Swampscott Climate Action Plan Committee Chair Martha Schmitt led a presentation on the current state of the committee’s climate-change resiliency efforts at a recent Select Board meeting.
According to Schmitt, her committee’s duty is to maintain the town’s climate action plan, which is called Resilient Swampscott. The committee’s five focus areas are buildings and energy, solid waste and recycling, natural resources, resilience and vulnerability, and transportation. She revealed some of the committee’s current activities, including updating the town’s hazard-mitigation plan from its 2015 iteration, working with the Conservation Commission to create a floodplain brochure, and supporting the Open Space and Recreation Planning Committee in its effort to implement conservation restrictions on public land.
Schmitt said the Open Space and Recreation Planning Committee and Tree Committee are also part of Resilient Swampscott.
She described the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions and the mitigation of climate change’s impacts as two main goals of the climate action plan. Schmitt also demonstrated a flood-risk projection model that predicted substantial flooding risks at multiple locations across the town’s coast in the coming years.
More than $2.2 million has been spent to repair seawalls at beaches throughout the town, although only the one at King’s Beach has been completed so far. Schmitt revealed that the Climate Action Plan Committee plans to propose repairs to the Eisman’s Beach seawall in the near future.
In 2016, the committee received nine recommended actions to improve climate resiliency efforts from Kleinfelder, a Boston-based engineering-consulting company.
“I don’t know that we’ve acted on all of these, but certainly these should be prioritized and taken into account,” Schmitt said. “Especially in the capital plan or the ARPA funding that we get.”
Select Board member MaryEllen Fletcher brought up the issue of gas leaks, saying that leaks can significantly affect the climate in a negative way.
“The data shows that the backlog has been 100 leaks for years,” Schmitt responded. “As soon as they fix the leaks, new ones spring up.”
Board member Peter Spellios explained that the Massachusetts Department of Public Utilities now has oversight of companies such as National Grid in regard to their gas-leak repairs throughout the state.
“We’re competing with cities and other densely populated areas,” Town Administrator Sean Fitzgerald said. “We do get frustrated because we hear that some of our problems are ‘tier two’ and ‘tier three…’ We believe a lot of them are serious.”
Fitzgerald recalled smaller things the town has done in the past to support climate resiliency. However, Spellios responded by saying the town has not done nearly enough yet.
“The truth is we haven’t made any investments,” Spellios said. “There cannot be even a reasonable debate that we’ve done — never mind enough — that we’ve done something meaningful as a coastal community exposed like we are.”
The Harbor and Waterfront Advisory Committee followed with a presentation about the potential salvation of the town’s pier. Spellios said that while the pier is a vital part of the town’s identity, it is important to gauge the community on whether or not it should be considered a priority moving forward. Fitzgerald responded by saying that the pier is an important asset to Swampscott.
“There’s no better way to take care of yourself than get outside and go out there and enjoy the most important resource that we have, and that’s the water,” Fitzgerald said. “Safest way 12 months out of the year to enjoy yourself in this town is to take a walk on that beautiful pier.”
