What Hampton Taught Me About Climate Policy in Washington

If you want to understand what's broken about federal climate policy, don't start in Washington. Start at a table in a town recreation center, with a room full of neighbors, a map of your coastline, and a stack of post it notes.

This spring, Hampton finished its first Coastal Resilience Roadmap, the product of seven months of forums, surveys, and community listening sessions.

Here’s what that process has taught me about the conversation we should be having in Washington.

The climate crisis is local and global

Most of the country encounters climate change as an abstraction: a graph, a headline, a wildfire somewhere else.

Coastal communities like Hampton encounter it as surprise expenses, higher municipal budgets, and rising property taxes. It shows up in rising flood insurance premiums, in crumbling and quickly deteriorating roads and sidewalks, sewer systems inundated with salt water, and in homeowners who can’t sell because prospective buyers can't get mortgages because underwriters have seen the maps.

You don't have to believe anything about the long-range science to see this. You just have to look at Route 1A or any of the streets near the beach.

New Hampshire has 13 miles of coast. Our coast is a natural wonder, a playground, an economic engine, a key tax base, an ecosystem, and for many a home. What's true here is true for hundreds of towns up and down the East Coast. We are not asking whether coastal resilience matters, we’re focusing on how we become more resilient.

What Washington gets wrong

Here is what I’ve learned watching Hampton try to address and get ahead of this.

The federal government wants to help, but it has structured that help in a way small towns can barely access. Our Roadmap was funded by NOAA's Office for Coastal Management, passed through New Hampshire's Coastal Program. That pipeline works. A lot of others don't. Major federal resilience programs are built around the assumption that every applicant has a grants office, a capital reserve, and months to produce a benefit-cost analysis. Most towns have one staff person wearing six hats (ours has two)!

Federal resilience funding is also structured like charity, rather than infrastructure or entitlement spending, which makes no sense. We build highways with steady, formula-based funding. But we build seawalls with discretionary, competitive, year-to-year grants. The result is that towns end up planning around the next grant cycle instead of the next century.

The National Flood Insurance Program, meanwhile, subsidizes risk in ways that protect nobody well. It pays out, again and again, on the same repetitive-loss properties. It underprices risk in some places and overprices it in others. It is neither protecting families nor pricing the market fairly.

And the programs that work best are the ones on the chopping block! The NOAA coastal programs that made Hampton's Roadmap possible — the Coastal Zone Management Act, the National Sea Grant program, the state Coastal Programs — are among the smallest line items in the federal budget and among the first targeted when budget fights begin. That is backwards. Dollar for dollar, these are some of the most effective federal investments we make.

What I'll push for in Congress

Climate policy in a Congress that isn't currently passing climate policy requires being specific about what can actually get through Congress. Here is where I plan to put my energy:

Defend and fund the small programs that work.Protect NOAA's Office for Coastal Management, the Coastal Zone Management Act, Sea Grant, and the state Coastal Programs that distribute federal support to towns. These cost pennies!! on the dollar and buy real planning and action on the ground.

Rewrite federal resilience grants so small towns can access and use them. Cut the match requirements that disqualify communities that need the help most. Simplify the application burden for towns under a population threshold. A grant you can't apply for doesn’t help.

Fund coastal resilience like infrastructure, not like a sweepstakes. Move toward predictable, formula-based resilience funding that lets communities plan beyond a single grant cycle. One-time, discretionary funding doesn’t build systems.

Reform the National Flood Insurance Program around honesty and affordability. Modernize flood maps. Protect primary-residence affordability for working- and middle-class families already living in floodplains, while pricing new development in high-risk areas fairly. Taxpayers should not be repeatedly rebuilding luxury second homes.

Treat working waterfronts as the infrastructure they are. Fisheries, ports, and small coastal businesses are not amenities; they are economies and communities. Federal policy needs to account for that (not just the real estate).

None of this “solves” climate change.

And, honestly, it's not intended to. It's meant to keep small coastal communities afloat (and our property taxes steady) as the larger political process plays out.

The reason the federal response to climate adaptation has been this clumsy isn't that policymakers don't understand the problem. First, the federal response (or lack thereof) is often compounded by corporate lobbying efforts and willful ignorance. Second, resilience is localized, patient work, and Washington is not currently built to support localized, patient work. Our politics reward confrontation. Resilience rewards cooperation.

I watched Hampton navigate this. And if we—and hundreds of similarly-situated coastal communities—are going to be able to keep going, we need better partners in Washington.

Read more about about Hampton’s Coastal Resilience Roadmap.