Heavy rains overwhelm the poorly drained hillside developments above the borough and send water rushing downtown, sometimes with such force that it comes spraying out of the inlets onto downtown streets like so many fountains. State Route 36, the primary arterial in Highlands, N.J., is sometimes impassable. During Superstorm Sandy in 2012, eight feet of water covered Bay Avenue, the main downtown drag. Today many of the homes have been or are in the process of being raised onto stilts, supporting a lively industry of specialty construction contractors.
A few years ago, the borough began working with Monmouth Hills, a historic community built above Route 36, to address some of their shared flooding challenges, which stretch back over a century to when Monmouth Hills was first developed. The plan included building new storm drains, inlets and pump stations while also constructing new wetlands in an existing human-made canal. One of the major moves was a plan to install a retention basin beneath Kavookjian Field, a baseball and soccer field on Route 36, partway down the slope between the hill and the bay, which would capture stormwater during heavy rains and release it slowly to mitigate flooding downtown. The whole project was estimated to cost about $16 million.
In 2024, Highlands was told it was going to receive a federal grant for $12 million, nearly as much as its entire annual budget, to cover the bulk of the flood mitigation work. The grant was part of the Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities program, better known as BRIC, created by Congress in 2018 and administered by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). In 2025, before Highlands received any of the money, the Trump administration announced it was canceling the BRIC program, calling it “wasteful and ineffective.” Without the grant, there was no way Highlands could pay for all the components of the plan. So, even as a group of state attorneys general were suing to have the BRIC program reinstated, Highlands began taking the plan apart and looking for ways to fund it piece by piece. It had little hope of completing the whole thing.
Jared Brey
Conceptually, the BRIC program isn’t wholly new. FEMA has made a small portion of its overall recovery funding for disaster areas available for hazard mitigation projects meant to reduce the damage from future storms. But BRIC is unique among federal disaster programs because it’s forward-looking, encouraging cities to anticipate future disasters, and because cities don’t have to be mid-recovery to qualify. Since launching in 2020, it has incentivized projects that improve public infrastructure, follow comprehensive hazard mitigation plans and incorporate nature-based solutions, among other priorities.
“The status quo of paying to rebuild after a disaster is no longer tenable,” says Joel Scata, a senior attorney at the Natural Resources Defense Council. He notes that the frequency of major disasters costing $1 billion or more has risen sharply in recent decades. “I think there’s a recognition that there needs to be a better alternative, and that’s reducing risk in the first place.”
The details of federal funding programs matter because they shape the scope to cities’ infrastructure ambitions. Most small cities don’t have the local staff capacity or revenue to plan for and fund projects that would help them manage future disasters. In Highlands, Broullon says, borough staff routinely scour a spreadsheet of federal funding opportunities to see what projects they might pursue. It built its plan for flood reduction in no small part around the priorities of the BRIC program, for example by partnering with a neighboring community to gain points on its application. Many other cities applied for BRIC grants and didn’t receive them, suggesting increased demand for the types of projects the program is designed to fund.
“It’s really the only way that we can get a lot of projects done, is through that type of funding,” she said.
Dozens of other communities are in a similar situation. The state-led lawsuit challenging the cancellation of the BRIC program was ultimately successful, but the fate of the awarded grants is still in question. A judge ruled in December that FEMA had to spend the money that Congress had allocated to BRIC for its intended purpose. The agency said it would comply, and reissued a notice of funding opportunity for the program in March. But it wasn’t clear whether it would honor grant awards that hadn’t been paid out yet. As of mid-April, Highlands and other communities that had already been awarded grants still weren’t sure when they’d get the money, or whether they’d have to reapply.
That type of uncertainty has affected all sorts of federal funding programs over the last year and a half. President Donald Trump began his second term by calling into question federal funding for all types of projects, especially those that are tied to climate change or social policy goals that don’t align with his priorities. His administration announced a freeze on all federal grants last January, intending to target programs related to diversity, equity and inclusion, before lifting the freeze a few days later. With congressional approval, the administration later pulled back millions in transportation and infrastructure funding, canceling some grants to cities that had been announced and in some cases partly awarded.
Trump has taken special aim at FEMA, citing “serious concerns of political bias” within the agency and suggesting that most of its work could be transferred to states. He has clamped down on disaster declarations, which unlock federal funding for recovery and hazard mitigation, in politically uneven ways. Over the last year, his administration has rejected 77 percent of disaster requests from states with Democratic leaders while approving 89 percent of requests from Republican states, according to reporting by Politico.
The uncertainty over specific grant awards comes amid more gradual changes in the federal government’s approach to disaster resilience and infrastructure funding, and a broader societal reckoning with the implications of climate change.
After Superstorm Sandy, impacted communities in the Northeast and mid-Atlantic were awash in recovery money meant to help them undo some of the damage that the storm did. New York City alone has received some $15 billion in federal recovery money related to the storm. In addition to that, the Department of Housing and Urban Development launched a competition called Rebuild by Design, awarding nearly $1 billion to New York, New Jersey and Connecticut for ideas promoting “regionally scalable but locally contextual solutions that increase resilience in the region.” Those ideas have informed, and in some cases been incorporated into, New York City’s climate change efforts, including a $1.7 billion Lower Manhattan Coastal Resilience plan that’s meant to anticipate future flooding from sea-level rise.
The city received a $50 million BRIC grant, the largest available at the time, for one set of projects focused on the Seaport neighborhood, the lowest-elevation point in Lower Manhattan. The plan anticipates near-daily flooding in the neighborhood by the 2080s, and calls for installing new drainage and green infrastructure to manage runoff, improving recreational spaces and rebuilding an existing pier at higher elevations. The whole Seaport plan was estimated to cost $170 million. The city still isn’t sure how much of the initially awarded $50 million grant it will receive.
“A year of uncertainty is a huge challenge,” says Jordan Salinger, deputy director of the New York City Mayor’s Office of Climate and Environmental Justice. “Across the nation projects didn’t know whether to proceed. Ambiguity does not lead to the best planning outcomes.”
While climate change is still a touchy subject, there’s a fairly broad recognition that resilient infrastructure — projects designed to withstand intense storms and keep more people safe during disasters — is a good investment. A widely cited study, accepted by FEMA itself, says that every $1 invested in hazard mitigation saves society $6 in prevented losses. A more recent report from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce says every $1 spent on “climate resilience” prevents $13 in losses. The money isn’t an abstraction.
“Communities that take longer to recover, you can lose businesses, you can lose residents. They might never come back,” says Yucel Ors, a legislative director with the National League of Cities. “With more resilient infrastructure, communities are able to more quickly recover.”
“Creating uncertainty,” he adds, “creates risk.”
Cities usually know where their vulnerabilities are. In 2021, the city of Scranton, Pa., applied for federal funding to buy out a string of residential properties that had been subject to repeated flooding. In September of 2023, before it received the funding, an intense rainstorm caused millions of dollars of damage to public and private property. On the night of the storm, firefighters went out in boats conducting rescues in the areas the city had identified as being in danger, says Scranton Mayor Paige Cognetti.
David Kidd
“There’s very little appetite for people to see their taxes go up because you’ve borrowed to do mitigation for a future event,” Cognetti says. “Once something happens, everybody’s going to say, ‘Why didn’t you do X, Y, or Z?’ But at the local level, it’s unrealistic to think local leaders can use local dollars to do that work.”
Meanwhile, the people who own the affected properties are waiting for payouts that they thought were forthcoming a year ago. “It’s just been miserable for these folks,” Cognetti says.
By the time I met with Carolyn Broullon in Highlands in late March, FEMA had announced it was going to comply with the court order to reinstate the BRIC program. Broullon told me she’d “heard that in the news,” but hadn’t gotten any official word about what it meant for the grant in Highlands. She drove me around town and showed me the canal the town had been hoping to convert into wetlands, with a new pump station that would be designed to look like any other bayfront house. We visited the field they were planning to fit out with a retention basin, and drove up to Mount Mitchill and looked across the bay.
In her bag, Broullon had a tiny model of an in-line check valve, a type of device with a one-way flap that lets water flow out without letting it flow back in. The borough had received a small grant from the Hudson River Foundation to outfit its existing sewage outfalls with those valves. She wasn’t sure what would happen with the BRIC grant, but she said the borough had to keep working to prepare for the storms it knows will keep coming.
“We can’t cry in our soup,” Broullon told me. “We have to keep on going and just find a way to make it happen, even if it’s on a much smaller scale.”
