Funding still needed for flood resiliency trust fund
By Steven Allen Adams, The Parkersburg News and Sentinel
CHARLESTON, W.Va. — More than eight years after catastrophic flooding hit southern West Virginia in 2016 and other flood events across the state since then, West Virginia is close to having an updated flood resiliency plan. But funding for flood resiliency remains elusive.
The State Resiliency Office (SRO) presented a flood resiliency plan to members of the SRO Board during its quarterly meeting on June 13, ahead of a June 30 deadline required by the passage of Senate Bill 677 during the 2023 legislative session.
Specifics of the new flood resiliency plan were not available, but it is based in part on the work done 20 years ago by state officials on a flood protection plan for West Virginia.The plan, first begun under Gov. Cecil Underwood in 1998 and completed under Gov. Bob Wise, was never implemented. After a review of the plan was completed by the end of 2022, the SRO told lawmakers it had no plans to update the plan at that time.
“A lot of good folks came together and put that plan together,” said SRO Director Bob Martin during a December 2023 meeting of the Joint Legislative Committee on Flooding. “Everything in it really still holds true today. Those are the things we’re going to be looking at to update and utilize for the plan we’re working on now.”
Now that the state has met the June 30 deadline for the new flood resiliency plan, the SRO is required to conduct annual reviews of the plan completed by June 30 of each year.
“Once we have the review up and an annual update of that plan, every time we go through it and look at it, it is going to be every year, It’s not going to sit on a shelf,” Martin said. “Apparently, that is what happened with the 2004 plan.”
