The University of Rhode Island’s Master of Public Administration program held a virtual event on April 13 titled “Challenges and Opportunities for Green Infrastructure, Stormwater, and Resilience Funding in Rhode Island” about policy recommendations aimed at Rhode Island municipalities based on the results of a study the program conducted.
For the study, the MPA team interviewed over 40 public, nonprofit and private stakeholders involved in the green infrastructure, stormwater management and climate resilience network in Rhode Island. The purpose of the study was to learn about the challenges Rhode Island municipalities have with financing projects.
Aaron Ley, an associate professor in the department of political science and director of the master of public administration (MPA) program, explained that the study participants were asked open-ended questions about dominant stormwater infrastructure funding mechanisms.
Courtney Greene is an MPA student and project partner at Throwe Environmental, a company that assists organizations with finding solutions to environmental challenges. She said there are three popular financial instruments used in stormwater infrastructure and management identified in the survey: grants, bonds and tax increment financing (TIF).
For each different financial instrument, Ley described the benefits and challenges that the participants mentioned. He said there were 24 mentions of benefits and 25 mentions of challenges associated with grants and described the most common responses in each category. Grant benefits included having access to more capital, networking and education opportunities while challenges include capacity and grant requirements.
“We’re doing the best with what we can, but it’s not a comprehensive approach,” Ley said, citing a participant’s response to the open-ended question about grants.
Greene introduced bonds, a fixed-income security that accrues interest over time that are cashed in for their face value once fully returned and mentioned a specific type of bond related to the study.
“Green bonds are a specific type of bond issue to raise funds specifically for climate-related projects,” Greene said.
The study revealed 31 mentions of benefits, most commonly the influx of funding and the potential use of bond money as leverage for other funding sources. There were 57 mentions of challenges, including executing ballot campaigns, servicing debt and the lack of sustainability.
Greene said that a little over half of the participants had knowledge of TIF districts as financing instruments, which are districts established by municipalities for development such as infrastructure upgrades.
Ley said there were 13 mentions of benefits, such as the ability to finance development without raising taxes and 23 mentions of challenges, specifically the difficulty of educating the public about TIF districts.
“You have a lot of people, oftentimes, who don’t know what it [TIF] is and hear ‘tax’ as the first word and have a Pavlovian response against it,” said an anonymous participant from the survey. “So you need a great advocacy campaign to lead in and you need a really good, disciplined political body to say what the money is going to be used for.”
Ley said the survey concluded by asking participants what ideal changes they would like to see with stormwater infrastructure.
“One of the things that we noticed was that participants described public education as a persistent challenge for almost all financing mechanisms,” Ley said. “So we want to encourage folks to tailor the level of stakeholder engagement efforts to the public’s knowledge gap on some of these issues.”
Participants also suggested adopting incremental financing instruments that reward property owners, developing regional capacity by identifying opportunities to work with other municipalities on watershed-level problems and developing an inventory of watershed projects that can be developed as concepts.
“We still have a lot of analysis to do,” Ley said. “We just really scratched the surface with our preliminary analysis of some of these, these patterns that we were analyzing.”