Commenter:
Matt Simons, City of Norfolk Planning Department
Align Fund Guidelines with enabling statute
The guidelines need to be strengthened to better align with the statue language: “Moneys in the Fund shall be used solely for the purposes of enhancing flood prevention or protection and coastal resilience as required by this article” (§ 10.1-603.25, subsection B).
This is very important because many areas of the commonwealth that do not experience coastal flooding have expressed a desire to utilize the Community Flood Preparedness Fund (CFPF), thereby diluting the Fund and negating the intended purpose of establishing a dedicated funding source to assist coastal communities with the greatest 21st century challenge that will face the Commonwealth: sea level rise.
The guidelines must be altered to more clearly define the eligibility for the Fund, which should state that all flood protection or prevention projects shall show a direct relationship to coastal resilience, and correlation to the goals, objectives and actions of the VA Coastal Resilience Master Plan, within the Plan’s coastal context. It is not sufficient to merely adjust the scoring criteria to weight higher scores for projects that show a correlation to coastal resilience.
The Hampton Roads community, as well as other coastal communities throughout the Commonwealth, will face the greatest environmental and economic crisis ever experienced within the Commonwealth, therefore, the CFPF needs to be entirely set aside for coastal resilience, as specifically mandated by § 10.1-603.25, subsection (B) of the statue.
The statue’s only exception to the coastal context pertains to the lone portion of the statue (subsection E) which references the availability of the fund to assist “inland” and coastal communities across the Commonwealth that are subject to recurrent or repetitive flooding. However, use of the CFPF for the purpose of adaptation and flood prevention strategies to address recurrent flooding should only be utilized pursuant to a recurrent flooding study being submitted to the state legislature upon request from the legislature; see example recurrent flooding study directed by SJ76ER, Recurrent flooding study for Tidewater Virginia (passed by the VA House of Delegates 2/24/2012, and Senate 2/28/2012).
Applicants requesting to access the CFPF for adaptation and flood prevention assistance to address recurrent or repetitive flooding should be scored based on their proposal’s correlation to the recommended adaptation strategies from the applicable recurrent flooding study for the subject area.
