| NSF Org: |
CMMI Division of Civil, Mechanical, and Manufacturing Innovation |
| Recipient: |
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| Initial Amendment Date: | February 16, 2022 |
| Latest Amendment Date: | February 16, 2022 |
| Award Number: | 2053637 |
| Award Instrument: | Standard Grant |
| Program Manager: |
Giovanna Biscontin
gibiscon@nsf.gov (703)292-2339 CMMI Division of Civil, Mechanical, and Manufacturing Innovation ENG Directorate for Engineering |
| Start Date: | January 15, 2022 |
| End Date: | December 31, 2024 (Estimated) |
| Total Intended Award Amount: | $400,000.00 |
| Total Awarded Amount to Date: | $400,000.00 |
| Funds Obligated to Date: |
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| History of Investigator: |
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| Recipient Sponsored Research Office: |
3 RUTGERS PLZ NEW BRUNSWICK NJ US 08901-8559 (848)932-0150 |
| Sponsor Congressional District: |
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| Primary Place of Performance: |
33, Livingston Ave, EJ Bloustein New Brunswick NJ US 08901-1980 |
| Primary Place of
Performance Congressional District: |
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| Unique Entity Identifier (UEI): |
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| Parent UEI: |
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| NSF Program(s): | DRRG-Disaster Resilience Res G |
| Primary Program Source: |
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| Program Reference Code(s): |
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| Program Element Code(s): |
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| Award Agency Code: | 4900 |
| Fund Agency Code: | 4900 |
| Assistance Listing Number(s): | 47.041 |
ABSTRACT
This Disaster Resilience Research Grant (DRRG) project contributes to the advancement of national health, prosperity and welfare by creating new knowledge on how coastal storm and flood events affect municipal finances. Disasters may cause fiscal distress for local governments when revenues shrink and expenses grow, thereby affecting their ability to provide adequate local public services such as policing, public works, and education. The extent of local distress depends in part on what other actors do, including local property owners and higher levels of government. This project collects twenty years of New Jersey data from property tax records, municipal budgets, and state and federal budgets to create a fiscal impact model; uses a phone survey of coastal residents and focus groups with public officials to create a behavioral model; and joins them to support the deliberations of a stakeholder group based in coastal New Jersey. This group will explore ways to incentivize more effective management of coastal hazards and increase transparency about how coastal storm and flood events affect municipalities.
Better risk management in coastal areas depends in part on re-aligning the incentives experienced by households and local jurisdictions by changing the rules of the intergovernmental public finance. This project extends the method of Fiscal Impact Analysis, a widely used method to assess the local fiscal impacts of land use development proposals, to the situation where coastal hazards cause local fiscal impacts. It also develops a novel agent-based model of intergovernmental fiscal relations to allow strategic exploration of alternative incentive structures. The project integrates these two tools into a simulation modeling system that can support stakeholder deliberations about more protective coastal risk policy. More broadly, the project will help local decision makers to mitigate fiscal stresses from adaptation decisions outside the municipal sphere of influence. From an equity perspective, it serves fiscally distressed coastal communities that often have vulnerable residents residing in the flood plain.
This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.
PROJECT OUTCOMES REPORT
Disclaimer
This Project Outcomes Report for the General Public is displayed verbatim as submitted by the Principal Investigator (PI) for this award. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this Report are those of the PI and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation; NSF has not approved or endorsed its content.
Coastal hazards such as flooding associated with hurricanes can cause substantial amounts of physical damage to buildings located in harm’s way. That damage can threaten the fiscal health of local governments, especially those that depend on property tax revenues. Storm events may also increase the demand for public services such as public safety and debris removal. Concerns over adverse fiscal effects on local government budgets due to both the storm events themselves and the policy responses to such events, such as buyouts of repetitively flooded properties, have increased in recent years.
This project has developed tools to help local governments anticipate the likely effects on local revenues and expenditures that might result from storm events and associated policy responses. The first tool is a freely accessible, online database of demographic multipliers for the 50 US states that helps local decision makers understand how the gain or loss of specific types of housing units might affect the number of school children, elderly people, and other residents who need public services within a jurisdiction. The ability to filter by housing size, type, tenure, and value allows much more realistic fiscal and climate modeling. The second tool is a freely accessible, online fiscal impact assessment tool that estimates how both revenues and expenditures will change for local government under user-inputted scenarios in which the number and type of housing unit changes because of storm damage or other events. The third tool is an extension of an existing online platform that maps coastal flooding and other hazards (NJ Adapt). The extension identifies which property parcels are affected by specific flood scenarios and calculates the market value of the damaged properties and the associated loss in municipal, county, and state property tax revenue associated with exposure to that hazard scenario. The assessment of property value loss and tax revenue exposure at the parcel level improves both risk assessment and fiscal planning. Analytical extensions compare the flooding impacts with past property buyouts, present construction activity and future credit ratings of municipalities. Detailed examples of one municipality and one county within NJ (Hoboken City and Hudson County), illustrate the real-world stakes. Finally, the project has conducted a public opinion survey to learn how New Jersey residents perceive coastal hazards, which risk management responses they prefer, and who should pay for disaster responses. A key concern of residents was the respective roles for property owners, local governments, state governments, and the federal government in paying for disaster response, highlighting the intergovernmental dimension of the fiscal challenges. Each of these activities has been developed for use in New Jersey but uses data sets that are available nationally, allowing wider application of the innovations developed in this project.
The intellectual merit of this project resided in linking disaster management tools including flood mapping to implications for local public finance in a context of fiscal federalism and sound public administration. The broader impact of this project was to make tools for understanding the fiscal aspects of disasters and policy responses more accessible to interested members of the public, professionals working this field, and public decision makers.
Last Modified: 04/28/2025
Modified by: Clinton J Andrews
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