Flooding issues bring attention to one of DC’s first projects under new resilience strategy

As commuters abandoned cars to flash flooding a week ago while about a month’s worth of rain fell on DC  in just an hour, residents saw “an example of what makes resilience planning so important,” according to the District’s deputy chief resilience officer, Harrison Newton. 

Thanks to Newton and DC’s Office of Resilience, the city has a new tool to prepare for emergencies like last Monday’s flooding — the Resilient DC strategy, developed over the past two years and unveiled by Mayor Muriel Bowser in late April during a forum at the National League of Cities.

It is a “prioritization plan,” according to Newton, a way for various District agencies to coordinate their efforts and make sure they are collaborating wherever possible to deal with crises. 

The need for DC to respond to flash flooding underscores the value of having an overarching plan in place, officials say. Although rainfall, coastal surges, and overflow from the Potomac and Anacostia rivers can all contribute to flooding in DC, the city is just beginning work on a plan that takes into account all three sources. 

Development of an integrated plan had been on the DC Department of Energy and Environment’s agenda for years, Newton said, but it wasn’t funded until work on Resilient DC brought the relevant agencies together and on the same page. In May, the DC Council approved a provision in the mayor’s capital budget for $5.8 million over the next four fiscal years so DOEE can develop “the first-ever integrated urban flood model for the District to identify gaps that can be targeted by the District’s Resilience Strategy and better realize the goals of Climate Ready DC.”

“The model would allow us to best predict what areas of the city would be most affected by severe events,” Newton said. “The District’s resilience plan is meant so when we have an event like we saw [last] week, the District’s residents are impacted as little as possible.” 

Newton said long-term stress — due to factors such as poverty, community trauma and distressed transportation systems — weakens a city’s ability to handle more acute shocks, like floods, earthquakes or human-made challenges such as government shutdowns.

“When we talk about resilience, what we’re really saying is [that] we want our communities, our government actors, our many stakeholders being able to adapt, thrive and grow in the face of those stresses and shocks,” Newton said.

Work on Resilient DC began in 2017 when the District won a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation’s 100 Resilient Cities program to prepare the report and hire Kevin Bush, chief resilience officer (CRO). The grants, funded by a $164 million commitment from the Rockefeller Foundation, provided funding to hire CROs in cities around the world, pay the first two years of their salaries and create plans like Resilient DC.

DC officials met with over 100 community stakeholders to put together their application for the grant. “Inequity was a theme, no matter what the challenge,” Newton said. In parts of the plan where inequity is a focus, he added, “that is the result of a great deal of community engagement and responsiveness.” 

“When a sudden shock hits, who is most impacted adversely by that disaster?” he added. “Usually it’s going to be vulnerable populations, economically distressed communities. They bear the brunt of an acute shock.”

The emphasis on equity is evident in the priorities of the integrated flood plan, Newton said. “[It’s] a world-class approach to understanding how the three types of flooding that can occur in our city relate to each other, and how specifically they threaten communities — often communities of color and communities where folks are economically distressed.”

According to Corinne LeTourneau, managing director for North America at 100 Resilient Cities, DC’s commitment to community engagement set its application apart from most others. DC’s application emphasized “breaking down the silos of government and bringing in a lot of voices,” LeTourneau said.

The plan is focused on four goals: including all D.C. residents in the city’s economic growth, preparing for the impacts of climate change, adapting to changing technology, and improving health and safety. The plan categorizes 68 initiatives by how they relate to one of the four goals and the relevant agencies involved.

For instance, under the umbrella goal of improving the city’s health and safety, the plan directs agencies to reduce crime by expanding services for returning citizens. The plan directs four entities — the Department of Employment Services, the Department of Behavioral Health, the Mayor’s Office on Returning Citizens Affairs, and the Department of Motor Vehicles — to collaborate on the READY Center, a resource for returning citizens to access housing and employment assistance. 

The plan also takes aim at the scarcity of affordable housing in D.C. with an initiative to produce 12,000 new units of affordable housing by 2023 through a partnership among the Department of Housing and Community Development, the Housing Production Trust Fund Board, the DC Housing Finance Agency, the DC Housing Authority, and the Office of the Deputy Mayor for Planning and Economic Development. 

The initiative includes increasing the city’s annual investment in the Housing Production Trust Fund from $100 million to $130 million to meet the goal. The council trimmed the mayor’s proposed 2020 funding of $130 million by $10 million, shifting some of the funds to another housing program.

Other parts of Resilient DC are generally focused on economic opportunity, technology, climate action and governance. Newton said they studied existing plans like Sustainable DC, Climate Ready DC and Vision Zero and looked for ways for the CRO’s office to coordinate budgeting, performance tracking and other administrative processes for those initiatives.

A few weeks before the unveiling of the Resilient DC strategy, the Rockefeller Foundation announced that it had decided to redirect its 100 Resilient Cities funding away from direct grants and toward related projects, including a new office within the foundation and a new initiative through the Atlantic Council, an international affairs think tank. The planned wind-down will not affect DC’s resilience strategy, because the District has institutionalized the CRO position within the city administrator’s office and will fund it through the city’s own budget.

Now that the DC strategy is complete, Newton said, it falls to the CRO to ensure the priorities outlined in the document are being pursued. Newton said Bush will work on establishing mechanisms to monitor progress on the program’s various components and hold agencies accountable for implementation.

Many of the goals will take years to reach, but others are achievable in the immediate future. The integrated flood model, according to Newton, is an example of the “short-term wins that are going to go a long way toward protecting District residents and making sure the mayor’s promises are delivered on in terms of making sure our residents are safe.”