<figure><figcaption> The Veterans Memorial Park "Smart" Rain Garden in The City of Cape Canaveral works to treat stormwater runoff before entering the Banana River Lagoon. (Talia Blake / Central Florida Public Media)</figcaption></figure>

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 University and Cornell.

Researchers believe the United States will likely see two feet of sea level rise over the next 21 years, and chronic or bi-weekly 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 Florida State University.

“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 University, 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.”

<figure><figcaption> Impact of 6.6 ft of sea level rise on municipal revenues in Florida (Shi, L., Butler, W., Holmes, T., Thomas, R., Milordis, A., Ignatowski, J., … Aldag, A. M. (2024). / Can Florida’s Coast Survive Its Reliance on Development? Fiscal Vulnerability and Funding Woes Under Sea Level Rise. Journal of the American Planning Association)</figcaption></figure>

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, The City of 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, Chief Resilience Manager for the City of Cape Canaveral.

The City of 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 back-flowing 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 pre-development 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.”

<figure><figcaption>A weather sensor located on the roof of City Hall in Cape Canaveral.(Talia Blake / Central Florida Public Media)</figcaption></figure>

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 Will 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 & 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