Baltimore’s Wetlands Restoration Pushes Ahead Despite Federal Funding Setbacks – Inside Climate News

BALTIMORE—Gravel crunched underfoot as Brad Rogers and Andrew Forbes stepped onto a narrow strip carved along a portion of the Patapsco River shoreline that’s slated to be a 9-acre tidal wetland.

At the site, just south of the Hanover Street Bridge, crews had been at work since last September, constructing a gravel sill that would hold new grasses. A muddy platform wound its way farther into the river, its edges blurring against the waves shimmering in the distance. 

It’s just one small part of a multimillion dollar initiative jointly implemented by South Baltimore Gateway Partnership, a nonprofit led by Rogers, and its partner environmental engineering firm, Greenvest, where Forbes is a senior project manager.

Rogers slowed to observe the scene.

“When we were out here this morning, literally three hours ago, the tide was higher and this whole area was flooded—everywhere that looks like puddles now was ankle- or chin-deep water,” he said. “The gap in the breakwater allows water to flood in and out, and that sort of flushing connects what happens here with the Bay—fish, microorganisms and protein all exchanging between the wetland and open water.” 

This stretch of shoreline along Hanover Street is one of four major sites under the Middle Branch Resiliency Initiative, a massive project aiming to breathe ecological life back into a river battered by decades of industrialization, stormwater runoff and urban neglect. When completed, the Hanover Street site will have low and high marshes and intertidal mudflats designed to absorb tidal surges, stabilize the shoreline and provide refuge to wildlife.

Rogers says the ecosystem is already attracting native species.

“The first thing I see is a beautiful great blue heron wading through a tidal pool we just finished building,” Rogers recalled. “We had just put the sand out, just planted the grasses. The water flooded in, and that heron—it just knew it was home. To one side was a snowy egret fishing, to the other, Canada geese with goslings nibbling in the grass.”

Only a year ago, the site was choked with trash and thick tangles of non-native plant species. Now, dead trees salvaged through the city’s Camp Small debris reuse program serve as perches for birds and carbon-rich habitat for organisms further down the food chain.

Construction began in the middle of last year with a stone sill snaking out roughly 150 to 200 feet from the shore into the Patapsco. Forbes and his team filled the interior with layers of sand and organic matter, a task made difficult by centuries of sedimentation at the river’s mouth. “The sub-base here is soft,” Forbes said. “You need more stone and sand than you think because it sinks. A lot of it disappears beneath the surface to create stability. You can’t see it, but it’s there, doing the work.”

But this spring, just as the marsh was beginning to take shape, a letter arrived. It was from the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

“The notification itself was very curt: There will not be money for the construction phase. No guidance, no next steps, just very factual. No explanation,” Rogers recalled. 

Rogers’ nonprofit was originally awarded $32 million for wetlands restoration through FEMA’s Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities (BRIC) program, a major climate resilience funding mechanism launched during the Biden administration. But in April, the Trump administration abruptly terminated BRIC, calling it a “wasteful, politicized grant program” in an official statement.

For Rogers, the sudden clawback could have delivered a major blow to the entire Middle Branch initiative. But his organization has been able to receive funding from multiple sources.

“We’ve built a program that goes beyond any one project. And having secured the BRIC grant brought us credibility to pull together a robust pipeline of multiple different avenues for raising capital funds,” Rogers said. “That grant provided a significant amount of credibility that accelerated our ability to grow the program.”

By Rogers’ estimate, the Hanover wetlands will be 90 percent complete by late summer. “All of these pieces are beginning to come together, and by the end of the summer, it’ll be 90 percent of the way there, and we’ll call the project done. And then a year later, the plants will be that much more grown in, and before you know it, it’ll just look like a giant natural system that’s always been there,” he said. 

As he and Forbes walked back toward the exit, Rogers paused again near the new plantings. “This used to be a dumping ground,” he said. “Now, it’s becoming a refuge.”

Weathering FEMA’s Pullback

Brad Rogers remembers the moment clearly. He had already secured the funding. Years of planning and coalition-building were finally yielding results. Then the email came. FEMA was rescinding $26 million of the $32 million it had awarded his organization.

The BRIC cuts didn’t just affect his nonprofit—they impacted nearly a billion dollars’ worth of flood prevention and climate resilience projects across the Chesapeake Bay watershed. 

“The BRIC program was yet another example of a wasteful and ineffective FEMA program. It was more concerned with political agendas than helping Americans affected by natural disasters,” the agency said in a statement announcing the cuts. 

Of the $1 billion provided to BRIC under the 2021 Infrastructure and Jobs Act, around $882 million will be returned to the U.S. Treasury or reapportioned by Congress in the next fiscal year, according to the agency’s plans. Trump administration officials noted that their predecessors disbursed $133 million to about 450 applicants since the establishment of the grant program, according to the statement.   

FEMA did not respond to multiple requests for comments about the rescinded funds and the likely impact an abrupt withdrawal of federal support will have on the projects already underway throughout Maryland and elsewhere in the country. 

In Maryland, the cancellation affected dozens of planned upgrades to stormwater systems, shoreline protections and ecological buffer zones in vulnerable communities. Local governments were left scrambling to identify replacement funds. 

“There are many organizations and governments across the country which are in far worse conditions than we are,” Rogers said. “I try to be respectful of the difference between what other people are facing and what we are.” 

Rogers credited his nonprofit’s resilience to its structure—a unique hybrid of public and nonprofit actors—and its ability to forge alliances quickly. 

The BRIC clawbacks hit Maryland’s small towns particularly hard. Crisfield, a low-lying city on the Eastern Shore, lost key funding for long-awaited stormwater upgrades and a planned flood barrier meant to shield the town from chronic flooding. The project, a key element of Crisfield’s Southern Flood Mitigation Plan, was years in the making and is now on hold.

In Baltimore City and across the county, sewer rehabilitation projects designed to reduce flooding and backups have been paused. Plans to invest in green infrastructure in historically neglected neighborhoods have similarly stalled.

Overall, the loss of funds has reverberated across rural towns and urban centers statewide. In places like Crisfield, where tax bases are small and adaptation plans depend on outside dollars, the absence of federal support has left little room to maneuver. In cities, climate and public health goals are impacted, forcing leaders to prioritize short-term goals over longer-term resilience projects.

FEMA’s decision has left communities scrambling for alternatives, as extreme weather events take a toll across Maryland and sea level rise threatens the gains made after decades of investments in restoring the Chesapeake Bay watershed.

Rogers found it ironic that funds meant for resilience got pulled at a time when climate change and extreme weather events are making those investments all the more important.

Despite the loss, new support came from the state of Maryland, local agencies and private philanthropies. Smaller grants were put together. Some projects were scaled back. But the work continued.

Rogers felt that walking away from South Baltimore’s disinvested neighborhoods like Cherry Hill and Westport when the going got tough was not an option. It was important to show up, he said, even when it’s hard.

Reconnecting the River

A few hundred feet across the Hanover Street Bridge, traffic zipped past with the usual urgency of a weekday afternoon.

Rogers and Forbes stood still at the curb momentarily, scanning the oncoming traffic before crossing. On the other side, a narrow passage gave way to a shrubby clearing. Shoulder-high weeds brushed their sleeves as they pushed through, arriving suddenly into a wide, barren field plowed by heavy equipment.

This was Patapsco Delta East, Rogers said, the second wetlands site under construction as part of the Middle Branch Resiliency Initiative. Unlike the gentle feel of the Hanover Street project, this site was defined by blunt force.

Excavators punctured the humid air, lifting tangled mats of mud and debris and dumping them to the side. A heap of dead reeds, storm-battered logs and trash sat exposed on one side of the landscape. The smell of earth and diesel came through in waves.

“This whole area used to be one giant mat of phragmites,” Rogers said of the invasive reeds, pointing toward the center of the site, where crews had begun carving a long, curving channel through the wetland base. “Invasive species choked the entire area and made it completely inaccessible.”

Here, between Hanover Street and Potee Street, was this stretch of land, left behind as a sort of ecological dead zone decades ago when overpasses were built around it. “There was no interaction between this site and the river,” Rogers explained. “So you have fish going up and down the river that have no access to the wetland over here that impaired its ecological function.”

That’s starting to change. 

The team had been sculpting what Rogers called a “tidal gut”—a winding, sinewy channel meant to reintroduce the daily tidal flows from the Patapsco into the site. “It moves like a snake,” he said, adding that this design allows the tidal channel to naturally connect the restored wetland with the river, enabling water, fish and nutrients to flow in and out with the tides. 

The regular exchange also brings in microorganisms and nutrients, creating a dynamic ecosystem that’s constantly refreshed by the Bay’s waters.

By planting new marshes and opening water channels to reconnect the ecosystem, the project aims to restore more than 12 acres of impaired land to the Middle Branch tidal system. “Instead of dumping more soil, like we did across the bridge, here we’re excavating,” Rogers said. “We’re removing the disconnect. That’s the work.”

Construction at the site broke ground in late February, just weeks before FEMA rescinded climate infrastructure funding. Though the Delta East site survived the cut, in part because construction on it had already begun, the clawback did affect the broader project. Designs for a fourth site, farther along the river’s bend, didn’t make it beyond the planning phase.

The MedStar Harbor Hospital site to the north will be the third major wetland restoration under the initiative and is due to break ground later this year. While each site differs in many ways, they fit together like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle: one extending into the river, another carved back into land, the third reclaiming industrial fill.

The Road Ahead

After leaving Forbes, Rogers drove past the edge of the cleared wetland, now behind metal fencing, and headed north toward the Baltimore Peninsula. In the distance, tower cranes dotted the skyline.

New apartment complexes came into view alongside the shimmering waterfront and the global headquarters of the activewear brand Under Armour. The development in the last couple of years has been unrelenting, spurring the wave of gentrification that now defines this part of South Baltimore.

But not every neighborhood has seen similar growth. Curtis Bay, for instance, a working-class community on the city’s southern edge, sits isolated from these developments. There, residents live next to coal terminals and chemical tanks. 

The neighborhood shares the same Patapsco shoreline that remains vulnerable to storm surge and has eroded during decades of disinvestment. It’s not part of the planned wetlands or other investments the city and its implementing partners are pouring into the rest of South Baltimore. 

The question of whether Curtis Bay should develop as an industrial zone, as some city authorities have previously suggested, or thrive as a residential community has eclipsed its development. Residents and local community groups have long urged officials to enforce stricter environmental controls to mitigate toxic pollution and invest in civic amenities. But the tension has resulted in lost opportunities, advocates believe.  

As Inside Climate News previously reported, communities across South Baltimore have also questioned whether the city’s environmental restoration projects—however ecologically beneficial—also reinforce existing inequities by concentrating benefits where capital investment is already flowing. Despite its habitat gains, some critics feel the Middle Branch Resiliency Initiative aligns too comfortably with real estate timelines and branding efforts surrounding the waterfront redevelopment.

One of those critics is Nicole Fabricant, an anthropology professor from Towson State University and environmental activist working in South Baltimore. She believes that the problems in neighborhoods like Curtis Bay and Cherry Hill stem from the legacy industries, including coal piers and the giant incinerator that burns much of the city’s trash. 

“I’m always skeptical of some of these shiny projects that often extract from the poor and benefit the wealthy. It’s like a quick-fit techno solution to deeply structural problems,” Fabricant said. “If instead we actually held corporate polluters accountable, and enforced some of the environmental regulations at the state level, we would see much cleaner, healthier environments.”

Fabricant said projects like shoreline improvements are attractive to public and private funders because they avoid going after corporate polluters, which is where the problem lies, in her opinion.

“The toxicity in South Baltimore has to do with the overburden of industries down there. But a lot of these bigger environmental projects are not willing to take on big polluters or to really identify the corporate entities that benefit from cheap lands and demobilize communities,” she said. “Until we actually enforce those environmental regulations, we’ll continue to see these techno quick fixes that aren’t really addressing the root problems.”

In the end, she said, a project like the Middle Branch Initiative, designed to restore the natural world lost to decades of industrialization, is unable to reconnect the Black communities in places like Curtis Bay because its very design prevents it from doing so. That, critics like Fabricant say, is one of its biggest weaknesses: a structural limitation that risks deepening the very inequities it aims to heal.

Rogers is aware of the criticism.

He said that while Curtis Bay is a part of South Baltimore and touches the Patapsco River, it is not adjacent to the Middle Branch and is outside the remit of their work. “This is the difficult reality: reimagining 11 miles of shoreline is incredibly ambitious and difficult, but it also doesn’t resolve all the problems faced across South Baltimore,” he said.

Rogers said he understood the concern that the initiative might only restore environmental quality for people who can afford to live in gentrifying areas where the people the project purports to serve once lived. “These are legitimate worries, and we should always be attentive to them,” he said, adding that the two ongoing projects and the one waiting to break ground at MedStar Harbor Hospital will benefit the Brooklyn and Cherry Hill neighborhoods, home to low-income Black and brown communities with limited shoreline access.

“Cherry Hill and Brooklyn do not deserve environmental quality and resiliency more than Curtis Bay. But they also do not deserve it less than Curtis Bay,” Rogers said.

For disinvested neighborhoods like Curtis Bay, which is not served by the Middle Branch Resiliency Initiative, the abrupt cut in federal funding has made a bad situation worse. Since FEMA pulled the plug on BRIC grants and similar uncertainty surrounds the promised funding from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, smaller community nonprofits and well-funded groups like Rogers’ alike are left to navigate a rapidly changing funding landscape.

But there’s opportunity in every crisis. Rogers’ nonprofit just secured new funding from the Maryland Department of the Environment—$17 million in total—through the Chesapeake Bay Restoration Fund and the Comprehensive Flood Management Program.

The infusion, he said, reinforces his belief that the Middle Branch strategy can align multiple priorities at once: flood protection, habitat renewal and water quality. “We sit at this interesting nexus point between resiliency, restoration, recreation, water quality and habitat. Depending on the site and the funder’s goals, we’re able to mix and match and tap into multiple simultaneous funding streams,” he said.

As he drove past the new townhomes along Cromwell Street, Rogers pointed out another reality. 

“Many people who are well educated in environmental science or climate science may be able to talk for hours about carbon sequestration, but wouldn’t know what to do with an excavator,” Rogers said. “You really need to have a team that brings together all of those disciplines—estimating costs, designing, permitting and building the project. Those are essential components of being effective in the world.”

It’s a perspective he’s come to appreciate over years in the nonprofit sector—one shaped less by idealism and more by implementation. “Our state and local partners have been more interested in figuring out opportunities for collaboration than they even were in the past,” he continued, “because now they know that their budgets are going to be tighter, and so they have to think creatively about how to find new partners.”

While Rogers’ organization has weathered the first round of cuts, the broader picture remains fuzzy. Many community-scale nonprofits—especially those without in-house technical staff, grant writers or political access—are still left to ponder the fate of their canceled plans.

As he parked the car outside his office, Rogers glanced at his phone, already vibrating with a new string of messages. He exhaled, shifted the gear into park, and looked up once more toward the shimmering shoreline visible in the distance.

“It’s not easy,” he said. “But I’m glad it’s coming together.”