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NOAA awards $22 million regional resilience grant for Aquidneck Island; local team to manage projects and outreach
Summary
A federal NOAA award will fund four years of regional resilience coordination on Aquidneck Island; the Aquidneck Land Trust will host the program and hire staff to help towns apply for projects and implement resilience actions.
Federal funding from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration will support a four-year, $22 million regional resilience program for Aquidneck Island, a collaboration intended to help the island's three municipalities prioritize and implement climate adaptation and coastal resilience projects.
Paige Mai, director of climate resilience at the Aquidneck Land Trust, told the council the NOAA award (NOAA's Climate Resilience Regional Challenge) was selected from a competitive pool and will fund staff, planning and technical assistance across Portsmouth, Middletown and Newport. The award explicitly funds building local capacity for grant writing, project management and community engagement; it also funds an island-wide Climate Resilience Action Plan intended to prioritize short- and long-term actions with an emphasis on implementation.
The land trust will host the grant and has already hired staff: a community engagement manager who will focus on outreach and public input and a resilience/sustainability specialist who will serve as project manager. The Town Council received the update and voted to receive and place the report on file.
Examples of work the grant plans to support include: regional beach and coastal resiliency projects, regional hazard mitigation planning, stormwater and nature-based solutions, multimodal transportation improvements and targeted municipal projects such as drainage/flooding mitigation along West Shore Road. The program will focus on practical project delivery and on creating a durable governance framework to continue island-wide coordination beyond the grant period.
Councilors asked how municipalities and council members could submit candidate projects; staff said councilors should raise potential projects with municipal planning staff, who will coordinate with the grant team to determine whether the work is eligible for grant-backed technical assistance or implementation funding.
Mai said draws on the grant are being made as expenses occur and that the program is advancing work already started by the Rhode Island Infrastructure Bank and municipal partners.
The council received the presentation and asked the grant team to continue coordinating with town planning staff, the public safety and public works departments, and local stakeholders as projects move from planning toward implementation.
