary building material. Many of the strategies feature off-the-shelf solutions that homeowners can adopt. “What we’re trying to demonstrate is it’s possible to still, as we say, live, work and play alongside the river in ways that allow the river its space,” Mayfield said in an interview after the signing ceremony. Living alongside the river means living with flooding. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration predicts Norfolk will face between 85 and 125 days of so-called sunny day tidal flooding by 2050. A recently released model by Climate Central shows the waterfront that is home to a brewery, restaurants and the Elizabeth River Project building will be below the annual flood level in two decades. “We built the site to flood,” Mayfield-Jackson said. “Urban environmentalism to me is not saying, ‘Okay, y’all just go live somewhere else.’ It is saying we all live here. We love the river also. So how can we live responsibly alongside the river as the climate changes, and as sea level rises?” Living responsibly means eventually surrendering to the inevitable — the water will come. The resilience lab’s final act will be to transform into one of nature’s most effective forms of resilience: wetlands. “The local problem caused by global warming and melting glaciers means that our wetlands are drowning, ” Mayfield said. By 2085, she continued, “As much as 80% of our wetlands may be gone. … So they’ll need desperately places like this where people welcome them to move to what was upland.” SUPPORT NEWS YOU TRUST. DONATE Stiff, who has been interested in rolling easements since she was a student at William & Mary Law School more than a decade ago, said the Elizabeth River Project and the conservancy are being “bold” in their approach. “It is only through bold action that we’re going to make any progress with sea level rise adaptation,” she said during remarks before the agreement was signed and a toast was made. “So thank you for being a part of the solution.” Stiff also gave credit to John Englander, a research fellow at the Institute of Marine Sciences at the University of California–Santa Cruz who wrote a short policy paper on what he called Shoreline Adaptation Land Trusts (SALT), and James Titus, a sea level rise expert with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency who championed rolling easements as far back as the 1990s. Titus has highlighted multiple advantages of rolling easements over the years. They do not prohibit development. They sidestep constitutional property rights issues. And they are a cost-effective way to deal with eroding shorelines and rising seas. “By purchasing rolling easements in critical areas, the nation’s largest property owner (the federal government) could motivate states to consider the long-term fates of their coastal zones, while avoiding the harm to property owners that has often accompanied the laws that protect our coastal environment,” he wrote in a 1998 Maryland Law Review article. As Titus noted, the use of a rolling easement also offers a potential tool to help address what Stiff says keeps her up at night: the takings clause of the Constitution. That clause requires the government to compensate private owners when they can no longer use their private property. But owners also risk losing the value of their properties when they fall under the public trust doctrine — the legal doctrine that the government owns natural resources like rivers and shorelines. What that means is as waters rise, private property could become public property. Exactly how that will play out on the land and the shore will vary from state to state. A rolling easement offers a solution. It can be a private agreement, like the one between the Elizabeth River Project and the Coastal Virginia Conservancy. It also could be used administratively at the state and local levels, helping governments avoid expensive buyouts and legal challenges. Property owners who agree to rolling easements could get tax benefits from the federal government and some states. “This is just the beginning of the rolling easement’s place in the land conservation realm. I hope it’s the first of many in Hampton Roads,” Stiff said during the ceremony. “This is just one tool in the toolbox of climate change adaptation and sea level rise adaptation. We have our work cut out for us.” [END] --- [1] Url: https://www.virginiamercury.com/2024/01/18/in-norfolk-an-environmental-headquarters-plans-to-live-with-the-water-then-surrender-to-reality/ Published and (C) by Virginia Mercury Content appears here under this condition or license: Creative Commons BY-NC-ND 4.0. via Magical.Fish Gopher News Feeds: gopher://magical.fish/1/feeds/news/virginiamercury/