Middle Peninsula landowners say Flood Fund puts residents of rural coastal areas at a disadvantage

On the weekend of October 9, with the onset of fall and a new moon swelling the tides along the mid-Atlantic coast, water gushed out of Chesapeake Bay on Ron Robinson’s property in Mathews County.

The so-called “royal tide” was not unexpected: the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration of the United States had published earlier in the season a bulletin predicting higher than normal tides for the region during the period. But actual water levels exceeded NOAA’s forecast, reaching the agency’s “moderate flooding” stage on October 10.

“This time,” said Robinson, his dock “was completely under water and the erosion was terrible. It was just massive waves crashing into our garden.

Robinson, like many other landowners on the rural middle peninsula, sought a way to hold back the waters which, with rising sea levels, keep rising. Since buying his home in Mathews in August 2020, he estimates he has lost between 20 and 30 feet of his yard to the seas.

For these owners, the new Community Flood Preparedness Fund, endowed with $ 64 million Virginia’s participation in a regional carbon market, represents a lifeline. But after Virginia announced the first round of $ 7.8 million local grants for flood protection, some residents say the state unfairly imposes stricter standards on projects in rural areas, where riverbanks are largely in private hands.

“The fund is there to help communities deal with flooding issues, yet all private (projects) are on lockdown,” said Lewie Lawrence, executive director of the Middle Peninsula Planning Commission.

Darryl Glover, deputy director of the Virginia Department of Conservation and Recreation which oversees the Flood Fund, said he doesn’t believe the current approach to distributing his dollars puts rural coastal areas of the state at a disadvantage – but insists he says, all projects must be able to show community-wide benefits.

The Flood Fund “was not meant to deal with individual properties,” he said.

How the state should handle private property when it comes to spending public funds on flood protection will likely be a topic of debate during the 2022 General Assembly session. Senator Lynwood Lewis , D-Accomack, told the Mercury that “one way or another, we’re going to take a close look at this issue.”

“The idea is that we promote living shores and natural infrastructure, etc. “If you want to have projects in rural coastal Virginia, you will need to have some sort of mechanism whereby private landowners who qualify and whose projects qualify can access the money.

Low income projects

For Lawrence, there are two main issues with the way Flood Fund funds are managed: how government officials assess whether a project qualifies for a “low income” label and how they decide whether it presents. sufficient ‘community-wide’ benefits.

Allocating money to low-income, community-wide projects was an explicit priority for lawmakers: the 2020 law authorizing the Flood Fund specified that priority should be given to projects “that implement programs”. community-wide risk mitigation activities ”, while at least 25% of all funds were to go to projects in low-income areas.

It is on how officials apply these criteria that disagreements arise.

Under Department of Conservation and Recreation guidelines based on the 2020 Act, flood protection projects “that are located and serve low-income geographic areas” may have a greater proportion of their costs covered by the state. For some, the state contribution can reach 80%, with comparable projects in non-disadvantaged areas covering up to 70% of costs.

Many of the 20 projects Lawrence submitted in the first round of funding are in areas classified as low income and, therefore, he said, should be eligible for the 80% match. Robinson was one, as was the plan by part-time Bavo resident Kimberli Vida to build a breakwater and stone outcrop.

The agency opposed the designation, saying an analysis showed that 15 properties associated with projects submitted by the Middle Peninsula PDC had an average estimated value of over $ 800,000, with individual property values ​​ranging from $ 250,000 to over $ 5 million.

“Even though these properties fall under a zip code that meets the low income criteria, we do not understand how properties valued with the stated range can be considered low income,” Glover wrote to Lawrence in a letter from October 20. .

Lawrence said it wasn’t that simple: “In rural communities it is very common for people to be rich in land and poor in money. Vida, for her part, said she and her husband bought their property in October 2020 using money from a devastating car accident settlement and “don’t have this house because we’re rich.” … It’s literally my retirement plan and my retirement money for all of my medical bills.

Either way, Lawrence argued that property values ​​are irrelevant: according to the guidelines, the low-income designation relates to geographic area, not individual ownership. In October, he sent the agency a legal opinion he had sought from MPPDC attorney Andrew McRoberts of Sands Anderson, who concluded that “the law and the guidelines make it clear that the criteria relate to areas and not people ”.

“Ignoring its plain language or using unreliable measures such as property value for subsidies would be arbitrary and certainly inconsistent with the law,” McRoberts wrote.

Glover stood firm on the matter. Designating projects located in low income areas but linked to properties that are not themselves considered low income “does not violate the letter of the guidelines,” he admitted, but it does violate his spirit. And, he pointed out, DCR has not rejected Middle Peninsula’s claims: owners can re-apply for funds to cover up to 70% of their costs in the general category – one choice at a time. Vida and Robinson, who faces around $ 48,000 to build breakwaters and replenish the shoreline, chose to take.

Community impact

Income designations are not the Flood Fund’s only dispute. The community impact also sparked debate.

By law, funding priority should be given to “community-wide projects,” a term the agency guidelines define as any project “that provides demonstrable flood reduction benefits at the census block level. American or more. ” Corn Lawrence argued that in a rural area, where census blocks tend to be larger than in urban communities, this is too high a bar to pass – especially when you take into account that, according to by his calculations, more than 95% of the Middle Peninsula coastline is privately owned. If the state insists on the community standard, he says, “they will never do a rural project.

Glover, however, rejected this claim.

“All we’re asking him to do is aggregate more properties so they’re community-wide,” he said. “What we have of the Middle Peninsula are disaggregated, high-income, high-value properties that, for the most part, are unrelated in any way.”

As the November 5 deadline for the Flood Fund’s second round of funding approached, landowners on the Middle Peninsula were nervously monitoring the tides. On Halloween weekend, extensive coastal flooding hit the area again, dragging the waters into backyards and through roads. Locals know it won’t be the last time.

“I think the state needs to know that anyone living on the shore of the bay is really affected,” Robinson said. “I’m sure we’ll have more and more of it with the climate change everyone is talking about.”