Resilient Florida is a state grant program that awards local governments grants to study their flood risks and make infrastructure upgrades to address them. Business leaders and climate advocates alike agree it’s urgently needed in flood-prone Florida. But while some communities fund high-priority projects with Resilient Florida dollars, others don’t know they’re eligible.
Greenville
The childhood home of famous soul musician Ray Charles sits about 45 miles east of Tallahassee in rural Madison County. Frequent flooding fills yards and roads in Greenville. It even poses a threat to the home itself, according to documents submitted to the state.
A photo of Ray Charles, left, greets visitors in the entryway of the Greenville town hall. The town’s scrapbooks sit beneath it, documenting water and sewer upgrades and past flooding. (Rose Schnabel/WUFT News)
The tiny town, in which nearly a quarter of residents live below the poverty line, can’t afford upgrades on its own. In 2022, it applied for help through Resilient Florida.
Greenville received $4.97 million from the state in 2023 to begin construction. “They were extra generous,” said the town’s public works director, Wayne Malone.
Those dollars are funding improvements recommended by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, including widening the pipes that move water under roads and railways throughout the town. A stormwater pond the size of an olympic swimming pool is also going in. Greenville was one of 71 projects that received funding in 2023, 10 of which were within inland counties.
The first phase of construction tackled the road into Greenville. Malone said flooding there is “a lot better than it used to be.”
He’s optimistic that when the project is complete, slated for December 2027, “it will wipe out all the flooding, period.”
Mount Dora
A flash flood on Oct. 26, 2025, crumbled roads and backyards in Mount Dora, a city 25 miles northwest of Orlando. Between 13 and 15 inches of rain fell in six hours in parts of the city, said public works director George Marek, causing up to an estimated $12 million in major infrastructure damages.
“This is no small event,” he said.
City officials are exploring grants to fund recovery efforts but, notably, didn’t know Resilient Florida funding was available to them to prepare for flooding before it happened.
Mount Dora never applied to the Resilient Florida grant program. The city’s public information officer said staff reviewed the program but understood it to be for coastal communities facing sea level rise.
Mount Dora is in Lake County, which received $502,000 from the Resilient Florida program in 2022 to assess the county’s flood vulnerability. That study is ongoing and “should be finished in the next few months,” wrote Lexie Farmer, Lake County communications manager.
This investigation was produced with the support of Report for America and Investigative Editing Corps with Mc Nelly Torres as the project editor.
