Eighty-four percent of municipalities say they don’t have enough capital budget for resilience work, and 81% are rethinking infrastructure investments as Biden-era funding runs out. Those figures, from a National League of Cities survey, framed a recent Clark University panel on how cities pay for extreme-weather preparation now.
Massachusetts has put a number on its own share: $90 billion to $130 billion through 2050 for high-hazard dams, coastal investments and protecting trees and wetlands.
The capacity trap inside competitive grants
Mark Davidson, a geography professor at Clark’s School of Climate, Environment, and Society, named the circular problem in federal grant-making. “In the past, we’ve often tried to fill capacity gaps through competitive grants, state and federal governments giving monies, but winning those competitive grants requires capacity. You need staff time, you need expertise. Sometimes you need matching funding, and that’s a paradox.”
Cities compete for the money that would let them compete. The ones that already employ grant writers keep winning, and the places with the worst exposure tend to be the ones without that staff.
“The resilience gap that we have is as much a capacity gap as it is about knowledge or planning,” Davidson said. Municipalities generally know what needs doing. Acting on it is the harder question.
Building financing tools instead of chasing subsidy
Melissa Hoffer, Massachusetts’ first chief climate officer, reached the same conclusion from the state side. “We know that we will not have enough money to invest in these resilience investments if we just do it through subsidy,” she said. “We had to really start thinking about financing tools.”
That thinking produced the Massachusetts Community Climate Bank, capitalized with $50 million in dedicated state funds, which lends at low interest for affordable-housing retrofits like fortified roofs and heat pumps. It also produced a disaster response and resilience fund for events that don’t qualify for FEMA relief, with a condition attached: recipients have to rebuild more resiliently. If the Mass Ready Act passes, that fund becomes one of the first revolving funds in the country financing resilience loans.
ICLEI USA is pushing local governments to bring private capital in at a project’s inception rather than after design, structuring public-private partnerships from the start. Its resilience finance guidebook aims to translate avoided risk into terms “that a lender, insurer or private investor will actually act on,” said executive director Saharnaz Mirzazad.
What the shift means for the bid market
Riverside, California is the working example. The city logged 79 days above 95 degrees Fahrenheit in 2024, a 65% increase over 2003, with a peak of 115. It stacked responses rather than waiting for one big grant: a Bloomberg Philanthropies youth climate fund, a NOAA-funded extreme heat summit and tabletop exercise, and a tree-canopy engagement map that then helped win a California Transformative Communities grant to plant 1,000 trees and put solar on 100 houses.
For contractors, moving from grants to revolving loans and P3s changes the counterparty and the timeline more than the scope. Loan-financed work needs a repayment case, which favors projects with measurable avoided losses: drainage, hardening, retrofit. Riverside held 36 events and gathered over 4,000 comments building its adaptation plan, per Construction Dive, and community governance bodies are increasingly written into funding conditions. Expect engagement requirements in more RFPs, and expect them to show up in the schedule.
Related on Exchange: infrastructure projects tracked across North America.