Flooding the streets and wallets
Climate change is impacting Central Florida municipalities’ budgets and is expected to cause major budget losses as cities rely on property taxes from coastal structures that may be underwater in the future, according to a study from researchers at Florida State and Cornell universities
Researchers believe the United States will likely see two feet of sea level rise over the next 21 years, and chronic or biweekly flooding will cause property values to drop, among other things.
As sea levels rise, municipalities are expected to face long term revenue losses, according to Will Butler, associate professor of Urban Regional Planning at FSU.
“They start to face these fiscal challenges, not just the physical challenges of flooding,” said Butler.
For example, the city of Cape Canaveral - an area flanked by the Banana River Lagoon and Atlantic Ocean - is expected to lose 38% of its total revenue by 2100.
Linda Shi, assistant professor in the Department of City and Regional Planning at Cornell, said sea level rise is impacting the money coming in and going out.
“On the expenditure side, you can imagine all sorts of increased expenditures due to emergency response to elevate roads, enlarge sewers, or augment existing levees or sea walls,” said Shi. “On the other side, in terms of revenues, if you have a lot of climate impacts, that causes property values to decline. If you have demolition or buyouts of properties, that will remove housing stock.”
Shi said it can also affect the number of businesses that are willing to come to Florida and the revenue that businesses are going to be able to earn.
“So if they're simultaneously depending upon those local source revenues, and facing threats to those revenues, then we see this tension building between these two sides of the equation,” added Butler.
However, Butler said there is time for municipalities to get ahead of this issue as, “it's not really bad quite yet.”
If municipalities are not able to come up with a solution, Shi said there could be negative effects on your daily life.
“It can affect transportation and septic tank systems,” she said. “All of that begins to be problematic and inconvenient, or potentially extremely costly at a household level, which affects your entire household financial assets and wellbeing.”
There are also societal responses to sea level rising already happening, said Shi, pointing to the cost of property insurance and in some cases the lack of availability of it.
“On the one hand, you see that insurance companies are trying to lower their own risks from climate change. They're going to start escalating those costs in order to try to get to an actuarial level, where their costs equal their damages that they have to pay out,” Shi said. “On the other hand, at some point, what we're seeing is that insurance companies are beginning to pull out of places that they perceive to be extremely at risk.”
Citizens Property Insurance Corp., the state-backed insurer of last resort, had 1.17 million policies as of March 31, 2024, after private insurers left the state following Hurricane Idalia.
Putting in the work
Warming oceans are thought to be causing more severe hurricanes but Butler said it’s not all bad.
When addressing policy issues to combat flooding, Cape Canaveral uses major weather events to drum up support from residents.
“A big accelerant that we've used in the last few years was Hurricane Ian. It genuinely scared a lot of individuals. I think it was a wake up call for many who had recently moved to the state. We were able to use it to really push forward a few different projects, where we saw several vulnerabilities highlighted through Ian's passage. It is kind of a dark race, but you never let a good crisis go to waste.” said Zach Eichholz, the city's chief resilience manager.
Cape Canaveral is working to address the issues of sea level rise by investing in both green and gray infrastructure.
They’re planning to break ground this year on a permanent pump station and tidal valve system in an effort to alleviate flooding in the Center Street Drainage Basin.
The tidal valve will prevent water from the Banana River Lagoon, where the basin drains, from backflowing into the stormwater system during periods of heavy rain.
“Then the pump will pump water around the tidal valve and out into the lagoon safely to draw down the existing system and return it to almost like a predevelopment level where the system will have as much capacity as it physically can to be able to handle storm situations much better,” said Eichholz.
Over the past five years, Eichholz said they have been leaning more heavily on green infrastructure adaptation projects, spending roughly between $2 million to $5 million dollars.
“Because if it's done correctly, those assets can appreciate over time, whereas you will always see a depreciation in traditional gray infrastructure that will require maintenance, upkeep, repair, monitoring,” he said. “That is, of course, the case with green infrastructure. But those assets being usually plants, trees, or some other type of nature based solution will literally grow and compound on their success.”
For example, since 2005 the city has hosted an annual sea oats planting event with the goal of planting 220,000 sea oats by 2035. As of this year, the city has planted 196,838.
“The 2004 hurricane season devastated the coastal dunes here and really left no beach protection for coastal residents. Since then, with these planting efforts, we've been able to push the dune system back out upwards of 100 feet and have a well vegetated dune line that performed extremely well during Hurricane Nicole in November of 2022.”
Eichholz said the city is also installing a system of remote sensor sites across Cape Canaveral that will relay water level and climatological data in real time.
“ So we can understand what's happening to us in real time on a street by street level,” he said. “That information is not only for emergency first responders, but also to engineering firms that help us with projects, such as the Center Street Basin pump station.”
Cape Canaveral’s comprehensive approach is a good example of how to address some of the threats to sea level rise, according to FSU’s Butler.
“There are real costs involved in any one of these kinds of projects, and diversifying the range of revenue sources can really help address that whether there are public private revenue sharing sources, there's federal and state, as well as local kinds of resources that can be brought to bear on,” he said.
But, Butler said, there may also need to be new kinds of financing mechanisms that can facilitate the kinds of investments that are going to be necessary in the future of Florida.
Funding and equity
According to the study’s survey of coastal planners and managers, the top challenge to addressing sea level rise is funding for implementation and funding for planning.
“Now that money is flowing through the Resilient Florida program, that may address some of those barriers around funding a little bit,” said Butler. “Although billions were requested, they only were able to find about $600 million for direct implementation of projects.”
That’s why cities like Cape Canaveral are leveraging public and private partners to help with planning and funding projects.
“One of the primary resources that we've been using as the East Central Florida Regional Planning Council,” said Zach Eichholz. “They've been pretty invaluable to help us with many things, including acquiring grants to help fund projects.”
Eichholz said the city also used a grant awarded by the National Science Foundation to complete the development of the Veterans Memorial Park “Smart” Rain Garden, which treats stormwater runoff from the surrounding area before entering the Banana River Lagoon.
“This particular project had, including the city, 14 grant partners on it, which was the most we've ever had,” said Eichholz.
While municipalities figure out how to combat the impacts of sea level rise and potential fiscal losses, Linda Shi said, cities that are the smallest by population and land size, the richest and whitest are going to be among the most impacted.
“So you can imagine a lot of small barrier island municipalities, that is basically a lot of the demographics that we're talking about seeing the most,” she said. “Because they're very small, there's nowhere else to spread that risk. There's nobody generating tax dollars, except for residential properties, which tend to be in mid to high rise condos.”
However, Shi said those who have the ability to easily move out of flood risk zones will leaving behind those who don’t have the means while possibly displacing other low income residents in there newly chosen communities.
“A real concern that groups that historically have benefited from public investment, subsidies, taxes, housing, preferential development of various kinds are again going to be better able to avail of safer and more resilient housing,” she said. “While groups that historically have not benefited from those investments are again going to be shafted to less resilient, more flood prone, and more affordable housing in low lying places.”
To ensure help is getting to all resident and combat the issues of flooding and sea level rise, Butler said there’s an opportunity to reenvision the system.
“There are pieces of the system that we have the opportunity to improve, to make better, more equitable, more sustainable, to make healthier opportunities for thriving communities,” said Butler. “We want people to stay in Florida and to thrive in Florida, we should be working on those aspects too because we need a place where it's an inclusive place where people can live for the long term.”
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