Big-dollar disaster in the making

President Trump’s remarks last week on Charlottesville did more than jolt the nation — they overshadowed his announcement at the same press conference of executive action on infrastructure that could cost taxpayers dearly.

First, the promising news: Trump’s executive order aims to streamline environmental reviews for federally funded projects, potentially cutting significant time and costs.

As an official in the Obama administration I experienced firsthand the delays and additional costs of duplicative, drawn-out environmental review procedures, which were especially problematic during the New York region’s recovery from Superstorm Sandy. Housing and Urban Development and its sister agencies have since made great strides in cutting red tape and expediting federal reviews and approvals, but Trump is not wrong that more can and should be done.

Trump’s order echoes recommendations in my recent report for the Staten Island borough president and the Community Preservation Corp., which calls for any infrastructure project to undergo a single environmental review process, governed by the regulations of the project’s primary funding agency, even if some of the project’s funding is provided by other federal agencies with different environmental requirements and procedures.

States and municipalities should not have to reconcile different federal regulations that are intended to enforce the same environmental laws, nor should they have to undertake independent reviews for every federal agency that funds a single project. Environmental protection and government efficiency should not be in conflict.

But Trump’s proposed improvement would be powerfully undermined by another component of his executive order, which revokes a 2015 action by President Obama requiring federal agencies to adopt a flood risk management standard. This ensured that all federally funded infrastructure projects are built either outside floodplains or at sufficient elevation to minimize the risk of damage.

With a pen stroke, Trump rolled back the clock on standards for development in flood plains to 1977 — as if Hurricanes Katrina, Sandy, Irene and other recent destructive storms had never happened.

With the federal government spending nearly $28 billion a year on disaster recovery, we cannot afford to ignore the costly impacts of more prevalent flooding or the data proving the money-saving value of engineering measures taken to help structures withstand forces of nature. A 2005 study by the National Institute of Building Sciences found that every dollar spent on mitigation saved $4 in disaster recovery costs over a 10-year period.

Rolling back the Obama flood risk requirements is penny wise and pound foolish. Any savings that may be gleaned today on projects built in at-risk areas will be dwarfed by the cost of repairing and rebuilding the same infrastructure if it is damaged in future flooding.

State and local governments that have experienced devastating losses in flooding and surge events understand this tradeoff and are proactively investing in stringent mitigation measures. Trump’s executive order allows this piecemeal approach to continue — without addressing the presumed guarantee that the federal government will come to the rescue with aid wherever powerful storms strike.

But why should the taxpayers of North Carolina or New York City, or any of the other states and municipalities with forward-looking flood standards, have to subsidize the higher recovery costs of places that choose not to adopt such requirements?

We know that major disasters necessitate federal help — yet so long as the trend toward more and costlier natural disasters continues, the federal government must require that infrastructure projects it funds in areas at risk of flooding adhere to construction standards that reflect today’s reality, not that of 40 years ago.

And as Congress and the White House work toward a much-needed federal infrastructure bill, it is critical that they predicate awards of government funds on compliance with up-to-date flood and other disaster mitigation standards. To borrow from the title of the President’s executive order, “discipline and accountability” demand it.