The Sconset Beach Preservation Fund filed an appeal Tuesday in Nantucket Superior Court of the Conservation Commission’s enforcement order to remove the controversial geotube at the base of the Sconset Bluff.
The appeal marks the latest round of litigation in the contentious debate over efforts to slow erosion along the east end of the island where the Sconset Beach Preservation Fund (SBPF) has mounted a decades-long campaign to protect homes along the bluff.
The Conservation Commission acted “arbitrarily and capriciously, and recklessly” in voting to remove the erosion control project, the SBPF stated in the appeal, and “has spent no time at all attempting to understand the environmental and destructive impacts to private and public infrastructure as part of its decision to order removal of the Geotubes.”
The 900-foot sand-filled geotube has been installed at the bottom of the bluff on the east end of Nantucket for nearly eight years. But the Conservation Commission determined in June that the SBPF had failed to comply with its permit for the project, specifically the requirement for a certain amount of sand that should have been dumped annually over the geotube to replenish the area, and issued an enforcement order earlier this month requiring the erosion control installation to be removed. Opponents believe the geotube installation has exacerbated erosion at beaches north and south of the projects.
But Glenn Wood, attorney for the SBPF, asserted that the organization had submitted several plans to bring the project into compliance that were ignored by the Conservation Commission. The regulatory board’s decision was “punitive,” the SBPF asserted, and the history of disputes over the past seven years “demonstrate how the Commission was actively hunting to locate violations since the date the Geotubes were installed.”
