Overlooked and Underwater: In a state flood resilience program, some inland communities feel forgotten

More than 4,000 travelers motor through the tiny Panhandle town of Esto (pop. 375) each day, zipping past a meat processor, a Baptist church, and a three-employee town hall minutes from the Alabama state line.

Its streets bear signs of years-long structural fatigue. The town’s patchwork of ditches and culverts can’t keep up with repeated heavy rains and flooding, which erode the roadside and pile up sediment. So, Esto’s engineering contractor recommended town staff apply to Resilient Florida, a state grant program that offers to help local governments prepare for growing flood risks by paying for them to study, then fix, their vulnerabilities.

Esto received $235,000 from the state in 2024 to draft a stormwater plan and, in its assessment, discovered something startling.

If erosion continues along First Avenue, one of the town’s main residential roads, there’s “a high risk that portions of the roadway could collapse,” engineers said. The next logical step was to apply for $3.2 million more in state funding to fix it in 2025.

But without providing any feedback to the town’s leadership, Resilient Florida staff turned away Esto’s proposal. State records obtained by WUFT show evaluators deemed the project “ineligible” because the local roadways it would fix are not considered “critical assets” under state law.

Town Clerk Ben Tew was disappointed when he got the news.

“ We've done all this planning work,” Tew said, “but if there is no implementation money, then what was the use?”

Since its inception, Resilient Florida has funded 347 infrastructure projects in coastal counties and just 30 in inland ones.

Coastal communities have received more than $1.6 billion toward project costs, nearly 20 times what inland counties have. Ninety-two percent of shovel-ready projects funded since the program’s launch are concentrated in coastal counties. More than half (52%) are in Miami-Dade, Broward and Palm Beach counties alone.

WUFT analyzed more than 1,200 applications submitted to the program over the past four application cycles and found coastal applicants have a higher award rate than their inland counterparts.

The discrepancies have left inland communities struggling to get their fair share of a fund created to serve all of Florida against flooding exacerbated by rising sea levels and stronger storms.

“ While Resilient Florida is necessary, it's not sufficient,” said Yoca Arditi-Rocha, CEO of The CLEO Institute, a nonpartisan, climate-focused nonprofit. Local governments are bringing forward projects to protect critical assets like main roads, hospitals and water treatment facilities. “The state is not keeping pace with the demand,” Arditi-Rocha said.

Sea level rise has made climate change tangible along Florida’s coasts for decades. Inland flood risks are rising, too, said Kerry Cook, a professor researching climate change at the University of Texas at Austin.

“ We are seeing increases in inland flooding in association with intensification of storms,” Cook said. “Storms are getting stronger, and they deliver more water per minute, for example.”

Aging infrastructure in rural, inland towns isn’t prepared to deal with the deluge, but tiny tax bases can’t fund the upgrades. That makes grant funding especially important for towns like Esto – and rejections especially disappointing.

“ I know Florida's big on the coast, and maybe that's what the main focus of this sort of resilient grant program is, but we are still Floridians here inland,” Tew said.

FLOODING A TOP PRIORITY

Linda Shi, associate professor at Cornell University's Department of City and Regional Planning, lives more than 800 miles from Florida, but focuses much of her research there because it’s “the ground zero of climate change impacts,” she said.

The state’s low-lying geography, long coastline and reliance on its coasts as moneymakers make it especially vulnerable to sea level rise, Shi and collaborators reported in a peer-reviewed 2023 paper.

With the 6.6 feet of sea level rise climate scientists project by 2100, she found more than half of Florida’s municipalities will lose revenue related to property taxes.

Yet “those with extreme levels of fiscal risk from sea level rise were not any more likely to be doing adaptation planning compared to those with much lower levels of fiscal risk,” Shi said.

When Shi surveyed the municipalities to ask why, the overwhelming answer was funding.

Legislators created Resilient Florida to provide that funding.

When Gov. Ron DeSantis signed the bill creating the program in 2021, his office called it “part of the largest investment in the state’s history – over $640 million – to support efforts to ensure state and local communities are prepared to deal with the impacts of sea level rise, intensified storms and flooding.”

The legislation also created the Florida Flood Hub, a center based at the University of South Florida that convenes workgroups of internationally recognized experts to guide flood research and modeling.

“Obviously the goal would be to put the available resources into protecting the most vulnerable assets,” said Chuck Jacoby, the hub’s strategic program director.

The hub estimates changes in sea level and intensity of rainfall and expects local governments to use those data when assessing flood risks. That ensures their results are standardized and reliable, Jacoby said. Since its inception, Resilient Florida has awarded more than $1.8 billion for “planning” projects to study local vulnerabilities and “implementation” projects to address them.

The latter are much more expensive, accounting for more than 90% of the program’s spending to date. Resilient Florida kicked off with an influx of federal dollars but is now funded by the state. Funds for the program come from gambling revenue and the state documentary stamp tax, typically collected on deeds and mortgages.

As the federal government cuts back on its climate spending, “a lot of other states are now looking to see who is well-positioned to kind of tackle resilience themselves,” said Rachel Rhode, a manager of flood resilience with the Environmental Defense Fund, a nonprofit focused on climate solutions, energy, ecosystems and human health. She pointed to Florida and Virginia as examples of strong investors in resilience.

But while Virginia historically paid for some of its upgrades with greenhouse gas fees from the power sector, Florida’s program doesn’t mention climate change.

It addresses symptoms of climate change, like flooding, without moving to reduce the human-generated greenhouse gas emissions that cause it.

“We keep mopping the floor of this overflowing bathtub,” Arditi-Rocha said, “and we're cleaning it with taxpayers' dollars.”

She’d like to see state legislators turn off the tap.

Arditi-Rocha said a “winning strategy” would target causes and effects of climate change with equal intensity. “Right now we're not doing that,” she said.

Orange County Rep. Anna Eskamani, who has served four terms in the Florida House and is running for Orlando mayor, called the program reactive rather than proactive.

“The state Legislature has, in so many ways, just turned a blind eye to climate change,” Eskamani said. “What ends up happening is that the focus of the program and the projects that are funded are more mitigating harm versus trying to prevent harm.”

Eskamani noted the program’s sparse inland awards are another shortcoming. Floodwaters from Lake Eola in downtown Orlando took days to dissipate after Hurricane Ian, she said, and street flooding is common during the rainy season.

Flood resilience, Eskamani said, “definitely needs to be a shared focus for all of our communities since we’re all directly impacted.”

Florida’s Chief Resilience Officer, Eddy Bouza, did not respond to questions on the program’s geographic priorities nor agreed to our request for an interview to answer questions about the program.

A COASTAL DISPARITY

Resilient Florida replaced a similarly named but coastal-only predecessor, the Florida Resilient Coastlines Program. The change opened up millions of dollars in state funding to inland communities that hadn’t previously been eligible, yet WUFT’s analysis of all applications submitted to the program indicates they may still be missing out on their share.

Resilient Florida awarded 347 implementation grants to communities in coastal counties and 30 to those in inland counties between the program’s launch in 2021 and last award announcement in July 2026.

That’s not just because inland communities apply less, though they do. WUFT’s analysis revealed, over the past four application cycles, inland communities have lower success rates in getting shovel-ready projects approved than their coastal counterparts.

During that time, Resilient Florida funded about 27% of the coastal infrastructure projects submitted compared to about 16% of inland ones.

WUFT reached out to the Florida Department of Environmental Protection, which administers the program, 10 times between May and July 2026 to respond to WUFT’s questions on the apparent discrepancy. Resilient Florida staff provided a spreadsheet of applications submitted to the program and, at our request, evaluator comments on five specific applications named in this story.

Communications staff acknowledged receipt of a summary of WUFT’s findings but didn’t answer questions on the record or make staff available for an interview.

The funded projects fill critical needs in coastal counties, which house about three-quarters of the state’s population, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

In Daytona Beach, $15 million from Resilient Florida helped relocate the city’s main fire station and emergency operations center after repeated flooding made it unusable during major storms in 2022. Broward County received $32.5 million from the program in 2023 to build a higher seawall in Port Everglades, a significant hub for both cargo and cruise ships, to prepare for continued sea level rise. The South Florida Water Management District has been awarded more than $100 million in Resilient Florida funds to tackle flooding and saltwater intrusion in and around Miami-Dade County.

But the inland projects that missed out have high stakes, too.

The City of Longwood in Seminole County, about 15 miles north of downtown Orlando, applied for $3 million in 2022 to relocate its fire station because flooding “threatened to disrupt emergency response for the entire community,” of more than 15,500 residents. The program didn’t fund the relocation that year and found it ineligible the following year when Longwood reapplied because of “insufficient documentation to identify flood risk,” documents obtained by WUFT show.

Evaluators’ scores and notes are public records, meaning anyone can request them. Tew, in Esto, didn’t know he could ask. It’s unclear how many applicants do, as FDEP staff didn’t share how many requests they’ve received, and if, or how they make the option known.

Thirty-five miles west of Longwood, a $4.8 million request from the City of Mascotte in Lake County to relocate its water treatment plant and public works building qualified in 2024, but didn’t rank highly enough to win the cash.

Two months after Mascotte learned it didn’t make the cut, Hurricane Milton caused “severe flooding” onsite, just as engineers had warned. The city applied for help again in 2025, noting, “the event triggered high wet well alarms and caused operational disruptions across Mascotte’s infrastructure.” It ranked 96th of 123 eligible projects this cycle, lower than the last time it applied.

The disparity between inland and coastal grant numbers didn’t come as a surprise to Amanda Boone, a senior project manager with Woodard & Curran, an environmental consulting firm.

Municipalities hire engineering firms like Boone’s to study their flood vulnerabilities through one side of Resilient Florida and manage construction work on the other side. Municipalities typically use grant funds to pay them.

“The program, I think, really originally kicked off with a lot of the coastal communities,” Boone said. “I think that was the primary forward focus and inland communities have kind of come after that.”

In 2015, partially driven by insurance companies’ warnings, Florida’s Peril of Flood Act required coastal communities to account for sea level rise in their comprehensive plans, according to Shi, the researcher at Cornell.

Resilient Florida's rubric scores projects on risk mitigation (40%), project readiness and ecological value (30%), local funding and construction standards (20%) and innovation and community assistance (10%). When it came time to make the case for funding, built-up coastal communities could demonstrate their vulnerabilities through data.

But those same vulnerabilities didn’t deter developers, said Kim Dinkins, policy and planning director for the smart growth nonprofit, 1000 Friends of Florida. “We're seeing this desire to intensify building in areas where we are seeing more impacts of sea level rise and impacts of these stronger and more frequent storms,” Dinkins said.

Buyout programs like those guiding development away from coastlines in New York, Massachusetts, North Carolina and Texas are “completely anathema” in Florida, Shi said. Still, some coastal residents are moving inland on their own.

Alachua County, for example, expects an influx of 23,000 climate migrants from Florida’s coasts in the next 75 years, according to the Bureau of Economic and Business Research at the University of Florida.

That makes inland communities’ flood resilience projects even more crucial, Dinkins said. “Not only are they going to have the impacts of the more frequent and intense storms, but they're going to have more people that they have to deal with.”

Most communities have now completed studies of their flood risk, according to the 2025-2026 Resilient Florida annual plan.

As of 2024, FDEP required those studies for communities to qualify for future funding, said Diane Quigley, a senior project manager with the engineering firm Stantec. She was director of the Resilient Florida program during its first year.

Now that inland applicants have the data their coastal counterparts began tracking more than a decade ago, does Quigley expect inland applicants to start getting more grants to make the upgrades they need?

“I hope so,” she said. “I hope they understand that they're just as eligible.”

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