Posted on June 3, 2021
Combatting the effects of climate change in a cost-effective, fiscally responsible way requires innovative thinking and careful consideration of the challenge at hand.
Elected officials in Anne Arundel County and the City of Annapolis have proposed a solution that fits this framework — a local resilience authority, a tool designed to reduce burdens on taxpayers by bringing in outside investments to fund the region’s critical infrastructure and community assets at risk from climate change.
By establishing a resilience financing authority, county and city leaders will create a nationally unique, independent organization of experts that will transform infrastructure investments from a cost obligation to an investment opportunity.
Traditionally, funding for infrastructure built by local governments comes primarily through public budgets — from local general funds. Governments issue bonds that must be repaid through future tax dollars, which impacts debt limits, and thus the capacity to fund critical projects in the future. Working in partnership with private investors, the resilience authority will be able to finance projects without unduly impacting long-term debt limits and capacity.
A resilience authority will bring together experts in finance, infrastructure and climate adaptation into a single group that can look beyond municipal boundaries and annual budget constraints to design, fund and efficiently deliver projects for communities.
As a result, rather than increase the tax burden to city and county residents and businesses, a new resilience authority will add efficiency, transparency, and accountability to every dollar invested into the community’s long-term prosperity and resilience. Revenues from local taxes and fees will only flow to the authority at the discretion of elected officials.
The need for this innovative approach is significant — the anticipated impacts of climate change are well documented, and the implications for communities like Anne Arundel County and Annapolis are profound. Significant financial investments will be necessary to enable communities across the county and city to adapt and thrive in the face of these challenges.
For example, the 2018 National Climate Assessment notes that coastal zone counties account for nearly half of the nation’s population and economic activity and that cumulative damage to property in those areas could increase dramatically.
The silver lining is that investing in adaptation and resilience can be highly cost-effective. That same National Climate Assessment estimates that such measures could significantly reduce the cumulative damage to coastal property to about $800 billion instead of $3.5 trillion.
To be clear, the challenges facing coastal communities like Anne Arundel County are significant and imminent. With more than 500 miles of coastline, what makes the county such a unique and wonderful place is what makes it uniquely vulnerable.
Meeting these challenges will require more than campaign slogans and calls to inaction, which will only condemn our children and future generations to compromised infrastructure, a stressed economy, higher property taxes, and a decreased quality of life for years to come. Rather, success will require substantive policy approaches that have the wellbeing of current and future generations in mind.
The creation of a resilience authority for Anne Arundel County and the City of Annapolis embodies this type of creative and innovative thinking. By providing an efficient and effective mechanism for financing projects, the authority will have the singular purpose of investing in the infrastructure that drives the economy, protects the environment, and ensures a quality of life for generations to come.
In other words, the County and City’s proposed resilience authority is a bold and innovative local approach to resilient infrastructure, one with the potential to become a national model for investment in the years to come.
Joanne Throwe is the president of Throwe Environmental, a senior fellow at the University of Maryland School of Public Policy and a former deputy secretary of the Maryland Department of Natural Resources. She lives in Annapolis.
