In 2023 and 2024, Linda Martin, chair of the Wolcott Selectboard, saw what happens when Flat Iron Road fills with water.
Where Route 15 crosses the Lamoille River, a bridge forces the wide flow of the river to narrow, bending its path around big abutments in the water. When the river surges from heavy rains, water spills over its banks, washing across the surrounding land and flooding the nearby Flat Iron Road.
Martin knows that the bridge abutments are the reason the road floods. The town hired engineers, who confirmed the problem and began designing alternatives to the bridge and its abutments that would help the water flow more easily.
To continue that work of designing an alternative bridge, Wolcott’s selectboard had applied for a $71,250 grant from a relatively new program, allocated through the Federal Emergency Management Agency, meant to help communities prepare for disasters before they strike.
Instead, on April 4, she — along with other municipal leaders and emergency managers around the country — learned that the Department of Homeland Security, under President Donald Trump, had ended the grant program altogether.
The announcement put Wolcott’s project on hold and cut off $750 million for other projects nationwide, including $2 million in Vermont.
This funding stream, called the Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities program, or BRIC, was an annual funding opportunity for communities recently hit by disasters. It aimed to shift the federal response from reactive cleanup “toward research-supported, proactive investment in community resilience,” as FEMA’s website describes it.
The program was guided by a philosophy captured in the oft-cited statistic that, on average, every dollar invested in preventing disasters can save $6 in disaster cleanup costs.
FEMA has a wide umbrella of hazard mitigation funds, which BRIC once fell under. The BRIC program was separate from individual and municipal post-disaster recovery assistance, and those payouts are ongoing.
When the program was canceled, the state, and the communities it works with, had been in the final stages of completing applications for the 2024 round of funding, which would have been due on April 18. That process ground to a halt.
Most of the grants that communities had applied to last year, as part of the 2023 funding round, had been outlined and organized but had yet to be awarded — this is where Wolcott’s bridge project falls.
“Those are gone. If it’s not awarded yet, it’s gone,” Stephanie Smith, Vermont Emergency Management’s head of hazard mitigation, said. It leaves $2 million in planned, proposed projects across the state suspended.
The remaining three years of projects — applications submitted during the 2022, 2021 and 2020 rounds of funding — are what’s left. Since BRIC works by reimbursement, communities are now racing to complete projects already awarded and underway.
About a week after the announcement of cancellation, the FEMA regional office advised Smith that communities could continue work on the ongoing projects, though they must complete them by their deadline — FEMA does not plan to offer extensions.
‘We all collectively lose’
The city of Barre is among the many Vermont cities and towns left in the lurch of BRIC cancellations, as it tries to address key infrastructure pain points that made the extreme floods of 2023 and 2024 as damaging as they were.
As part of a broad hazard mitigation plan, the city had plans to redesign and replace a protective grate — called a debris rack — on Gunner’s Brook near Harrington Avenue. That rack worked almost “too well” at keeping floating debris like tree branches, leaves, and trash from clogging a narrow bend in the brook, as City Manager Nicolas Storellicastro described it.
It creates a kind of inadvertent dam, raising water levels in this part of the river. When heavy rains come — as was the case in the July 2023 and 2024 floods — water rushes into the neighborhood.
“It works very well on a day-to-day basis,” Storellicastro said, “but it may not have been designed for an event of the magnitude that we got.”
The BRIC funding would have helped the city complete much of the work necessary to design and build a better debris rack, and restore floodplain to help the surrounding neighborhood absorb water without damaging homes.
The need for this kind of flood-resilient infrastructure is likely to become more and more prevalent in the state, as scientists predict climate change only makes Vermont more vulnerable to more extreme precipitation and flooding.
“These floods, they’re stronger, they’re bigger, and we’re seeing that our infrastructure is just not up to the task,” Storellicastro said.
Because of this, the city has not abandoned its plans to replace the debris rack that the BRIC grant could have covered. Instead, Barre is looking to a different hazard mitigation grant program under FEMA, which is funding a number of other flood-preparedness infrastructure work in the city, along with a $68 million federal long-term disaster recovery fund recently awarded to the state through the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. For that, the competition for an award is expected to be much stiffer.
“I’m not willing to concede yet that the funding will disappear completely for this project,” Storellicastro said. “We’re going to pivot, but that means that somebody else’s project, including maybe one of ours, doesn’t get funded. We all collectively lose when that happens. It just basically leads to another roll of the dice when the next storm inevitably comes.”
Filling a planning gap
Part of why planners and municipal leaders found BRIC funding so valuable was because it helped fund scoping projects and pre-disaster planning work, which is essential to do before shovels hit the ground.
Essentially, it’s funding to open up future funding, Smith said.
“Most of them are projects to help communities identify future flood risk reduction projects,” she said.
Take Wolcott for example: In order to stop the flooding of Flat Iron Road, the town first needs to know that the abutments under the bridge are causing it, find out what an alternative might look like and get a cost estimate before they can secure funding.
“That scoping funding is hard to find often. In order to do a big project, you need to have that work done in order to apply for funding to do that infrastructure project. So this helps (towns) get there,” Smith said. “It helps you get to being able to access funding to do the work.”
The other type of project the state funded through BRIC were updates to municipalities’ hazard mitigation plans. In order to get any funding through FEMA, each town or city in Vermont needs to have a local disaster prevention plan that the agency has approved. So, every year, Vermont Emergency Management has submitted a BRIC application on behalf of all the communities that don’t have plans that meet FEMA’s standards.
Like the scoping projects, it’s essential funding to open up more opportunities for funding.
These local mitigation plans are particularly helpful because when disaster does strike, FEMA opens up a different stream of money — still under that bigger hazard mitigation umbrella — for future preparedness. The agency allocates 15% of total cost of the disaster’s damages for preventative projects — so the amount of money available, and the timing for when it becomes available, varies greatly.
“We need to be able to apply immediately after the disaster,” said Smith. “We have to be ready to go with applications.”
BRIC offered a more consistent, annual opportunity for a set amount of money. For now, the channel for post-disaster hazard mitigation funds remains. But the state is still trying to figure out how to cover the costs for writing the plans it was expecting to update with 2023 BRIC funding.
Vermont Emergency Management’s hazard mitigation section does hold onto “a few million dollars” to fill any gaps left behind by FEMA prevention funds, Smith said.
Finding ways to move forward
The state’s Department of Environmental Conservation is one of the few 2023 BRIC recipients that has been able to move forward with the most recent round of funding, since FEMA had already reviewed this grant by the end of 2024.
The department’s $183,857 planning grant will go entirely toward modeling landslide risks, state geologist Ben DeJong said. Those models should ultimately save the state from needing to spend on buyouts and cleanups after disaster has already struck, DeJong said.
“We have always been more reactive and are hoping, with this work, to take a more proactive stance,” he said.
Working with a seasoned modeler at Norwich University, the department plans to create a map that highlights the most landslide-prone areas. Illustrating where soil conditions and sloping terrains can combine with high, sudden precipitation to become particularly dangerous helps inform homebuyers and developers, and can keep them from even building on high-hazard areas in the first place.
“Even if we saved one parcel from being built, (this grant) would very quickly pay for itself,” DeJong added, explaining that most individual home buyouts cost the state over $200,000. The entirety of the $183,857 in the BRIC grant will cover the time of an expert modeler at Norwich and one state geological survey staffer who will support the effort to make the final map.
In Rockingham, the town will be able to continue its plans to re-size a culvert under Route 121 and Ski Bowl Road without the $44,000 grant it was expecting from BRIC, by pulling from a state structures grant and local highway funds, Municipal Manager Scott Pickup said over email.
And, in Wolcott, the work to address Flat Iron Road’s flooding is intended to move forward, thanks to an alternative collaboration with the state Fish & Wildlife Department and other hazard mitigation grants that FEMA is still awarding, explained Linda Martin, the selectboard chair.
“If those hazard mitigation grants got pulled, then I’d be really crushed,” Martin said. “So much work goes into one of these grants, hundreds of hours.”
Martin said that even if something changes with their backup plan, she hopes to preserve and repurpose the existing grant proposal.
“If not, we will just have to be patient and we’ll find funding someday. I’m sure,” Martin said.
But across the state, most of this preventative planning work will be left undone, Smith said.
“These are not things that communities are required to do,” she said. “These are things that communities are opting in to do because they’re being proactive and because they want to reduce their future costs. I think the unfortunate reality is, without funding to do that, communities won’t do these projects, and then the next time we have a flood, it won’t be better, it’ll be worse.”
