Wisconsin’s Pre-Disaster Flood Resilience Grant continued

The Joint Committee on Finance voted on Tuesday to continue the Pre-Disaster Flood Resilience Grant by allocating $2 million in the 2025-27 budget. With this investment, flood prone communities in Wisconsin will continue to have access to an innovative program focused on reducing flood hazards by restoring wetlands, streams, and floodplains. Initiated in the last budget, the creation and continuation of this program has been a top priority of the Wisconsin Wetlands Association.

The Pre-Disaster Flood Resilience Grant is a competitive grant program for local governments and tribes that offers two types of grants:

Assessment grants enable gathering watershed, catchment, or stream reach scale vulnerability data to understand how water is flowing and contributing to flood risks; or
Implementation grants enable wetland, stream, and floodplain hydrologic restoration projects that re-establish the landscape’s natural capacity to reduce flooding and protect vulnerable infrastructure.

Flooding is Wisconsin’s most frequent and costly disaster. Many communities are looking for ways to lower the cost and severity of flood damages by proactively and strategically working with nature to restore wetlands and floodplains. These natural features are designed to capture and reduce the energy of flood flows, while also offering other benefits.

In its inaugural grant cycle in the fall of 2024, the program provided funding for 11 projects across the state. The eight assessment projects that received funding include hydrologic and hydraulic studies, culvert inventories, and field assessments of flood vulnerabilities. The three implementation projects that received funding include restoration of wetlands and floodplain/river connections to improve the natural capacity to manage floodwaters.

Continuing the Pre-Disaster Flood Resilience Grant was supported by Governor Evers in his budget proposal and also championed by Senator Romaine Quinn and Representative Todd Novak in the legislative budget process. When the program was created in the 2023 legislative session, it had the wide bipartisan support of more than 30 legislators and passed unanimously through both houses. It also has the support of twenty organizations representing diverse interests in topics like emergency management, local government affairs, insurance, farming, and conservation.

To learn more about the Pre-Disaster Flood Resilience Grant, visit Wisconsin Emergency Management’s webpage.

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