Editor’s note: This commentary is by Nick Clark, an at-large member of the Progressive Party’s Coordinating Committee, a Thetford Selectboard member, and a candidate for Vermont House in 2016 and 2018.
Climate projections for Vermont indicate that we will experience more intense and prolonged summer storms (“Regional climate change projections for the Northeast USA,” Hayhoe, Katharine et al.). This will increase our risk for flood damage. Most notable and costly is damage caused to public infrastructure, and specifically to roads and bridges. As a general rule, the cost of rebuilding a road can average $1 million per mile.
Not every town is affected similarly in every storm. In Thetford, where I was recently elected to the Selectboard, Tropical Storm Irene was relatively uneventful. However, the storm of July 2017 left Thetford one of the hardest hit towns in the state. In an interview with the Valley News, our emergency management director estimated that up to a quarter of homes had limited road access. The damage warranted a visit from the governor.
The July 2017 storm was declared a disaster, which meant that the town was eligible for federal aid money. The Federal Emergency Management Agency and the Federal Highway Administration both extended lines of credit for over $2 million each. Not obvious to the public, however, is that federal aid money is reimbursed after a disaster, not during.
Those reimbursements can take years to arrive – some towns are still waiting on checks related to Irene. The money needed for repairs, in the short term, is often borrowed, which means that towns with significant flood damage get stuck paying interest on disaster-related loans until (and if) federal reimbursements arrive.
The Thetford Town Report shows that in the 2018 calendar year, the town paid $61,177 in interest on disaster-related loans. The 2018 interest payments alone represented 5.6% of the town’s total Public Works budget. The interest payments represented in themselves a 5.9% increase over the previous year’s Public Works budget. A property assessed at $250,000 paid an additional estimated $43.44 in property taxes — this individual burden would’ve been higher in a smaller and/or less wealthy town.
Thetford budgeted $67,250 for disaster-related interest payments for the 2019 calendar year, up from $60,000, while starting the year with over $2.5 million in outstanding disaster-related debt from the July 2017 storm.
Not all storms cause flooding and not all flooding is extensive enough to necessitate disaster-related borrowing, however even minor damage has a price tag. In the spring of 2019, a culvert in Thetford failed during a storm and washed out part of a gravel road — the repair, with parts and labor, was roughly $30,000.
There is a very real, local cost to climate change with or without federal aid money. The questions are, can towns — can residents — afford it, and will local and state government lead on the issue? What is our plan?
