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Projects

Current Projects

 

Collaboration with the Virginia Floodplain Management Association to develop a Virginia No Adverse Impact Legal Guide.

• We continue to see constantly increasing hazard losses, particularly from flooding, which consistently ranks as the costliest natural hazard we confront. One major reason for increasing hazard losses is the growth of development and infrastructure in hazard-prone areas despite decades of increasingly useful data outlining natural hazards. One of the reasons local governments continue to allow new development and increasing density of redevelopment in hazard-prone areas is a fear of a lawsuit for denying property owners desired development permits. Thus, the Association of State Floodplain Managers, with over 7,000 national members and more than 12,000 state chapter members, commissioned development of the No Adverse Impact Legal Guide to help attorneys serving local governments better understand the legal landscape of risk related to development and to denials of development permits based on more protective “No Adverse Impact” standards for floodplain management. While a valuable resource, the No Adverse Impact Legal Guide is limited to federal constitutional law and generalities of tort law. This project is developing the Virginia No Adverse Impact Legal Guide based specifically on Virginia law. This is crucial as Virginia’s constitutional protections of private property rights differ from those of the U.S. Constitution, and Virginia tort law has features that distinguish it from many states.
  • People and Entities Involved Outside of W&M:  Virginia Floodplain Management Association; Kristin Owen, President, VFMA and Floodplain & Dam Safety Manager for Henrico County.
  • People and Entities at W&M Involved:  W&M Law School J.D. candidates Elizabeth Qi and James Fakolt (May to August, 2024); Thomas Ruppert, VCRC Director

Changing Vertical Datums

• Datums are baseline standards against which we measure geographic location and elevations. They are frequently referenced in state and local codes to ensure a precise, shared understanding of regulatory action. NOAA is updating their geodetic datums (anticipated 2024-2025), which include horizontal (NAD 83) and vertical (NAVD 88) datums, and their tidal datums (anticipated 2026), which impact definitions of water levels (e.g. mean lower low water, mean low water, mean sea level, mean high water, etc.). The code of Virginia uses tidal datums as the baseline for legal (e.g. waterfront property) boundaries, ecological (e.g. tidal wetlands) boundaries, and to constrain jurisdictional roles (e.g. Potomac River Fisheries Commission). Derived elevation measurements (such as freeboard standards) are also used in local codes. Although less frequently used, the geodetic datum has also been referenced in bills for defining legal boundaries (e.g. public oyster grounds).  NOAA recognizes the potential ramifications of the changing baseline resulting from the updated datums and recommends evaluating if a state needs to change its legislation as a result and if it is necessary to create a plan to ensure that state datasets are either: 1) adapted to the new datums by conversion to the new datums or 2) by being clearly identified with datum under which they were developed and then including/referencing the appropriate conversion methodology to shift uses of old datums to the new ones. This project will catalog references to vertical datums in the Virginia Code, Virginia Administrative Code, and at least one set of representative local government documents, evaluate potential impacts, evaluate how this might affect policy, and make recommendations to address latent policy changes if necessary. 
  • Peoples and Entities Involved Outside of W&M:  Outside reviewers and sample local government TBD.  Cirse Gonzalez, Coastal Training Program Coordinator and Erin Reilly, Conservation and Restoration Coordinator, Chesapeake Bay National Estuarine Research Reserve, Virginia.
  • People and Entities at W&M Involved:  Molly Mitchell, Asst. Professor, Center for Coastal Resource Management.  Jeryl Phillips, Research Scientist, Center for Coastal Resources Management.  Thomas Ruppert, VCRC Director.