Good evening.

Good evening, everyone.

Are we live?

Awesome.

Good evening, everyone.

The time is now seven oh three PM, and we are here for our regularly scheduled uh town council meeting.

Today's day is Monday, July 20th, 2026.

Please stand for the Pledge of Allegiance.

So the first item on our agenda this evening is item A one.

It's a presentation by Fuss and O'Neal on the twenty twenty-two FEMA BRIC project for foddering farm road causeway.

So I will invite them up to present to us.

Hi, good evening.

I'm not a quick introduction for uh for our consultant here.

Just to give you a little introduction on the project.

So in two thousand seventeen, the Harbor Island Improvement Association reached out to the town regarding flooding on the causeway.

I know this might be new to some of you.

So and then in 2018, um the causeway as well as other causeways were added to the hazard mitigation plan, which is a requirement for FEMA as part of the national flood insurance program as well as the community rating system.

And then in 2020, the town was awarded a pre-disaster mitigation grant, of which we hired Fuss and O'Neill um to conduct a concept study for the potential raising of flowering farm causeway.

And the Harbor Island Improvement Association, the Salt Ponds Coalitions have been part of the advisory group established um to work on that project, and henceforth.

We did a geotechnical investigation consisting of a few borings along the causeway to see if the soil was suitable for any of these road raising alternatives.

We also had a subcontractor do a wetland delineation to see what the neighboring wetlands in this area were.

We conducted a vulnerability assessment to evaluate the roadways current and future flood risks under various sea level rise projections and under various coastal storm scenarios.

We developed designs incorporating nature-based solutions.

And we refined our selected alternatives and created a recommended plan that identified two road raising alternatives that would reduce current and future flood risk at this causeway and could be permitted for construction with minimal impacts to neighboring properties, and could also be suitable for future funding opportunities like the FEMA grant.

The key points we identified along the causeway from our field survey were the three properties.

It was the bottom of their driveways where their driveway meets the road, and we also identified the lowest point on the driveway on the causeway, which has an elevation of three point feet, 3.8 feet.

All of our elevations were collected based on the NAVD 88 vertical datum.

And so we were comparing between this and what we could raise the causeway to.

These points were used to evaluate the current and future flooding predict predicted on the causeway and would help us evaluate the risk reduction achieved with our proposed roadway alternatives.

All right, hello.

Okay, so with that in mind, we've come up with two alternatives for elevation changes, and we really think this is the sweet spot for this project where we maximize the amount of flood risk reduction that we get while limiting the impacts on the residents.

So we're looking at two potential elevations for the road, an elevation of seven feet and an elevation of eight feet.

The maximum change to the lowest point of the road here would be 3.2 feet under that elevation seven or 4.2 feet under elevation eight.

And for the homes, we would only be raising the road approximately two to three feet in front of the lowest home, number 214.

And with this proposed elevation, we're getting again some pretty good risk reduction, especially for those frequent storms.

So up to a 10-year storm or a 10% chance of a storm occurring every year, plus a foot of sea level rise, and under the elevation eight feet, we'd be looking at protection against that same type of storm, plus an additional buffer for if we have two feet of sea level rise.

So we're getting again some really good risk reduction with minimal impacts to these homes.

And although it's not feasible at this time to increase the road elevation for larger, more rare storms like a 25-year or a hundred-year storm.

The good thing here is we are reducing since we're raising the elevation, we're reducing the impacts of those future storm events as well.

And for bigger storms, we would anticipate, right, that you'd also have higher likelihood of more advanced warning about storm surge.

Residents would know that that's happening.

It's the frequent flooding events that can really catch people off guard in an emergency.

And with this proposed approach, it would also allow for a phased approach long term.

So if we got to a point later on where residents are deciding that there's too much flood risk and they need to raise the road higher, you'd be able to increase the elevation on top of the additional elevation that we are proposing here.

And so this is a little bit about what the road would look like.

So it does require a reconstruction of the existing road within the proposed project area.

Because there's some regulated marsh habitat that's adjacent to the road.

We came up with a design that constrains the width and the impacts that there would be to any of the wetland areas.

And so the redesign elevated road will provide that safe access.

It will keep the pavement width the same, but it will make some improvements again with the elevation of the road, but also adding some nature-based solution, these vegetated slopes that also will help with some stormwater runoff.

So we've got two 11-foot travel lanes that would allow for safe two-way travel, again, consistent with the existing road conditions, no curbing, so instead the road is crowned or constructed to allow water to flow off, which will also help with runoff and flooding.

And then the stormwater would be treated by allowing it to go across these proposed vegetated areas on the slopes that would be with native vegetation.

Um and we'd have a two-foot grass shoulder on either side to allow space for pedestrians or cyclists to move safely to the side of the road.

Um this type of design has been successfully permitted in other parts of Rhode Island, um, and this minimizes any of the impacts on the residents.

This type of design would allow one lane of road to be open during construction and would have minimal impacts to the other uh utilities and infrastructure along the road.

And so, of course, the other thing that we wanted to think about in addition to the risk reduction is what type of project is feasible and can be funded by the town.

So, based on our conceptual designs, we did estimate, in opinion of a cost for both the elevation seven or elevation eight alternative.

And you can see that the estimated costs are pretty close to each other.

Um, there's only about a hundred K separating the cost between the all two alternatives because they own the only substantial difference between them is the additional fill required to raise the road that extra foot, and then a little bit of additional pavement and util and um and fill for the the edges of the road, the additional distance that we would have for that eight foot elevation.

The bulk of the costs, um, you know, the the pavement, the utility work, um, the the actual construction, um, the pre-positioning doesn't change between those two cost estimates very much.