DeFalco describes Red Hook engagement and evolving resilience thinking

I think especially, and the Red Hook Coastal Resiliency Project is a good example of, I think, how things are evolving.

At the time that the project was being looked at and designed, the community was very concerned about the height of flood walls.

And some of the reasons things were designed the way that they were designed and the level of protection that they were designed at was directly from community engagement and community input.

Oh, not the limitations of FEMA?

Because I was told that much of that, like in one section, there's a wall this big.

That that was FEMA limitations and FEMA design.

Obviously, this has been going on for a long, long time.

The community engagement becomes important.

I think the Bureau of Coastal Resiliency is incredibly important because we can see even in just the last few years how our thought process about what protection means has evolved.

And especially, I mean, even in just the time that I've been at DEP, the amount of rainstorms and the way that we're thinking about inland flooding versus coastal flooding and how they're intersecting has changed, I think, pretty dramatically in the last few years.

And so thinking about what we do to supplement projects down the road is going to be a big part of that community engagement.

My bureau is going to be very part of that, a big part of that community engagement.

We work very closely together.

We're working together now on different studies that are happening out in Jamaica Bay and Springfield Creek on how we are engaging communities, especially in areas where there may or may not be buyouts needed and how that intersects with the projects that are being

planned there, even if they're federal projects or federally funded projects.

So that's a thing that we're coming up with.

Also, with the additional money that the administration has put forward, we're going to have a lot more capacity to be able, I think, to do more community outreach.

There's no question that we would like to be doing a lot more than we've been able to do.

And we're also looking at the way that we do community outreach, I think, very differently.

A big part of what my bureau used to do was a lot of proactive community outreach.

And right now, given the amount of storms and, right, the amount of, like, everybody's calling us with a clogged catch basin.

But when you have a storm, 25% of the time we're in a flash flood warning or more this year.

That really changes, like, people, we were doing proactive community engagement, and I feel like sometimes now we're doing more case management.

And so we've got to think about how we staff and work together on this vision to be able to improve the community engagement, something we're definitely thinking about and want to work on.