VTrans details flood‑focused tools and Protect plan benefits to Addison County RPC

Otis, a VTrans staff member, told the Addison County Regional Planning Commission technical committee that VTrans’ resilience work “sort of goes across across the entire agency,” covering immediate response and recovery as well as planning, design and grant prioritization.

The Transportation Resilience Planning Tool, or TRPT, and the Federal Highway repeat‑damage web tool are the primary tools Otis described. The TRPT combines stream geomorphology assessments and other criteria to score road segments and structures for flood vulnerability and criticality. The repeat‑damage tool, Otis said, tracks sites with multiple federally declared natural‑hazard damages and currently covers the federal‑aid system including interstate, state highways and many class 1 and class 2 town highways.

Why this matters: Otis said VTrans created a resilience improvement plan under the Protect program (a resilience‑focused IIJA program) to identify high‑priority locations for investment. Sites identified in the plan are eligible for a higher federal construction share—Otis said, “we get just we get 7 and a half million dollars in in protect funds every year”—and projects on plan‑identified sites can qualify for a 90% federal share and are exempted from the program’s benefit‑cost analysis requirement that otherwise can block small local projects.

Otis described how the TRPT works in practice: it scores vulnerability (primarily flood processes: erosion, deposition, inundation) and criticality (presence of redundant routes and nearby critical facilities such as hospitals or police stations). The TRPT is web‑based and filterable by asset owner, town or RPC; Otis encouraged RPCs and municipal staff to use it for hazard mitigation planning and project identification. He also noted a known limitation: the TRPT is based on largely static data and currently lacks an automated update cycle, which can leave replaced or upsized structures showing as high risk until the tool is manually updated.

The repeat‑damage tool focuses on natural‑hazard events for federal reporting and funding eligibility; Otis clarified it does not include crash or traffic incident data. He said the repeat‑damage tool includes visual markers showing overlapping events and individual damage records, and it allows public commenting on specific locations.

Otis described several research and next‑step efforts tied to resilience planning: expanding the TRPT to include the state‑owned rail network (part of an ongoing rail plan update), integrating high‑hazard rock slopes identified by VTrans’ geotechnical group into the resilience plan, and research projects on nature‑based solutions, landslide hazard mapping with the University of Vermont, and a study (led by Vermont Local Roads) on municipal roads general permit (MRGP) practices and their resilience benefits. He said the landslide mapping work seeks to identify unstable slopes more proactively so VTrans and towns can plan mitigations or preemptive closures.

Otis also noted programmatic and funding details: VTrans uses the TRPT and repeat‑damage signals as primary flags when scoring projects for Protect funds; the agency receives approximately $7.5 million per year in Protect formula funds and also encourages RPCs and towns to apply for discretionary Protect grants. He said one Protect grant round is coming up quickly and noted a deadline mentioned in the meeting, February 22.

The presentation included an invitation for municipal and RPC staff to provide local insights and corrections to the tools’ data. Otis offered follow‑up contact via email (and said the version posted to the RPC website includes his supervisor Andrea’s contact information).

Otis repeatedly stressed the TRPT and repeat‑damage tools are intended to inform project selection and to make certain municipal projects more competitive for federal resilience funding. He asked attendees to flag missing priorities so VTrans can improve the datasets and scoring.