When Richard Grundy moved AVTECH Software Inc. from Newport to Warren 15 years ago, the renovated Cutler Mill seemed to offer the ideal flexibility and space that the company needed to develop its climate hazard alert technology.
But the location had climate hazards of its own, Grundy soon learned.
The historic mill sits in a low-lying neighborhood along Child Street, not far from an estuary called Belcher Cove. The first shock at the mill, Grundy recalls, was when he was told AVTECH would be required to purchase flood insurance for the first and second floors of the company’s offices.
It was unnerving to imagine the devastation that could be wrought if water levels ever reached that height.
“From the second floor of the mill, we can see the roof of nearly every [building] in Warren,” said Grundy, AVTECH’s CEO and president. “So that was a bit of a wake-up call about the area that we’re in.”
Neighboring businesses and residents have been getting wake-up calls, too. During heavy rainstorms or when the tide is exceptionally high, parts of nearby Market Street and the side roads often flood, at best causing traffic backups and business closures, at worst causing property damage.
And it’s only going to get worse, town officials and local environmental advocates say. Much worse.
Warren, with its 11,000 residents, is particularly vulnerable to rising coastal water because it’s surrounded nearly on all sides by tidal rivers – the Palmer, Kickemuit and Warren – with parts of the town only a few feet above sea level.
That’s why Warren has put into place a pioneering plan, a comprehensive climate-adaptive redevelopment strategy that calls for property owners to undertake a “managed retreat” from flood-prone areas in town through voluntary buyouts and creating new neighborhoods along Metacom Avenue for those displaced residents and businesses.
The concept of a managed retreat from rising water levels isn’t entirely new to Rhode Island. In 2022, 18 East Providence residents along the Runnins River accepted federal flood-zone buyouts, moving from high-risk areas. And in the Pocasset River watershed of Johnston and Cranston, homeowners have expressed interest in voluntary buyback programs backed by federal agencies.
Newport, meanwhile, is not attempting to move but rather modify existing structures for climate resiliency. In neighborhoods, the city and property owners are installing tide gates, raising the foundations of historically significant buildings and redesigning Easton’s Beach to preserve homes, businesses and natural resources.
But Warren’s plan – dubbed “Market to Metacom” – is highly unusual among managed retreat strategies nationwide.
It’s a large-scale, long-term, phased approach focused on two areas in town – a particularly low-lying 184-acre neighborhood around Market and Child streets where voluntary buyouts are expected to happen over 70 years, and an aging mid-20th-century commercial corridor along Metacom Avenue that officials are eying for redevelopment into mixed-use, walkable neighborhoods.
The scope of the project is enormous. There are more than 400 buildings in the target area around Market Street, accounting for about 700 residential units and 30 businesses, all of which generate about $2.4 million in annual tax revenue for the town.
But local officials say the climate data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and Federal Emergency Management Agency shows that relocating will be inevitable.
By 2035, as many as 31 buildings around Market Street are projected to be at risk of being flooded as Belcher Cove rises and encroaches into the neighborhood. By 2100, a total of 306 buildings in that area of Warren will be lost to rising water, according to projections.
As buyouts occur, most structures, local streets and utilities will be removed and wetlands restored, according to the plan.
But in some quarters, the town’s vision has been greeted with apprehension and, in some cases, apathy.
When first unveiled in 2021, some residents flocked to Town Hall to protest that the strategy would damage the resale values of their properties. Businesses, too, have been slow to throw their full support behind the idea.
Keri Cronin, a Town Council member and owner of Dish Clothing Boutique on Water Street, says many local businesspeople have too many immediate business challenges to contend with before looking decades ahead.
“I know there are many small-business owners who are aware and concerned … and would possibly be interested in being some part of the change,” Cronin said. “But it’s not something that is part of the regular conversation.”
So far, no buyouts have occurred.
Efforts to implement the Market to Metacom plan have been hindered by personnel changes at Warren Town Hall. Two town planners have left for other jobs in recent years, and a town manager stepped down in 2023.
At the same time, federal funding concerns under President Donald Trump have complicated matters.
“The plan is still alive and moving forward, but it has slowed down a little bit,” said Warren Town Manager Brian Sullivan, who was hired in March 2024. “Funding is a big issue, and that’s one of the things we’re exploring.”
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HIDDEN HAZARD: Claudia Conley, owner of Claudia’s Furry Tailz Pet Spa LLC, stands in the doorway at the spa on Market Street on a dry summer day. She says she lost two days of business last winter because of flooding. PBN PHOTO/MICHAEL SALERNO[/caption]
‛YOU’D NEED A BOAT’
The neighborhood around Market and Child streets doesn’t look out of the ordinary – a mix of closely spaced multifamily homes, small storefronts and industrial buildings. But it’s situated close to Belcher Cove to the north, and town officials say most of the area will be underwater 75 years from now.
Claudia Conley already sees the red flags.
Owner of Claudia’s Furry Tailz Pet Spa LLC, she started renting a storefront at 173 Market St. about three years ago. Since then, flooding has become more than a nuisance.
“That’s something I didn’t realize when I rented the place,” Conley said. “If it happens to be very torrential rain at the same time as the high tide, you are 99% guaranteed not to be able to drive here.”
Last winter, Conley twice had to cancel a day’s worth of pet grooming appointments because floodwaters in the parking lot and surrounding roads.
“We had so much flooding that I couldn’t come into the business, and it happened rather quickly,” she recalled. “The area was undriveable – you’d need a boat.”
Warren’s plan for a managed retreat took root in March 2020, developed by then-Town Planner Robert Rulli, who secured an initial grant of approximately $100,000 from the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service’s Southern New England Estuary Protection Program.
Environmental engineering firm Fuss & O’Neill Inc. and architecture firm Union Studio Architecture & Community Design Inc. were brought on board to help assemble the plans.
Market to Metacom made a splash when Rulli first unveiled it. The Fish & Wildlife Service “jumped on it because they looked at it as something that could be replicated in other communities throughout southern New England,” said Rulli, who is now director of community and economic development in Bridgewater, Mass.
Then-Town Manager Kate Michaud was immediately receptive, as were members of the state’s congressional delegation. Eventually, institutions throughout the U.S. caught wind and invited Rulli to speak on the innovative plan.
“This was an opportunity to do several different things because of one situation,” Rulli said, including buyouts of an area expected to become uninhabitable, the revitalization of an outdated area of town, and the opportunity to keep community members in Warren. “I think that’s what makes it interesting. When the University of Southern California asked me to speak about this, I got all kinds of people nodding their heads.”
Many townspeople didn’t agree.
Following early media coverage, “there were literally people waiting outside my office to yell at me because I had somehow damaged their property values,” Rulli said. “That was not our intention at all. Our intention was to bring awareness to the fact that by a certain date, that area is going to have flooding on a regular basis.”
Another complication: The town will have its work cut out persuading many residents and businesses to move to Metacom Avenue, locals say.
While Main and Water streets are known for a lively small-business scene, including popular restaurants, quirky storefronts and artisan shops, Metacom Avenue has shopping plazas with large expanses of asphalt, a design that discourages walkability.
“People don’t consider [Metacom Avenue] that much of a destination,” Cronin said. “It’s more of a pass-through [between] Warren and Bristol. I don’t think people think about opening their small businesses there.”
Cronin said businesses want to be “smack dab in the thriving business district, regardless of what the risks are 20, 30 years down the road.”
But under the Market to Metacom plan, Warren officials have a grand vision for an 81-acre corridor along Metacom Avenue between Parker Avenue and Jameson Drive, an area that contains 54 buildings, 66 housing units and 50 businesses.
The town has adopted a distinct zoning code for the Metacom Avenue Special Revitalization District that could allow developers to build 450 multifamily units, 68 single-family homes, 108,000 square feet of commercial space and another 34,000 square feet of civic or institutional space.
Steve Pimental, owner of Warren Auto Body at 171 Market St., is keeping an open mind about a relocation effort.
When a storm is in the forecast, Pimentel says that he and his employees have to move equipment onto higher spots in his garage. And given the nature of his business, he has to worry about flood waters carrying hazardous waste from cars into surrounding areas.
Ideally, Pimental says, he would stay in the area – Warren Auto Body is a longtime family business, one he’d like to carry on for decades. Eventually, he hopes his daughter might take over.
Pimental doesn’t have immediate plans to leave.
But if another location were to draw him away from Market Street, he says, it would have to be somewhere else in Warren, such as Metacom Avenue.
Town officials implementing this vision of relocation acknowledge it will take decades. In addition to the sheer number of properties affected, the town needs to seek state and federal funding to carry efforts forward in a piecemeal manner. The community has made some minor steps forward. A $750,000 U.S. Department of Transportation grant that will go toward the Metacom Avenue redesign was awarded in spring 2024, for instance.
Uncertainty over future grants reigns as the Trump administration has instituted freezes and funding cuts.
Meanwhile, Warren lacks a full-time planner. In the summer of 2024, the town hired Herbert A. Durfee III to take over Rulli’s role. Durfee picked up on the Market to Metacom work but left to become the town planner for Barrington last fall.
While an interim planner has been hired, Sullivan says, the town needs someone in the role permanently to oversee grant applications. The hiring process has been slowed due to a statewide shortage of town planners, he says.
In July, Warren issued a request for qualifications to hire a consultant for “redevelopment plan implementation.” Responses were due on July 31.
[caption id="attachment_501620" align="aligncenter" width="836"]
MARKET TO METACOM
Warren is implementing a long-term plan to offer voluntary buyouts of properties in the neighborhood around Market and Child streets, which officials say will be underwater in the next 75 years because of rising sea levels. The strategy is to offer residents and businesses alternative locations along Metacom Avenue, where special zoning laws will allow for redeveloped, walkable neighborhoods. / SOURCE: FUSS & O’NEILL INC./PBN ILLUSTRATION: ANNE EWING[/caption]
ON THE FOREFRONT
Nevertheless, Warren is still considered to be ahead of the curve.
In Barrington, managed retreat “isn’t at the forefront like it has been in Warren,” Durfee said. “Warren really was the leader in the state, and in most coastal states in the union, in putting a managed withdrawal together.”
But just up the road, “I would be supportive of putting [a managed retreat plan] together because we certainly have a lot of properties that could be underwater in the next 50 to 100 years,” he said. “We need to at least make residents aware that this is coming.”
Smaller swaths of buyouts have already taken place or are in the works in other communities, including East Providence and Johnston, with East Providence buyouts on Marsh Street and in the State Street area funded by a $9.65 million federal grant in 2023.
In one of Newport’s most historic neighborhoods, The Point, there hasn’t been talk of buyouts but of raising buildings, says James Madson, a member of the city’s Historic District Commission.
About 50% of The Point sits within a designated flood zone, meaning that new construction and substantial renovations must meet Federal Emergency Management Agency standards.
“People don’t like it,” Madson said. But federal requirements are out of the city’s control and “really, it’s just a precursor to what The Point is going to look like,” he said. The neighborhood’s structures “are all going to have to be raised if you have to save your home.”
The tightly packed neighborhood, on the waterfront just south of the Pell Bridge, encompasses around 300 homes.
Even without talks of buyouts, the city faces obstacles of apathy similar to those encountered in Warren.
“I don’t think a lot of people are focused on it,” Madson said. “Residents of The Point aren’t nervous, necessarily, because these homes have been there for 250 years. Most of them feel they’ll outlive us – it will be my kid’s problem, not mine. … But it’s in the back of everyone’s mind.”
So far, about six to 10 property owners have raised the foundations of their houses, Madson says – a $60,000 to $100,000 undertaking, and an expense that typically falls on the homeowner. Those who haven’t raised their foundations can still encounter difficulties with banks or insurers.
“We’re looking for grants all the time to help people,” Madson said.
The city has also installed flood gates below Storer Park and Bridge Street in The Point, says Thomas Shevlin, Newport’s communications director. In 2024, the city installed a tide gate on Wellington Avenue, off Thames Street. It has helped.
“In areas where we’ve seen regular standing water, that tide gate has brought water down to a fraction of what it used to be,” Shevlin said.
The city is also in the process of redesigning Easton’s Beach, where storms have already caused significant erosion and damage to the natural landscape and beach structures.
As to whether infrastructure improvements could help the Market Street neighborhood in Warren, Rulli says it’s possible.
“Unfortunately, reality is something different,” he said. “It’s several million dollars just to do the engineering for some of these projects before you even get to construction.”
Conversations about managed retreat are becoming more common at the statewide level, says Kimberly Korioth, Rhode Island’s chief resiliency officer, and not always in coastline communities.
In 2024, the U.S. Department of Agriculture allocated $12 million to reduce flooding problems around the Pocasset River in Johnston and Cranston, part of a broader project estimated to cost $48.5 million.
The project, overseen by the nonprofits Rhode Island Association of Conservation Districts and Northern Rhode Island Conservation District, will involve acquiring 100 properties located within a 100-year floodplain. Within those properties, the agencies will manage the demolition of more than 130 structures, in addition to floodproofing 25 properties, constructing a bypass culvert along Simmons Brook and removing a debris dam.
The project will affect about 1,000 residents, Korioth says. While many buyout programs so far have focused on residential properties, Korioth says state environmental leaders are working to involve more businesses.
“We want [voluntary buyouts] to extend beyond residents to businesses as well,” Korioth said, “given that they’re equally at risk and have their own socioeconomic impacts to the broader community.”
The Market to Metacom project has “been a leader in our state for these partnered restoration and retreat approaches,” Korioth said. “Other efforts I’ve seen have been conservation and restoration or retreat, not necessarily bringing them together.”
DOING THE MATH
At AVTECH, Grundy says, the company has avoided significant water damage since moving into Cutler Mill in 2009. “We’ve just been lucky until this point,” he said.
But that doesn’t mean there haven’t been costs for the business. Flood insurance premiums have risen over the years, from $16,000 to $25,000 annually, Grundy says.
“Add that up every year over the last 15 years and that’s substantial business reinvestment that could have been made that is instead protecting around the potential flood issue,” he said.
Still, it would take significant incentives to move the company out of the historic brick mill – a property that scores of local businesses and artisans call home. Grundy likes the location.
Yet, because AVTECH develops environmental monitoring and alerting equipment and software for businesses, Grundy says he knows the prevalence of flood damage and its dire consequences, noting that companies are 10 times more likely to be affected by water than they are by smoke or fire.
“I think for us, [potential relocation] comes down to business risk and cost,” Grundy said. “What are the financial risks of moving? … Does [staying] become unaffordable from a flood insurance standpoint? Does it become too risky from a water intrusion standpoint? That would be the arithmetic we would have to do.”
