An effort to help safeguard the coastal cities of Aberdeen and Hoquiam from future flooding has ground to a halt after the Trump administration ended a federal grant program.
Since a catastrophic storm caused flooding and landslides a decade ago, the cities have committed to better protecting their residents from flooding. They drew up plans to build one of the state’s largest pump stations and levees to hold back water in low-lying areas between the Wishkah and Hoquiam rivers.
The pump station was complete, and the environmental review and permitting process for the levees was nearing completion when the $85 million from the Federal Emergency Management Agency was withdrawn this month.
The levees were among the 13 projects across the state that have been canceled by the abrupt end of the Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities grant program, while another 14 are up in the air, according to the Washington Military Department.
The projects include building a tsunami evacuation structure in Westport, adapting to sea level rise in the lower Duwamish Valley and updating a Snohomish County hazard mitigation plan. The state’s projects were slated to receive an estimated $168 million from the program.
The state Department of Ecology raised alarm in a letter to Washington’s congressional delegation this week.
“Removing these federal resources undermines years of planning and enormous sums of cumulative investment by local, state, and federal agencies in projects that protect lives and economies,” wrote Marissa Smith, acting special assistant to the director for federal affairs at Ecology.
“Investing in risk reduction projects significantly reduces the damage caused by natural hazards and extreme events like flooding,” Smith continued. “Funding for these projects reduces the need for federal disaster response and recovery funding and costs on the federally administered national flood insurance program.”
In announcing plans to end the program earlier this month, a FEMA news release called the program “wasteful and ineffective.” The news release identified about $882 million to be rescinded nationwide.
The program was established in 2018 during President Donald Trump’s first term, according to a letter from Pennsylvania Republican Rep. Rob Bresnahan to Cameron Hamilton, the acting administrator of FEMA. “This program is a hand-up, not a hand-out, to at-risk communities who have suffered catastrophic weather events,” Bresnahan wrote.
In an advisory this week, FEMA stated projects that have not started construction will not be approved and will end, and phased projects might end “after the completion of Phase 1 or at another appropriate stopping point.”
The Grays Harbor levees are intended to protect over 5,100 properties, including over 1,300 businesses and more than 3,000 jobs in the flood zone, according to the cities of Hoquiam and Aberdeen. The project would include a levee system totaling 12 miles around the cities.
City officials also hoped the levees would help alleviate the costs of flood insurance — estimated at more than $2 million a year in 2014 — and enable future development.
The Low Income Housing Institute in Seattle planned to build a five-story affordable housing complex in Hoquiam but pulled out after failing to secure federally backed lending because of the project’s location in the flood zone, Hoquiam City Administrator Brian Shay said.
“These are critical projects for flooding and economic development standpoint for our cities and our residents, and we just — we’ve got to find a way to get them built,” Shay said.
City officials are still hoping the funding will be restored, if in a different format or under a different title.
“It’s a very good project. It’s not a Democratic project or a Republican project — it’s a people project and a property project,” said Grays Harbor Commissioner Vickie Raines, who also chairs the Chehalis Basin Board. “That’s the biggest thing for me. I just don’t understand why the program was eliminated.”
