As Crisfield Mayor Darlene Taylor sees it, the low-lying Maryland town has no future unless it can hold back rising water. Computer models suggest that the adjacent Chesapeake Bay could get high enough by 2050 to trigger daily floods that are deep enough to stall cars on roads.

Hope arrived in the form of a federal grant program under the Federal Emergency Management Agency, created during the first Trump administration. The Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities (BRIC) program helped rural communities like hers to invest in massive projects to fight disaster threats, ranging from wildfires to floods.

Crisfield officially got word from FEMA last July that it had secured $36 million from the program to launch the first phase of its massive flood-protection initiative. “Everything had lined up and everything was in place for this to be a highly successful project,” Taylor said.

A lot has changed since then. Trump returned to office in January, vowing to drastically shrink the size of the federal government. In a terse April 4 press statement, FEMA announced it was pulling the plug on the disaster-preparedness funding, not just for Crisfield but for all applicants and grantees, calling it “wasteful and ineffective,” though without citing evidence to support those claims.

The administration announced that any undistributed funds from the program’s inaugural year, 2020, through 2023 would be returned to the Disaster Relief Fund or the U.S. Treasury. The agency also canceled the 2024 funding opportunity, just days before the application deadline for that year’s $750 million allocation.

The reversal has left hundreds of communities nationwide scrambling to find alternative sources for the billions of dollars they had been promised. Among the six states and the District of Columbia in the Chesapeake Bay watershed, BRIC grants had been on track to disburse nearly $1 billion across about 350 applications, according to a Bay Journal analysis of FEMA’s database.

Among the region’s losses: $32 million to restore wetlands along the Patapsco River’s Middle Branch near Baltimore; $2.7 million to acquire 21 flood-prone properties in Scranton, PA; and $20 million toward finishing a floodwall in DC around the Blue Plains Advanced Wastewater Treatment Plant, the largest sewage plant in the Bay watershed.

And, of course, there’s Crisfield. With an annual budget of just $4 million, the town of 2,500 residents can’t afford to fight sea level rise without financial help from beyond its borders, Taylor said.

“We’re pretty much devastated,” she added. “Without this, we know that we will be in a really bad position to protect our citizens, protect our property, protect our community and really protect our way of life.”

Wasteful?

The FEMA announcement described the program as “more concerned with political agendas than helping Americans affected by natural disasters.” Many experts contend the opposite is true.

Recent studies suggest that investments in flood hazard mitigation yield a return of up to $8 in benefits for every $1 spent, according to the Association of State Floodplain Managers. Chad Berginnis, the association’s executive director, acknowledged that the BRIC program had flaws, but said it was making important strides in warding off disasters.

“I don’t [doubt that we] have debt issues in this country, but I take very strong exception to the FEMA press release that characterizes this program as wasteful and ineffective,” he said. “Those are just flat-out lies.”

Berginnis said he largely agreed with the findings of a recent Republican-led task force’s report, which called for reforming the BRIC program. The 61-page report offered a broad range of recommendations to improve the nation’s overall disaster response and preparedness efforts.

Among them: creating a pathway for smaller communities to obtain BRIC grants, so they don’t have to compete against “coastal elites” who have access to caravans of consultants and grant writers. During the 2023 grant year alone, about 75% of the program’s funding benefitted such “high capacity” applicants, according to the report.

But the report was notable also for what it didn’t say, Berginnis pointed out. It didn’t say anything about getting rid of BRIC.

‘The water doesn’t care’

The BRIC program was established by Congress through the Disaster Recovery Reform Act of 2018, which Trump signed into law in October of that year. Beginning in 2020, applicants could receive up to $50 million for projects designed to help communities reduce their exposure to catastrophes.

Such “pre-disaster” funding, backers say, is necessary now more than ever with climate change exacerbating a variety of threats and driving up the costs of “post-disaster” spending.

The abrupt cancellation of the program has drawn strong criticism, especially from Democratic lawmakers.

“When we talk about government cuts to environmental programs, I will caution that rising seas don’t care who is in the White House,” said Rep. Sarah Elfreth, a Maryland Democrat. “The water doesn’t care how a small town that experiences 90 days of flooding or more a year voted in the last election. Flooding will continue to devastate communities, even if the president does not believe in climate change.”

Some Republicans, while supportive of Trump in general, appeared to be quietly working to get the president to change his mind and restore at least some funding.

“We were made aware of this cancellation in funds and are reaching out to the appropriate federal agencies for a better understanding of this decision,” U.S. Rep. Andy Harris’s office told the Bay Journal in a statement. Harris, Maryland’s only Republican congressman, chairs the conservative House Freedom Caucus, and his district includes Crisfield.

His office noted that Harris had written a letter in support of Crisfield when the community was applying for BRIC funding. Harris remains “supportive of the city’s need to become more safe, resilient and prosperous by reducing the negative impacts of flooding,” according to the statement.

Because of the sluggish manner in which FEMA disburses funding, some of the grants now being cancelled date back to the program’s inaugural year in 2020. In many cases, communities have already expended millions of their own dollars designing, engineering and permitting projects that now may never see the light of day, Berginnis said.

For multiphase projects, FEMA said its regional offices will work with applicants on previously obligated projects to determine what it called the “best path forward,” adding that “this may include ending the project after the completion of Phase 1 or at another appropriate stopping point.”

In the April 16 FEMA memo, the administration also justified BRIC by pointing to its purported failure to produce “concrete results” and the distribution of the “majority of funding … to only a few states.”

Community impacts

From small-town mayors to state emergency management coordinators, officials have reacted to the administration’s action with shock and disbelief.

“I don’t know what facts they are looking at to call this [program] wasteful,” said Maryland Secretary of Emergency Management Russell Strickland. “I know of nothing in Maryland that I would call wasteful.”

His agency estimates that communities across the state stand to lose more than $80 million across 26 applications that were in FEMA’s approval pipeline. The impact remains “undetermined” for $8.7 million that was allocated to 17 projects but hadn’t been spent as of the April 4 announcement.

Meanwhile, 31 Maryland-based applications for the 2024 funding year were dropped. Those $70 million in requests would have included $36 million for the second phase of Crisfield’s flood project and $16 million for a long-planned effort to fight frequent flooding in Cambridge, another Eastern Shore community struggling to transition its economy from seafood to tourism.

“We’re in a holding patten now,” Strickland said, adding that he hopes Congress and the administration work together to create a replacement for BRIC. He also is waiting to see whether Maryland and other states take legal action to overturn the decision.

The South Baltimore Gateway Partnership, along with other partners, has raised $67 million to restore the first phase of what will ultimately be 11 miles of the shoreline along the Middle Branch of the Patapsco River. BRIC funding accounted for about $32 million of that total. About $5 million has been used for designing the project, but the rest stands to be clawed back, said Brad Rogers, the partnership’s executive director.

So, Rogers said, the wetlands to be added along the shore by MedStar Harbor Hospital will be scaled back from 12.3 acres to 8 acres. And instead of simultaneously launching another project at the BGE Spring Gardens campus in Ridgely’s Cove, that phase will be delayed until more funds are raised.

“We are saddened that the federal construction funds won’t be available going forward, but we are confident this will still be a terrific project,” Rogers said. “We’re not being deterred. We’re just moving forward on a slightly different timeline.”

In Virginia, the affected projects included $12 million to upgrade Richmond’s water treatment plant and $24 million to repair and modernize Portsmouth’s Lake Meade Dam, which holds back the city’s main drinking water reservoir.

In Pennsylvania, outcry followed the cancellation of FEMA’s $2.5 million award to the city of Scranton to acquire 21 flood-prone properties and demolish 18 homes standing on them. The properties were set to be repurposed into infrastructure to help prevent future flooding, city officials say.

“You have people that are in limbo,” Scranton Mayor Paige Cognetti said. “Going forward, we are always going to have natural disasters. It’s absolutely untenable that cities and municipalities won’t have access to federal dollars to fend off and prevent [them] but also prepare [for them].”

Many of the places impacted by the program’s cancellation abound with Republican voters. For example, in Crisfield’s main voting precinct, Trump won a 56% margin of victory in last November’s election.

Plans there call for installing a tidal flood barrier that will surround most of the city as well as adding sewers, pump stations, water-retention facilities, tide gates and wetlands. The goal is to ensure protection from up to 5 feet of flooding above ground level — akin to the inundation from Superstorm Sandy in 2012.

Several residents recently completed coursework in a “resilience academy” program, hosted by the city and several partners. As part of their final project, three younger residents — all under 20 years old — pitched a plan to share knowledge with a “sister city” facing similar flooding issues.

“I live in this area,” said Emily Napier, indicating a point on the map near downtown, “and we flood on a daily basis.”

Dennis Marshall was on hand to collect his wife’s certificate in her absence. He owns a vacation rental in town that he says could benefit from the project.

“People come down here, and if they have to wear boots, they aren’t coming back,” he said. But Marshall added he is far from confident that the flood project, if built, would deliver the results it promises. “If it works, it’s fine,” he noted. “That’s the problem.”

Does he regret voting for Trump now that the Republican president has nixed the city’s massive windfall? “I think if he did it, he did it for a reason,” said Marshall, clad in a black Trump T-shirt.

Barbara Mete, another enrollee in the three-month resilience academy, moved to Crisfield about six years ago after retiring from a job in New York. She hoped the course would give her a deeper appreciation for her new home and the estuary at its doorstep. In the wake of the loss of funding, she is deeply concerned about her community’s future, she said.

Her message to Trump and FEMA? “Please think about the people who live here and the children that will come after your administration,” Mete said. “Nature is the key. If we take care of her, she will take care of us.”

By Jeremy Cox, Bay Journal