NY Sea Grant helps village bring dune back down to size

The conditions were just right for the dune.

Strong winds on Lake Ontario, blowing from the northwest, brought more sand than usual onto the beach at Sodus Point, New York, and over the last two years, the dune along one residential section of the shore grew. And grew.

The dune - built in 2021 as a preventative measure after historic flooding in 2017 and 2019 - grew so high some residents lost their view of the water. Meanwhile, due to understaffing and turnover at the Village of Sodus Point, the maintenance plan was not carried out, leading to confusion about who was responsible for the dune's care. Tensions among residents and between residents and local government were on the rise.

"There were a lot of miscommunications around what property owners could do, and what the village was supposed to be doing," said Kevin Druschel, the village's code enforcement officer, who came on as project manager for the dune this year. "The dune was supposed to be a great thing, and it became a bad thing."

In July, the community sought help from longtime collaborators from New York Sea Grant(NYSG), a cooperative research and extension program housed at Cornell and the State University of New York. Over the course of 10 weeks, NYSG's Mary Austermanand Roy Widrigheld public meetings and met individually with nearly all the impacted homeowners. They also facilitated discussions with the village, Wayne County Highway Department, the Wayne County Soil and Water Conservation District and the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation (NYSDEC) to clarify issues and needs and to coordinate a new maintenance plan.

Now, with a new permit from NYSDEC, the village plans to bring the dune back in alignment with its original footprint and purpose, with maintenance scheduled to begin Nov. 6. Austerman and Widrig received an Assembly Citation from New York State Assemblyman Brian Manktelow (R-130th District) for their efforts.

"I don't know that we would have been able to do what we did without Sea Grant," Druschel said. "They've been the glue to hold us together through this."

For Austerman, Great Lakes coastal community development specialist, it was "textbook extension work."

"This is what we do," she said. "It was a messy situation. The village was down capacity-wise…so we brought an unbiased ability to cut through the frustrations and get the project back on track."

High hopes versus high dunes

Sodus Point sits at the lowest elevation on the south side of Lake Ontario and in 2017 and 2019, the village experienced severe flooding that lasted months. The community sandbagged nearly the entire peninsula around a large portion of the business district and ran multiple industrial-sized pumps 24 hours a day to keep the water off roads and out of homes and businesses. Even with those measures, homes, infrastructure and the shoreline were damaged.

"There was a lot of panic associated with it, too," said Widrig, coastal processes and hazards specialist.

NYSG was instrumental in helping the village plan mitigation strategies after the floods, including consultations on the efficacy of a dune along the county beach. Dunes help dissipate energy from storms, block waves and prevent flooding - at Sodus Point, waves can reach up to 8 feet and caused flooding in 2017 and 2019.

"The waves kept coming in," said neighborhood resident Laurie Hayden, describing a storm in 2019. "When I was standing on my deck, it appeared that I was floating on the lake."

Thanks to funding from then-Gov. Andrew Cuomo's Lake Ontario Regional Economic Development Initiative, the village built the dune in 2021, with help from volunteers, the Wayne County Soil and Water Conservation District and the county Highway Department. The project won an award from the American Shore and Beach Preservation Association.

But the dune also came with state-mandated maintenance regulations. When multiple people in the village government left their positions in the ensuing years, the maintenance plan got lost in the shuffle. The dune grew, and no one knew who was supposed to control it.

'Super facilitators'

When Austerman and Widrig first held meetings to discuss the impasse, they encountered anger and frustration.

"Some of the residents said they'd never seen the maintenance plan and as a result did nothing to maintain the dune out of fear of doing the wrong thing," Austerman said.

Hayden said Austerman and Widrig served as an essential sounding board for residents. "They gave people who didn't feel as though they had any input or any opportunity to convey concerns a way to do that," she said.

Austerman and Widrig also educated residents and local officials about the ecology of the dune.

"I'm a highway and bridge guy, I didn't know anything about dunes," said Kevin Rooney, P.E. Superintendent for the Wayne County Highway Department, whose office will be acting as the primary contractor for November's maintenance. "Mary and Roy, both of them are super facilitators, and they bring their experience to the table. Now I understand what a dune is supposed to do, why it's been constructed, and why you have to bow down to the dune - it's that important and that environmentally sensitive."

Beginning Nov. 6, the village and county will be strategically removing sand from the "toes," or the bottom of the dune and pulling out fencing that's no longer needed. The hope is that the dune will then "relax," Druschel said, and lose some of its height.

"We're really hoping that this is the best approach to get us back on track," he said. "From now on, the dune will continue to change - growing and shrinking over time - it's going to be a living, breathing dune from now on, and it's going to be maintained the way it's supposed to be."