Virginia’s Flood Fund Makes Grant Awards: A Good Start to a Larger Effort

King Tide in Norfolk - October 10, 2021

Snapshot: Virginia announced the first round of grants in its newly created, statewide Community Flood Preparedness Fund. Created in 2020, the Fund will have upwards of $80 million to distribute this year for local governments flood protection plans, projects, and capacity building.With more rounds of grants in coming months and years, the Fund needs to be at the center of work to work on resilience in Virginia. This will take some changes in Richmond, starting with those recommended in a recent study.

Backstory: The first round of grants gets Virginia off to a good start in its work to address flooding. This first round of grants had a few large projects but was marked by localities seeking funding to develop local resilience plans. This was expected and a hoped-for outcome, as localities are going to be the ones that have to do the most work on flood protection The first round was heavily coastal, a reflection of the attention that has been paid to coastal flooding and sea level rise up to now. But with new information on the increase in rainfall intensity, and with more riverine flooding in the valleys and mountains, the non-tidal regions of Virginia need to become more involved in the Fund.

And this Fund is run by the Department of Conservation and Recreation without broader coordination with programs in other state agencies, without a science and technical advisory body, or public oversight . Acting in isolation, this Fund will not reach its potential. It needs to be coordinated with the Department of Transportation and the Department of Health at a minimum, with those agencies taking their own resilience actions.

The Fund also needs to be guided by a state strategy. There is an emerging first try at a coastal strategy in the Coastal Master Plan underway. But that work needs to be expanded statewide. There also needs to be somewhere the state can obtain the science and technical advice to help guide this work, as pointed out in that state study.

Finally, the Fund, and all of this work, needs broader advice and oversight, in the form of a governing citizen board that can help coordinate this work.

The coming session of the General Assembly will be a place to help set this work in motion and, with a new governor coming next year, there are opportunities for the new administration to take action as well.