Speaker numbers apply only to this recording.
The Committee on Environmental Protection and Waterfronts, chaired by James F. Gennaro, held an oversight hearing on coastal resilience on Wednesday, September 30, 2026, at 1:00 PM. The hearing addressed the city's response to a recent nor'easter that caused coastal flooding and one fatality, and considered three pieces of legislation: Int. 0343-2026 (solar permit fees), Int. 0931-2026 (mobile drinking fountains), and Int. 0936-2026 (establishing a Department of Coastal Protection). Committee members present were Chair Gennaro and Council Member Sanchez; Council Members Epstein, Hanks, and Restler were absent. Council Member Avilés also attended. All three introductions were heard and laid over by the committee.
Good afternoon. Welcome to the Committee on Environmental Protection and Waterfronts. At this time, we ask that you please silence all electronics. If you wish to testify, please see one of the sergeant at arms in the back. And at no point, please do not approach the day. Thank you for reminding me to silence my phone. Let me do that now. 343, sponsored by Council Member Sandy Nurse, in relation to waiving fees for street crane permits related to solar installations. And this past weekend the city was hit with a nor'easter, which brought coastal flooding, strong winds, and heavy rains, which unfortunately led to the passing of New Yorker and NYCHA employee Leighton Brown, a maintenance supervisor who's tragically struck and killed by a falling tree during the storm. I would like to offer my sincerest condolences to Mr. Brown's family and friends. And his confluence of factors led to significant coastal flooding in low-lying waterfront neighborhoods. While the city was spared the worst of these effects, our neighbors in New Jersey were not so lucky. Across the state, the combination of severe storm surge and higher than average tide washed away entire stretches of beach, creating significant economic damage and undoing millions of dollars in recent recent beach renourishment work. As some of you know, back in 2012, well, I don't think anybody knows this, but I know it. As some of you as you probably don't know, back in 2012, I um introduced a bill that would go on to become local of 42 of 2012, um, codifying the New York City panel on climate change and the climate adaptation task force. Um according to the panel's 2024 report, that is the NPCC, local sea levels are projected to rise between six inches. These are their projections, not mine, to rise between six inches local sea levels are projected to rise between six inches and approximately twelve inches by the 2030s, one to two feet by the 2050s, and two to five point five feet by 2100. I think those estimates are a little high, and you're gonna go off on a tangent for a minute, and therein lies, you know, some of the people who criticize climate change and don't believe in it, don't you know they don't know, you know, they they don't have confidence in it. Back when I was working for the state as the DEP, as the DE, the state DEC deputy commissioner, um we were for our purposes in DEC using um numbers for sea level projections that were uh projected by Columbia. Um and um and the office uh and the governor's office of storm recovery were using numbers that were generated by my alma mater um Stony Brook University, uh their uh department of you know, marine, oh god, senior moment, uh Department of uh SOMAS School of Marine and Atmospheric Sciences, and um you know, their high-end estimates for sea level rise by X date, whatever it was, or half of what the Columbia projections were. And so I raised the point with the commission of DEC and state government at large. People see state government as kind of like one entity, and we have two sets of books for sea level rise. So if you're at the governor's office of storm recovery, you're seeing the high-end estimate of like X. And if you look at Columbia's number, the high end X uh high-end estimate was 2x. And so we shouldn't have two sets of books, and this is why people lose confidence in you know climate forecasting and sea level rise projections. Um because they're like personalities of you know, the one who was doing it at Stonybrook was uh he was a Nobel laureate. Um, and he's very strict in terms of we don't know something until we know it. And so if we don't know it, it's not going in the calculus for the projections. We could be wrong. We can end up there could be things that we don't know, factors that we don't really that we think are out there, but we haven't really studied them enough that like they're not going in the um projections. We're gonna be conservative. And whereas some other entities are like, well, you have to bill in a little little bit of a fudge factor because nature always has something out there that we don't yet know. So let's use the Ouija board and try to fit it in somehow uh to account in our current projections that which we don't fully know yet. And so as a scientist, it's always like kind of annoyed me. And so that's two minutes of your life. You can't get back.