Event to preview city measures for mitigating rising strait waters

How might climate changes affect Benicia in the future, and what can residents and property owners do to mitigate its impacts?

Residents will get a chance to hear answers to those and other questions at the Open House on Climate Change Adaptation Nov. 20. Attendees will learn about anticipated local effects of climate change and share ideas about how the city should protect vulnerable areas and make other modifications ahead of time, said Alex Porteshawver, the city’s Climate Action Plan coordinator.

The event is funded by a grant from the California Coastal Conservancy, Porteshawver said.

She said members of the community and technical experts, including the project team made up of ICF International, headquartered in Fairfax, Va.; Placeworks, which worked on Benicia’s Waterfront Park Master Plan, with offices in Berkeley; Moffatt and Nichol Engineers, with offices in Oakland; and city employees have identified places and structures in Benicia that are considered vulnerable to higher temperatures, rising sea levels and increased flooding during storms.

Those could effects could negatively affect the city’s economy as well as local ecology, she said.

During the open house, those attending will be able to visit stations that describe the changes Benicians should expect that could threaten public buildings and other structures, neighborhoods, businesses, roads and open spaces, and various ways the city could adapt to become more resilient.

“We’ll focus on temperature and sea level rise storm surge,” Porteshawver said. She said city employees and two advisory groups have refined the geographic areas on which the city will focus, and the project team has identified vulnerable areas in the city’s community land use that include buildings and infrastructure in the city’s neighborhoods and commercial areas.

Geographically, Porteshawver said, those places are the city’s downtown commercial areas, Portside Village Townhomes, Benicia Industrial Park, local schools and municipal buildings and other city structures and equipment.

Also vulnerable is the city’s transportation infrastructure, including roads, streets, highways, bicycle and pedestrian paths and railroads not only in the city but beyond; the Port of Benicia, which Porteshawver noted is privately owned and operated by AMPORTS, while the underlying land is owned by the city; the city’s wastewater treatment plant that processes residential, commercial and industrial sewage before discharging it into the Carquinez Strait; the stormwater system that sends rain runoff into the bay; the city’s shorelines that range from man-made seawalls and revetments to natural wetlands and marshes; and the pipelines and energy lines that serve Pacific Gas and Electric and Valero Benicia Refinery.

“There isn’t a simple answer to what the ‘biggest threat’ is in Benicia,” Porteshawver said. “The vulnerability assessment was conducted by evaluating the three components of vulnerability: exposure, sensitivity, and adaptive capacity.

“To evaluate components, the project team first identified how the climate in Benicia might change (exposure), and then evaluated the assets’ sensitivities (sensitivity), and their ability to adapt to those changes in climate (adaptive capacity).”

Porteshawver said such experts as city supervisors gave their counsel on the subject through surveys, but no judgment or ranking was made on the overall extent to which structures and features are considered vulnerable.

She said residents who attend the Nov. 20 event will see the pros and cons of the various methods the city could use to prepare for climate change.

“The first step will be to conduct a high-level qualitative screen of each proposed adaptation measuring using evaluation criteria,” she said.

“The criteria will be very similar to those used in the Adapting to Rising Tides (ART) Project model developed by the Bay Conservation Development Commission (BCDC). The criteria cover society and equity, economy, environment and governance.

“For example, the project team will use these criteria to determine whether the measure has high, moderate or low capital costs, high, moderate, or low impacts on ecosystem services, and positive, negative, or neutral interactions with the other city goals.”

Porteshawver said this screening process will allow the project team to identify “the most promising adaptation measures” based on those criteria, as well as set priorities of areas that need further evaluation.

“We do not want to propose strategies that do not make environmental or financial sense,” she said. “The adaptive strategies presented during the open house are draft strategies aimed at addressing vulnerabilities by sector and by key asset.”

Benicia residents can weigh in on the topic during the workshop, Porteshawver said. “If they cannot attend, or they want to think through the information, they can view the open town hall forum within one or two days of the workshop,” she said. “It will be up for three weeks.”

The online forum will give viewers an introduction summarizing the project and climate change scenarios as well as a list of adaptation strategies that viewers can rank. They also can suggest other methods or leave comments.

Once the information is gathered, it will be used to draft a plan that would provide Benicia with an approach it could take to address climate change. The Community Sustainability Commission will review the draft the month before it is sent to the City Council, which Porteshawver said is likely to happen in June 2015.

She said once the city’s vulnerability report is complete, residents will have a clearer picture of climate change threats to the city.

In the interim, she said, at least five points should be considered.

“As a coastal community, the city is susceptible to vulnerabilities related to sea level rise,” she said. Second, “Sea level rise and storm surge will continue to contribute to flooding issues already present in the city and may make them worse.”

Third, she said, “Temperatures will increase slightly, but more notably, the number of consecutive extreme hot days will increase.”

A fourth consideration, she said, concerns rain. “Precipitation patterns are not expected to change locally.” Finally, she said, “The city is being extremely proactive by conducting the vulnerability assessment and developing adaptive strategies; we are ahead of the game.”

Those actions, Porteshawver said, put Benicia in a better position to find ways to pay for any recommended strategies to counter climate change, and to put recommendations into city plans for hazard mitigation, stormwater control and capital improvements.

The Open House on Climate Change Adaptation will take place from 6-8 p.m. Nov. 20 in the Benicia Community Center Multipurpose Room, 370 East L St.