Town officials and residents from Gouldsboro, Hancock, Sorrento, Sullivan, and Winter Harbor will gather at the Charles M. Sumner Learning Campus at 5 PM on February 11 to take stock of what towns in our region have learned and done since last January’s storms. The meeting will be an opportunity to explore ways to work collectively on preparing for future storms and sea level rise.
The meeting is the last of a series of regional community meetings organized by Maine Sea Grant in coastal and working waterfront communities from Kittery to Eastport. Maine Sea Grant says that the goals of the meetings are to:
- Create space for community members across diverse sectors to take stock of their working waterfronts within the context of the community’s resilience since the storms.
- Share resilience and working waterfront planning work across the region: recent, underway, or planned.
- Learn about resources for public and private working waterfront resilience.
- Identify systems and networks that would be useful to have in place locally to support working waterfronts in anticipation of future storms.
Anne Berleant’s Ellsworth American coverage of the recent meetings on MDI and in Blue Hill offers a preview of the issues — the severity of the destruction, the need to get serious about planning, the difficulty in finding the money required to do the work — that are likely to arise at our region’s meeting. Maine Sea Grant’s commitment to hosting regional meetings at this scale, rather than one or two large meetings, is insightful and welcome. Solutions that make sense in Kittery, Portland, or the mid-coast may not make sense here. The coastal geology is dramatically different along the coast, waterfront uses differ, and municipalities vary in size and financial capacity. It will be good to meet with and hear from neighboring communities that are not too different than Gouldsboro and share similar challenges in responding to storms and rising seas.
Bill Zoellick, chair of Gouldsboro’s Coastal Resilience Committee, will be there to provide a brief overview of how last January’s storms impacted Gouldsboro, what the town is doing in response, and what we have learned in doing that work. Town Manager Josh McIntyre will also be there to answer questions about how our town is preparing for future storms and rising seas.
We hope that anyone interested in these issues will consider joining us. Maine Sea Grant has provided a brief description of this series of meetings and a place to register if you want to attend.
