The Loss of FEMA Dollars Leaves Towns Scrambling

Barre flooding in July 2023 Credit: File: James Buck

Nicolas Storellicastro was finally looking to the future.

The Barre city manager has had his hands full with recovery efforts since severe flooding inundated parts of the city in July 2023. Just as officials were making progress, another major flood struck Barre in July 2024. “It’s kind of been this vicious cycle,” Storellicastro said.

But in early 2025, Storellicastro was optimistic about moving forward on projects that would make flooding less destructive in the city thanks to state-supported planning and federal mitigation grants.

The city had worked with experts to identify projects that could help protect people and property from future floods. The top priorities were expensive infrastructure projects: fortifying the bridge that connects to the city’s wastewater treatment plant, removing another bridge that traps debris during floods and expanding barriers to prevent that debris from damming the river. Each would cost $1 million to $2 million, Storellicastro estimates — which would be difficult for Barre to shoulder alone.

The state was helping city officials apply for grants, in part through the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities program. But in early April, FEMA abruptly announced that it was canceling the BRIC program just a few weeks before the application deadline.

“It’s really easy for residents in a community like ours that was hit back-to-back years to get really frustrated and think that we’re not doing anything,” Storellicastro said. “The hard reality is that these projects take time under the best of circumstances, and then, when you face these kinds of cuts…”

Vermont communities have been scrambling to find other funding for mitigation projects since FEMA announced that it would cancel the fiscal year 2024 cycle of the program and would not disburse funding for some projects that had been selected in past years. BRIC has provided $133 million in funding since the program began operating in 2020, according to a FEMA spokesperson.

This year’s round would have made $750 million in funds available nationally to help communities reduce damage from extreme weather, natural disasters and chronic impacts of climate change, such as extreme heat. At least $2 million would have been set aside for Vermont.

Without the funds, emergency preparedness leaders say, fewer mitigation projects will move forward. Mitigation is an ever more urgent issue as climate change intensifies storms and makes flooding more frequent in Vermont.

The cancellation is just part of a larger shakeup at FEMA under the administration of President Donald Trump, which has proposed radically shrinking or even eliminating the agency. Since the beginning of Trump’s term, FEMA’s staff has been slashed.

BRIC was created in 2018 under the first Trump administration, replacing an older FEMA mitigation program. It opened its first funding round in 2020 and was significantly expanded under the Biden administration.

The Trump administration now says the program has no value. “The BRIC program was yet another example of a wasteful and ineffective FEMA program,” an agency spokesperson said. “It was more concerned with climate change than helping Americans affected by natural disasters.”

Mitigation experts disagree. “FEMA historically has often spent most of its money on disaster recovery, but we know from decades of research that the most cost-effective way to think about disasters is to try to reduce the risk before the disaster occurs,” said Kris Smith, a researcher at Headwaters Economics, which focuses on reducing communities’ disaster vulnerability. “Without federal investment in prevention, our disaster costs are likely to get more and more expensive.”

Federal funding can support projects that local and state governments could ill afford without creating hardships for taxpayers, she said. That investment reduces disaster recovery costs down the line, she said, referencing research that shows a sizable return on investment — about $6 saved for every $1 spent, according to a 2019 report by the National Institute of Building Sciences.

And while BRIC faced criticism for its complex application process and tendency to favor more urban areas, Smith said FEMA had continually worked to address those issues.

Local leaders in Vermont also said they hadn’t seen evidence that BRIC was wasteful. “At least for our communities, when they pursue this funding and use this funding, we make sure every dollar is used the way it’s supposed to be used,” said Seth Jensen, deputy director of the Lamoille County Planning Commission.

“It was a big shock and a big hit to the strategy we have for addressing flooding for the long term in the region.” Seth Jensen

Communities have used past BRIC funding to design culverts and plan bridges. Those projects help prevent repetitive damage, according to Scott Pickup, the municipal manager of the Town of Rockingham and the Village of Bellows Falls. In Rockingham, BRIC funding would have supported a culvert project that Pickup says would prevent future damage to Route 121, which has been washed out by floods in the past.

“Eventually these storms are going to reoccur, the damages are going to be repeated, and we’ll end up spending more money to keep repairing and not upgrading these facilities,” Pickup said. “I thought BRIC was a forward-thinking, thoughtful way to address some serious problems that were occurring. The way that the system is set up now, we’ll simply be paying over and over for problems that aren’t going to go away. So that makes no sense to me.”

When Jensen heard BRIC had been canceled, he thought immediately of a project in Wolcott, where two concrete structures sit in the Lamoille River — remnants of an old bridge. During the 2023 floods, those structures restricted the flow of water. The river spilled its banks and thundered onto Flat Iron Road, where it scoured a 300-foot section down to the bedrock. Repairing the damage cost about $110,000, according to Linda Martin, Wolcott’s selectboard chair.

A year after this 2023 disaster, Barre City flooded again. Credit: File: James Buck

Jensen and Martin want to remove those bridge remnants and create a “flood bench” on the riverbank opposite the road — an open area of land that the river could flow onto in a flood, rather than inundating the road. But after a BRIC grant was canceled, they’re $71,000 short. They are still seeking alternative funding.

The cancellation is also forcing Jensen to rethink Lamoille County’s longer-term flood-mitigation strategy. The region has used BRIC for scoping studies, which weigh whether a potential project is viable and cost-effective — a prerequisite for some federal funding.

“There’s a big gap between a project idea and a project being ready for [a construction] funding application,” Jensen said. BRIC funding made it possible for small towns, which often have a tiny staff and limited budget, to hire a consultant to conduct those scoping studies.

Without BRIC, Jensen is unsure how his region will fund that work. “It was a big shock and a big hit to the strategy we have for addressing flooding for the long term in the region,” he said, “because it meant that the best tool we had for filling the gap to get [projects] ready to actually happen is gone now, and we’re going to need to figure out something else.”

BRIC has also been used in Vermont to pay for improvements to Local Hazard Mitigation Plans that communities must renew every five years. Without an up-to-date plan, disaster-stricken communities are ineligible for FEMA’s Hazard Mitigation Assistance, which is commonly used to pay for buyouts and infrastructure projects that prevent repeated flood damage.

Maggie O’Brien, who leads emergency management at the Rutland Regional Planning Commission, said losing funding for plan updates was a huge blow. “When I received that email in early April that said that BRIC was being canceled, I just felt a stone drop in my stomach. Because I was like, That’s a third of our region not getting updated plans,” O’Brien said.

Funding from the 2023 cycle of BRIC would have paid for updates to nine plans in O’Brien’s region. Across the state, BRIC funding was expected to provide roughly $1.4 million to pay for local plan updates, according to Stephanie Smith, the hazard mitigation section chief at Vermont Emergency Management. VEM plans to use other funding to complete them.

Amid the larger shakeup at FEMA, communication from the agency about the impacts on Vermont has been sporadic. Stephanie Smith has still not received final guidance on whether any BRIC projects that are already under contract with FEMA will be impacted by the cancellation.

“A few weeks ago [we] had been promised from FEMA headquarters a list of all of our projects, their status and what we were supposed to do — if they were supposed to move forward or not,” Smith said. But after the head of FEMA was suddenly fired in May, Vermont Emergency Management was told it wouldn’t get a list. Until it does, Smith’s team is continuing to implement previously approved projects, and they’re still receiving reimbursements from FEMA, she said.

Smith also said FEMA has quietly changed its formula for calculating cost-effectiveness, which may render some projects under other grants no longer eligible. “What we’re seeing is tightening, tightening of what is eligible,” Smith said.

In the midst of this uncertainty, local and state emergency management leaders are working to ensure that priority projects can move forward. But they acknowledged that less federal funding will ultimately mean fewer mitigation projects get done in Vermont.

Many projects that relied on BRIC money are looking toward Hazard Mitigation Grant Program funding, which Vermont has from the past few years’ flooding disasters. Most of that money has already been used for buyouts, so $35 million worth of infrastructure projects are now competing for just $15 million of available funding, according to Stephanie Smith, the VEM mitigation chief.

“Not having BRIC, it means we’re not going to be able to do some of this work,” Smith said.

In Wolcott, Jensen is working with the state to secure funding for the Flat Iron Road project and partnering with the Fish & Wildlife Department to move it forward. In Barre, Storellicastro is looking to that same pot to fund what would have been BRIC projects. And Stephanie Smith said the state will also pay for updates to local plans.

In Rockingham, Pickup says the town has decided to use $44,000 from its own highway budget for a scoping study for a culvert project on Route 121. Using town money will delay other local projects, he said, such as improvements to pedestrian safety. “You don’t have the financial capacity to do all of these projects without real federal funding,” Pickup said.

And in Brattleboro, a project to study options for flood mitigation in the town’s historic center is on hold after an anticipated $104,000 in BRIC funds was lost, according to Brian Bannon, the town’s zoning administrator.

“Right now, it’s really hard to say what the future is for hazard mitigation, because FEMA plays a critical role and is a critical partner in all those projects,” Bannon said. “The loss of federal funds just leaves a really large hole that makes planning, at this point, pretty impossible.”

The original print version of this article was headlined “Flood Aid Is Drying Up | Communities around Vermont are scrambling to find new funding for flood-mitigation projects in the wake of FEMA cuts”