Portsmouth Awarded $527,949 Community Flood Preparedness Grant

In a news release this week, Governor Ralph Northam announced that the City of Portsmouth will be awarded a $527,949 grant for one of 19 local projects selected for addressing the impacts of flooding, sea-level rise, and extreme weather in Virginia. 

The City of Portsmouth’s project is among the first to be awarded grants through the Virginia Community Flood Preparedness Fund.  The Governor and General Assembly established the fund in 2020 to assist communities in building resilience to the impacts of climate change, including floods, with targeted funding going to vulnerable and underserved communities.

“Virginians have experienced the devastating effects of flooding over and over again,” said Governor Northam. “Without strong investments in resiliency, we will continue to see more of the same. The Community Flood Preparedness Fund grants are so important because they will jumpstart projects in more than a dozen localities, including some that have been impacted by recent disasters.”

The City of Portsmouth was awarded $527,949 for the project, Data-Driven and Equity-Driven Resilience Strategy.  Portsmouth will use the funds to write a data-driven resiliency plan for the city, with a focus on equity.  Through the plan, we will measure our risks and vulnerabilities across a range of issues so that we can better quantify the threats that we face, the costs to meet these threats, and how well we are able to improve the lives of our citizens.  The City of Portsmouth anticipates that the planning process will take about one year to complete, while subsequent implementation efforts will be ongoing in accordance with the grant funding.

“We are incredibly excited for the possibilities that this grant opens up for the City of Portsmouth,” said Thomas Quattlebaum, Portsmouth’s Stormwater Compliance Manager who will be the manager of this grant project.  “We plan to study how to make Portsmouth more resilient, not just to environmental threats like flooding, but to issues pertaining to housing and poverty that have long been a source of concern for our citizens.  It is our hope that this will be the beginning of a long-term effort to improve the lives of Portsmouth residents by planning for our future,” he added.

Per the Governor’s announcement, the Community Flood Preparedness Fund is financed by the sale of carbon emission allowances under the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, which Virginia joined in January 2021.  The Community Flood Preparedness Fund is allocated 45 percent of the revenue Virginia generates through the Initiative with an estimated $75 million per year to be available through the matching grant program.

The Community Flood Preparedness Fund is administered by the Virginia Department of Conservation and Recreation on behalf of the Virginia Resources Authority.

For more information and to read the announcement from the Governor’s Office, please use this link: Full Release.