Hampstead - Virginia will start using more loans rather than only relying on grants to fund local flood resiliency measures, according to the chairman of the Department of Conservation and Recreation.
The Joint Subcommittee on Recurrent Flooding heard from DCR Director Matt Wells on Thursday that his organization intends to use both the Community Flood Preparedness Fund and the Resilient Virginia Revolving Loan Fund.
Virginia looking for loans for local flood resiliency efforts
The circles on a Venn diagram of the two, according to Wells, "wouldn't exactly match, but they would be significantly overlapped."
State senators Lynwood Lewis, D-Accomack, and David Bulova, D-Fairfax, introduced legislation in the previous session to establish the revolving fund, which will lend money to communities and individuals for flood resilience initiatives.
Due to the state's involvement in the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, $25 million from the Flood Fund was allotted to the revolving fund in the budget. Since Virginia joined in 2020, The Flood Gund has received a little over $200 million.
The target market is where the two funds diverge: the Flood Fund is meant for community-scale projects, but the Revolving Fund is accessible for residential, commercial, and industrial properties, according to Wells.
The revolving fund is intended to support itself.
Previous Flood Fund grants, according to a DCR representative, would include lending opportunities.
We are thinking about making loans through the CFPF in part because it has a bigger pool of money that may be used as leverage, Wells said on Thursday.
The subcommittee's business representative and CEO of the architecture company Clark Nexsen, Chris Stone, questioned if the revolving fund was sufficient to meet the demand.
"The $25,000,000... It won't even really complete a big or easy endeavor, Stone claimed.
The cash, according to Lewis, the subcommittee's head, would serve as project gap funding.
