FHA seeks applications for new transportation resilience grants

The Federal Highway Administration has opened the application period for a new discretionary grant program called PROTECT (Promoting Resilient Operations for Transformative, Efficient and Cost-Saving Transportation). Up to $848 million is available.

Established through the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, the PROTECT program is intended to help make surface transportation more resilient to natural hazards, including climate change, sea level rise, flooding, extreme weather events, and other natural disasters, through support of planning activities, resilience improvements, community resilience and evacuation routes, and at-risk coastal infrastructure.

The program offers competitive funding in four areas:
• Planning Grants: To include resilience planning, predesign, design, or the development of data tools to simulate transportation disruption scenarios, including vulnerability assessments; technical capacity building to facilitate the ability of the eligible entity to assess the vulnerabilities of its surface transportation assets and community response strategies under current conditions and a range of potential future conditions; or evacuation planning and preparation
• Resilience Improvement Grants: To improve the ability of an existing surface transportation asset to withstand one or more elements of a weather event or natural disaster, or to increase the resilience of surface transportation infrastructure from the impacts of changing conditions, such as sea level rise, flooding, wildfires, extreme weather events, and other natural disasters
• Community Resilience and Evacuation Route Grants: To strengthen and protect evacuation routes that are essential for providing and supporting evacuations caused by emergency events
• At-Risk Coastal Infrastructure Grants: To strengthen, stabilize, harden, elevate, relocate or otherwise enhance the resilience of highway and non-rail infrastructure, including bridges, roads, pedestrian walkways, and bicycle lanes, and associated infrastructure, such as culverts and tide gates to protect highways that are subject to, or face increased long-term future risks of, a weather event, a natural disaster, or changing conditions, including coastal flooding, coastal erosion, wave action, storm surge, or sea level rise, in order to improve transportation and public safety and to reduce costs by avoiding larger future maintenance or rebuilding costs

State, local and tribal governments are eligible to apply, as well as metropolitan planning organizations, special purpose districts with a transportation function, and multi-jurisdictional groups of entities including federal land management agencies in collaboration with states or groups of states.

Not less than 25% of available grant funding will be available for rural areas that are outside an urbanized area with a population of more than 200,000.

Applications are due by Aug. 18 via Grants.gov. An informational webinar and the notice of funding opportunity are available online. Inquiries may be sent to PROTECTdiscretionary@dot.gov.