Sconset Bluff Stakeholders To Meet In Private This Week To Discuss Future Of Geotube Project

Key stakeholders in the debate over the Sconset Beach Preservation Fund’s controversial erosion-control geotube installation along the Sconset Bluff will meet privately on July 14th to discuss the project's future, according to documents reviewed by the Current.

The meeting comes amid months of uncertainty on the next steps for the project after Nantucket’s Annual Town Meeting narrowly voted down a proposal to expand the geotubes that had been brought forward by the Sconset Beach Preservation Fund (SBPF) and the town of Nantucket.

Since that vote, members of the Select Board and the Nantucket Coastal Conservancy, a local advocacy group long opposed to the geotubes, have called for a meeting to bring together stakeholders on both sides of the debate and attempt to find a mutually agreeable path forward. Representatives of SBPF also told the Current that they were open to a meeting. Now, it seems that meeting is indeed happening.

Representatives of SBPF, town administration, the Select Board, the Nantucket Coastal Conservancy, the Nantucket Land and Water Council (NLWC), and the environmental engineering firm Arcadis—responsible for many of the town’s plans related to the Sconset Bluff—have been invited to the meeting.

Town of Nantucket sustainability programs manager Vince Murphy confirmed in an email to the Current that a “non-public internal meeting” on “erosion controls” is scheduled for July 14th.

In the documents reviewed by the Current, Murphy wrote that “the primary point [of the meeting] is for an open and frank discussion on the Baxter Road erosion control projects and to see if a mutually agreeable path forward may emerge, in the wake of the recent Annual Town Meeting vote on Article 73.”

The coastal engineering structure is now at a crossroads after the expansion plan failed on a 182-163 vote on Article 73. Without approval from Town Meeting, the expansion plan can’t go forward. The town could bring the proposal back at a future Town Meeting, but there is no guarantee the vote would go differently, and even if it did, that wouldn’t solve all of the problems facing the geotubes. The expansion would still need state approval, and pending lawsuits involving the NLWC and other parties would need to be resolved.

Additionally, the existing geotubes are currently in failure. A portion of the installation collapsed after sustaining damage in what SBPF has deemed an act of vandalism, and that led to a further secondary collapse. SBPF has submitted an outline of a plan to repair the damage to the Conservation Commission, which would have to approve the work, but Commission chair Seth Engelbourg was skeptical of the plan, and SBPF has also suggested that repairing the damage without confirmation that the town will continue to pursue the expansion plan would be “not practical.”

For decades, SBPF has battled local activist groups and regulatory bodies over the geotubes, which are long textile fabric rolls filled with a slurry of sand and water and installed at the base of the bluff to protect the homes perched along Baxter Road above.

Opponents have raised concerns about the impacts of the geotubes on nearby beaches and about the source of the mitigation sand that SBPF is required to pour over the tubes to ensure those beaches are not eroded—a requirement SBPF has often shirked.

Proponents have argued that the geotubes and the potential expansion, which would have come at no cost to Nantucket’s taxpayers, are needed to protect Baxter Road and avoid the potentially enormous expense of providing utilities to homes along the bluff should the road be deemed impassible.