Funding What’s at Risk

How Resilience Should Follow Risk: Making CFPF Work for Every Locality

October, 2025

Community Flood Preparedness Fund (CFPF) Round 6 delivers a substantial new infusion of support to local flood resilience across Virginia, with $99 million awarded to help localities move from risk assessment through planning and into implementation. The CFPF, in practical terms, is an engine for turning scientific insights and data-driven design into actual community protection. In a moment of federal uncertainty, the CFPF helps close the resilience funding gap by making sure resilience does not depend on a shifting set of federal priorities.

The CFPF is a lifeline for communities experiencing flood risk, but it can also serve as a difficult stress test for localities experiencing capacity challenges. Communities with specialized staff and well-established procedures tend to compete effectively for these awards, while under-resourced communities can find the process hard to navigate, regardless of the urgency of community needs or the quality of the proposed work.

If this pattern holds, Virginia risks drifting into a two-tier resilience landscape with one set of outcomes reserved for localities with deeper internal capacity, and quite another for those with fewer staff and narrower administrative bandwidths.

This is precisely the opposite of what the Community Flood Preparedness Fund is designed to accomplish.

Wetlands Watch addresses the capacity gap directly by helping all localities, especially those with limited staff capacity, compete for CFPF awards and carry that work forward after an award is made. We provide funding guidance, technical assistance, and peer-to-peer exchanges that help communities translate urgent flood risk into a clear, competitive project story, with a scope and budget that can stand up to review. 

Our goal is for CFPF-funded projects to follow the map of flood risk, not the map of who has the bandwidth to apply.