A new round of federal flood dollars is open, and the design work runs through engineering firms. FEMA opened a $600 million funding round under its Fiscal Year 2026 Flood Mitigation Assistance Swift Current program, aimed at cutting repeated flood damage to homes and buildings insured through the National Flood Insurance Program. Swift Current ties the money to recent disasters, so communities in areas with a presidentially declared flood emergency between June 2025 and May 2027 can apply, on deadlines that follow each disaster rather than one national cutoff. States, tribal nations, and territories apply directly, and local governments pursue projects through their state hazard mitigation officer. The dollars pay for the work that pulls repetitive-loss properties out of harm’s way, typically property acquisitions, elevations, and localized flood-control projects, and each one needs benefit-cost analysis, hydraulic modeling, and design. It is worth noting that FEMA no longer covers project scoping as an eligible cost, which shifts that early engineering onto applicants and their consultants.
Sources: Stormwater Solutions, July 16; FEMA, Flood Mitigation Assistance Swift Current
POLICY Minnesota’s plumbing-code rewrite for stormwater is still unsettled, and the jurisdiction question sits at its center. At its July 21 meeting, the Plumbing Board’s ad hoc committee continued its reconsideration of Chapter 15 of the 2024 Uniform Plumbing Code, which reaches stormwater reuse and non-potable outdoor water use. A coalition pressed the board to drop Chapter 15 entirely, largely because the draft bars stormwater as a reuse source, which they say conflicts with state and federal stormwater rules and Minnesota’s low-impact-development practice. Work continues at meetings this fall. The open question is jurisdictional and relates to whether the plumbing code, or agencies like the Department of Health and the Pollution Control Agency working from the state’s stormwater standards, should govern site stormwater and drainage design.
Source: Minnesota Department of Labor and Industry, Plumbing Board (July 21 ad hoc committee meeting)
BIZ Data-center developers are throwing cash at project approvals, and the terms increasingly carry engineering. A national trend report this week catalogs how far the offers have gone. In Pennsylvania, builder NorthPoint Development revived a rejected project with a $165 million package that included $10,000 in cash to every township resident once the project earns its certificate of occupancy, a $15 million community fund, and $7 million a year for 15 years. In Virginia, a developer reportedly offered 143 homeowners $4.4 million each. Advisers in the piece say the one-time checks do not settle projects on their own, and the agreements that succeed layer in operational covenants on water use, energy, and noise, along with infrastructure investment and environmental commitments. That is the part that lands on firms. Minnesota is in the thick of it, from Hermantown, where the council just approved reimbursements tied to a Google project’s transmission review, to Faribault, now drafting performance standards for a proposed facility. As these community benefits agreements harden into enforceable technical standards, consulting engineers are the ones who size the water and power demand, model the noise, and verify the commitments.
Sources: Minneapolis/St. Paul Business Journal, July 20; Northern News Now, July 7
FUNDING Congress is lining up a stopgap, and the timing pushes the real spending fight past the election. House leaders are moving a continuing resolution that would carry federal spending into the new fiscal year at current levels through December 4, with a floor vote expected before the August recess. A stopgap keeps agencies open and formula programs like the infrastructure law’s highway and water dollars flowing, and it also holds new starts and program increases at last year’s levels and defers the full-year decisions. Those decisions matter for firms. The House Appropriations Committee’s Fiscal Year 2027 transportation and housing bill, approved in June, sets discretionary spending for those agencies about 10 percent below the current year, and a stopgap into December leaves that number unsettled through the fall. The near-term picture appears stable, and the risk sits in the discretionary grant programs that ride on top of the formula base.
Sources: Just the News, July 20; House Appropriations Committee, June 3
Benefit-cost analysis (BCA). The calculation FEMA requires for a mitigation grant, comparing a project’s lifetime avoided flood losses against its cost and expressing the result as a benefit-cost ratio. FEMA generally funds Flood Mitigation Assistance projects only when that ratio reaches 1.0 or higher, meaning the damages a project is expected to prevent at least equal what it costs to build. Engineers assemble these cases with hydrologic and hydraulic modeling, damage estimates, and cost data, so a sound BCA often decides whether a community’s flood project earns federal dollars.
Build your bench: ACEC Minnesota’s Leadership Development Series for mid-career professionals runs September 2026 through April 2027 in a 24-person cohort, and the four-session Emerging Leaders program for early-career staff runs this October and November.
The (Almost) Daily Brief publishes most weekdays: policy, funding, workforce, and industry news for Minnesota’s engineering firms, in a few minutes of reading.
