What is the Future for Traditional Flood Mitigation after BRIC Awards?
Many of us working to reduce flood risk were excited when Congress finally approved a disaster generated formula to create a sustained funding program for FEMA mitigation grants. At ASFPM, we were cautiously optimistic that typical FEMA flood mitigation for buildings, like elevation, buyouts, and small flood proofing projects would now be routinely funded by BRIC. We discussed the need to continue this type of funding with FEMA managers, and they felt such mitigation would continue. After seeing the Fiscal Year 2020 grants, it is clear that is not the case.
FY20 was the first year of BRIC grant funding and $500 million was available. Of that amount, $51.8 million was set aside for states, tribes, and territories and the rest was available for competitive project selection. In the end, 22 projects from 10 states were selected from the 568 applications under this portion of the program. Further details are provided in the article on the next page. Most of the traditional flood mitigation projects as well as mitigation planning and capacity building grants were funded through the state set aside, not from the competitive grants. As such, one way to get more traditional flood mitigation projects, which is what communities often tell states they want, would be to dramatically increase the state set-asides.
Especially discouraging is that state priorities for mitigation grants were replaced with FEMA priorities, which seem to favor large infrastructure projects. A concern with that focus is there is already a federal agency for large flood control projects, the US Army Corps of Engineers (USACE). It appears that some members of Congress who cannot get USACE-funded projects in their state or district like having the ability of using BRIC to get those same big projects.
The array of FEMA programs that can fund mitigation activities now includes BRIC, FMA, HMGP, and ICC. While Pre-disaster Mitigation (PDM) was supposedly replaced by BRIC, it is interesting that some in Congress have proposed funding PDM again so there is the ability to address mitigation pre-disaster. In the absence of any significant changes to the scoring criteria for BRIC, using PDM and FMA for seriously attacking repetitive loss will likely be needed to provide the ability to provide pre-disaster funding.
There is a need for transparency in the scoring and selection process. FEMA has not yet shared application scores with applicants and subapplicants. As a result, many are not interested in applying next year, since they do not know how or why their project was not selected and what is needed to improve their chances for funding next time.
The good news is the need for mitigation funding has finally caught the attention of Congress. We now need to help them understand if the program they funded is actually working. The first step is to get application and scoring feedback from all of you in the field who helped to submit applications. As these projects proceed, we will then need your feedback on how well the program is actually being implemented.
