City manager talks sustainability at Hofstra forum

City Manager Jack Schnirman joined other panelists at a symposium on suburban sustainability at Hofstra University on Nov. 10, where he talked about Long Beach’s progress since Hurricane Sandy and some political challenges the city faces in implementing more sustainable infrastructure in the future.

Schnirman sat alongside Henrietta Davis, a former mayor of Cambridge, Mass., and Dr. Ronald Loveridge, director of the Center for Sustainable Suburban Development at the University of Riverside, California, and a former mayor of Riverside. Diane Masciale, general manager of the public-television station WLIW21, moderated the symposium.

Less than 36 hours after Donald Trump had been elected president, the panelists discussed what his leadership could mean for environmental strategies, as well as the need for suburban communities to team up with the state and federal governments in order to implement sustainable practices.

“At the local level, there’s no Democratic, Republican or ideological way to go about some of these issues,” Schnirman told the crowd. “There’s either competence or not, corruption or not, sustainable management or not. … Infrastructure may not be sexy, but I know I’m preaching to the choir here when I say it’s absolutely critical, and it knows no partisan boundaries.”

Schnirman said that while people can debate whether climate change is real, extreme weather has become more common, which is why, he said, Long Beach is dedicated to continuing projects that will protect its residents from future storms.

Among those currently in the works is a $230 coastal protection project along the city’s oceanfront, on which the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers broke ground in August. The city is also in the design phase of two separate bulkheading projects along Reynolds Channel to better safeguard the northern side of town from flooding, and nearly 400 homes have been elevated since the storm.

“Prevention and resilience is a lot more effective and a lot cheaper than disaster recovery, which we found out,” Schnirman said. “One of the things that we have said in Long Beach is that if we protect ourselves now in all the ways that we have to, then Long Beach is not only a safe place to live, but a good investment.”

In an op-ed essay that appeared in the Herald last month, Schnirman and his co-author, U.S. Rep. Kathleen Rice, wrote that Long Beach residents are “fighting a bureaucratic system that prioritizes short-term fixes over long-term resiliency.”

When it came to rebuilding a new and improved boardwalk after Sandy, a $42 million undertaking, Schnirman said that the Federal Emergency Management Agency could cover only $32 million of the cost — the original value of the structure — as U.S. Sen. Chuck Schumer and Gov. Andrew Cuomo gathered additional state and federal funding. Schnirman said that the outdated FEMA system must be reformed to allow for municipalities to rebuild stronger and safer after natural disasters.

“If we had built our boardwalk the same as the old boardwalk, we would have thrown away $30 million to let another boardwalk be destroyed,” Schnirman said.

One member of the audience said many people across the country oppose spending millions of dollars on recovery efforts in areas that will always be prone to disaster. But Long Beach resident Matthew Dwyer, who has refurbished his Sandy-ravaged house on Barnes Street, countered that stance, and urged people to pressure legislators to require all future development to be sustainable.

“You’re not going to tell Oklahoma not to rebuild, you’re not going to tell Southern California not to rebuild,” Dwyer told the audience. “We all are in a place where we face some natural disasters, and we live and learn. We’ve learned so much in the last five years to mitigate some of these problems.”

Despite the expansive recovery plans generated in the four years since Sandy, all but a few redevelopment initiatives outlined in the city’s 205-page New York Rising Community Reconstruction Plan remain unfunded.

Loveridge said that the best way to obtain funding from the state and federal governments to build sustainable infrastructure is for cities like Long Beach to team up with surrounding communities around Long Island. Schnirman told the Herald after the meeting that the city is dedicated to taking a more regional approach, and has been in touch with many coastal municipalities about this issue.

Making Long Island communities more sustainable would make them more attractive destinations, which would keep jobs and young people in the area, Schnirman said. He added that it isn’t the government’s role to create jobs for people, but to support the building of resilient infrastructure, which, in turn, would “allow good things to happen.”

“We either embrace suburban sustainability or we’re not going to be here,” he said. “…This is what we’ve got to do, or we’re [going] nowhere.”