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A conversation with Brian Ambrette, director of Maine’s new resilience office
When Governor Janet Mills introduced her landmark bipartisan climate law this January there was already broad agreement that Maine needed to do more to defend against rising sea levels and intensifying storms.
The widespread flooding that occurred a year prior exposed vast weaknesses in both local infrastructure and the state’s emergency response and recovery efforts.
More Maine communities than ever before applied for federal resilience grants and counted on them to bring vital projects to life.
But now, nearly seven months and billions of dollars into the Trump administration’s grant cancellations, a new playing field has come into focus, one with significantly less federal support.
Through state funds and a still unscathed $69 million grant from the National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration, it’s largely up to the new Maine Office of Community Affairs and State Resilience Office to help communities fortify their coastlines and infrastructure before the next major storm.
This week I spoke with Brian Ambrette, director of the resilience office, as his new program takes shape and tries to navigate the changing federal terrain.
The interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.
Could you start by providing a quick overview of your career and how you came to this position?
I started off with a land trust down in the Chesapeake Bay region, working with rural communities at the intersection of land conservation, land protection and coastal resilience issues.
In 2019, I was really fortunate to land as a climate resilience coordinator in the Maine Governor's Office of Policy Innovation and the Future and worked on the state climate plan, Maine Won’t Wait.
Then the next major project I worked on was the Infrastructure Rebuilding and Resilience Commission over the past year and a half, and it was that work that really led to the establishment of the State Resilience Office.
In your own words, why do you think the State Resilience Office is needed?
Across the country, governments at every level are really grappling with the challenges that are presented by the natural disasters that we're seeing.
It's important for an entity like the State Resilience Office to have this kind of high altitude vantage point to think about responses that can address multiple issues at a time, like threats to community safety, economic wellbeing and resilience posed by climate change.
We can provide benefits in that level of information preparation for community leaders. They don't have the hours to spend weeding through a GIS system, looking at flood maps and things like that. They need information that's packaged a little bit more with analysis that is anticipating the questions that they have and helps them make an informed decision relatively efficiently. Then they have access to folks who have either the expertise or the time to help them through decisions and get a project from concept to off the ground.
How many staff members will the office have and what's the general budget of the office? What are the office’s key duties and responsibilities?
The NOAA grant, in total, will supply about $22 million to the state resilience office. A significant portion of that will go out in grants to communities through the state’s Community Resilience Partnership (a grant program and network that has awarded over $18 million in grants for local resilience projects).
But the bulk of that funding will go towards building regional capacity at the regional councils (groups like the Lincoln County Regional Planning Commission that help prepare communities for the effects of climate change).
Then we will have four positions funded by the NOAA grant that include the director, myself, a resilience planner, communications planner, regional coordinator and two additional fellows that will focus on coastal and inland flood risks.
What challenges do the Trump administration’s dramatic cuts to federal climate resilience and disaster mitigation grants pose to the State Resilience Office?
I think the word of the day is uncertainty, and I think there’s simultaneous ways that we can work our way through that.
One is making good use of the funding programs that are available. Not everything has been terminated or paused at this point, which is good news. There's still uncertainty in the existing programs that are out there, and some folks still have access to the grant funds that have been awarded.
There's still the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s Safeguarding Tomorrow Revolving Loan Fund, which could potentially allow some sizable infrastructure resilience or hazard mitigation projects. That is a program that does actually start to build some state capacity for funding those kinds of projects. The Maine Office of Community Affairs, meanwhile, is developing a grants research tool that will help communities find existing state, federal and philanthropic grants for their local priorities.
Maine will need to become more self-resourced in its ability to make those kinds of proactive resilience investments. That was going to be true regardless of what the federal picture looked like, so this probably just puts a little bit in some more stark contrast, and brings it forward.
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