Managing the flood fund
Transparency, fairness should guide decisions about resilience grant funding
Responsibility for administering a state fund that provides grants for resilience projects may seem like a technocratic dispute with little bearing on the lives of most Virginians. But in Hampton Roads, which needs that program to help guard vulnerable communities from rising seas, it’s an important debate — one that helps determine which communities are better protected in the days to come.
As such, this region expects state officials to ensure that administration, wherever it lands, should be defined by transparency and that it helps rural communities as well as more densely populated cities.
The General Assembly created the Community Flood Preparedness Fund in 2020 with passage of the Clean Energy and Community Flood Preparedness Act. It cleared the way for Virginia to join the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, a partnership of 11 states to reduce carbon dioxide emissions that drive global warming.
The RGGI is a market-driven program that holds quarterly auctions of credits for carbon emissions that power companies can purchase. That incentivizes a reduction in emissions and generates revenue divided among the member states for climate and resilience programs.
In Virginia, participation in the RGGI is still relatively new but the commonwealth can already see the merits. The program
delivered $227.6 million to state coffers in 2021, our first year as a member, and an additional $74 million in March.
State law divides that money between the Housing Innovations in Energy Efficiency fund, which gets 50% of the revenue and uses it for improving energy efficiency in new and existing residences of low-income residents, and the Community Flood Preparedness Fund, which gets 45% of the money. (The 5% balance pays for program administration.)
The first fund is administered by the Virginia Department of Housing and Community Development while the second comes under the authority of the Virginia Department of Conservation and Recreation.
This year saw Gov. Glenn Youngkin and Republican lawmakers, who hold sway in the House, spar with Democratic legislators, who hold a slim Senate majority, over continued participation in RGGI. Youngkin wants Virginia out; Democrats want to remain in.
While that dispute played out — in an executive order, budget negotiations and proposed legislation — officials also differed about whether VDCR is the best administrator for the flood fund.
As the Virginia Mercury reported in November, property owners in rural communities contend they face higher hurdles to winning grant funding for resilience projects. They say the program favors large-scale efforts that demonstrate “community-scale” improvements, which ignores homeowners in less densely populated areas who are also threatened by flooding.
Sen. Lynwood Lewis, a Democrat who represents the Eastern Shore, introduced a bill this year that would move administration of the fund to the Virginia Soil and
Water Conservation Board. The goal is to include more voices in the discussion — the board is made up of citizen appointees — and to increase transparency and oversight.
The bill passed unanimously in both the House and Senate, but Youngkin amended it to keep the fund under VDCR. The Senate unanimously rejected that only for Youngkin to veto it when it reached his desk, saying the change would have the “unintended consequence of fragmenting our coastal resiliency efforts”
Now, this controversy predates Youngkin’s election as governor and the concerted effort this year to withdraw Virginia from RGGI membership. And the VDCR pledged in April that it will improve the transparency of its grant-making process.
But it’s important that coastal residents throughout the region have access to the resources needed to protect their homes and businesses. RGGI membership is instrumental in providing that funding and helping to reduce carbon emissions. And communities here should expect state officials to work together to ensure that the money goes where it’s needed — in a way that is fair, equitable and open to appropriate oversight.
Virginia has so little time to guard against sea-level rise. It has to get this right and can ill afford protracted disputes about how to do so.