The bipartisan Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA) isn’t just about making our roads and bridges safer. Though, that’s why we love it. It will also make communities stronger and safer. The IIJA funding will help make our infrastructure more resilient to the impacts of many pressing issues in our world, such as climate change and cyberattacks. Over $50 billion is planned to protect communities against extreme weather conditions such as floods, wildfires, and droughts. This legislation is the largest investment towards physical and natural systems in American history.
There is so much ground to cover with this aspect of the IIJA that we’re going to break this up into two parts. Up first, we’re going to examine programs that will help roads with flooding.
Programs for Resiliency
Below is a list of the programs, and how the funding is intended to be utilized:
- Flood and Inundation Mapping and Forecasting, Water, Modeling, and Precipitation Studies: IIJA provides $492 million through various funding mechanisms for mapping capabilities (flood forecasts, projections) that will provide actionable decision support services equitably delivered to communities across the nation.
- Flood Mitigation Assistance Grants: IIJA provides $3.5 billion in grants to reduce the risk of repetitive flood damage to buildings and structures.
- Watershed and Flood Prevention Operations: IIJA provides $500 million in technical and financial assistance to local sponsors (cities, counties, towns, conservation districts, tribes), or legal subdivisions of state or tribal governments. The program provides planning, design, and construction of measures that address resource concerns in a watershed.
- State and Local Cybersecurity Grant: IIJA provides $1 billion for state and local governments to address cybersecurity risks.
- Pollution Prevention Grant: IIJA provides $100 million in grants to states, state-sponsored institutions, tribes, and tribal institutions. This program will deliver technical assistance to businesses to identify and adopt source reduction practices and technologies that benefit businesses, communities, and local economies.
- Carbon Reduction Program: IIJA provides $6.42 billion in formula grants to states that reduce transportation emissions and/or develop carbon reduction strategies.
- Preventing Outages and Enhancing the Resilience of the Electric Grid Grants: IIJA provides $5 billion in competitive grants to states, tribes, and entities to prevent outages and enhance the resilience of the electric grid.
- Department of Interior Wildfire Management – Preparedness: IIJA provides $245 million in direct federal spending, interagency agreements, cooperative agreements, and possibly contacts. This program funds a range of actions that helps the federal government prepare to respond to wildland fire.
- Emergency Preparedness Grant: IIJA provides approximately $234.1 million in states, countries, territories, tribes, cities, townships, non-profit businesses, emergency response organizations, and hazardous materials enforcement organizations. Comprised of 4 total grants (Hazardous Materials Emergency Program, Assistance for Local Emergency Response Training (ALERT), Hazardous Materials Instructor Training, Supplemental Public Sector Training), it would help with developing, improving, and carrying out emergency plans including ascertaining flow patterns of hazardous materials, deciding on the need for regional hazardous material emergency response teams, training public sector employees to respond to accidents and incidents involving hazardous materials, and training hazardous materials safety employees to become instructors to extend the reach of hazardous materials training.
Safety and being prepared are forms of strength at the community level, and the IIJA intends to do just that by improving several aspects of our infrastructure.
Join us next week as we break down the second part of resiliency funding and be sure to check out our past IIJA breakdowns.
----------------------------
Source: GFOA.org
