Rebuilding with Resilience

PURPOSE & ROADMAP
2016 is the two-year anniversary of the announcement of the winning RBD proposals. It marks an opportunity
to take stock of the challenges that the grantees are encountering as they work to implement these ambitious and
visionary projects, and to examine the lessons they are learning along the way. The success of these projects will
depend on a number of factors:
• The ability of grantees to move these projects from concept to implementation, to deliver the range of
resilience values described in the RBD proposals, and to develop a longer-term vision for achieving the broader
goals of the RBD proposals; and
• The ability of federal, state, and local decisionmakers to learn from these projects and to institute
broader legal and policy reforms so that these practices can be replicated and scaled throughout these
communities and regions, and in other places.
To that end, this report is designed to help others learn from the obstacles and opportunities exposed by
implementation of the RBD projects, including:
• Needed legal and policy reforms — This report documents how the grantees are navigating and
overcoming legal and policy barriers. The hope is that local, state, and federal decisionmakers can use the
lessons the grantees are learning to make reforms to laws, policies, and regulations, where needed, so that
these types of innovative projects will have easier pathways forward in the future.
• Opportunities to institutionalize, scale up, and replicate — To have the broad effect envisioned by
the competition, decisionmakers at all levels of government will need to determine how to institutionalize, scale
up, and replicate the innovative practices developed through the RBD competition and identified in the RBD
proposals. Additionally, to achieve the more holistic resilience visions laid out in the proposals, each of the
grantees will need to find other ways to fund and implement future phases of work. The state and community
beneficiaries can scale up implementation with other sources of funding and through other regulatory
pathways. 13 State and federal policymakers will also need to figure out how to learn from these RBD projects
so that the practices can be encouraged and replicated in other cities, regions, and states. For example, the
competition can inform how federal agencies administer disaster recovery programs and other funding sources,
and these projects can help regulators at all levels of government improve and streamline permitting
of resilience projects.
This report first describes the common resilience interventions that were proposed in each of the winning
proposals (e.g., nature-based coastal defenses, green infrastructure, and land-use approaches) and the shared
challenges and lessons learned for each of these interventions. It then provides a summary of the legal and policy
challenges that the grantees are facing as they work to implement their RBD projects and describes how the
grantees are working to overcome those challenges.
After this summary chapter, the report includes individual case studies of each of the winning RBD proposals
to describe how each of the grantees are transitioning to develop specific capital-improvement projects that
can be implemented with the CDBG-DR funding. These case studies include discussion of the legal and policy
challenges particular to each project and the pathways the grantees are exploring for overcoming challenges and
scoping future phases of work. The lessons included in this summary are derived from these case studies. 14
7 Chapter 1: Summary of Lessons Learned | Rebuilding with Resilience GEORGETOWN CLIMATE CENTER