A Plan to Limit Flooding in N.J. Is Hampered by Evaporating Federal Funds
A local nonprofit spent years preparing a flood-resilience plan. All that is now at risk.
Shirley Irizarry, a lifelong resident of Camden, N.J., moved to the city’s Marlton neighborhood for the breathing room. There’s space, shade trees and plenty of shops within walking distance.
It’s all peace and quiet—until a heavy rain. Her neighbors’ basements and garages flood. Sewage bubbles up from storm drains. Flooded cars, streets and schools spell delays and closures. “It really shuts down business for people in ways you couldn’t imagine,” Irizarry says.
At the beginning of 2025, when Irizarry, an experienced community advocate, heard about an opportunity to use her organizing skills to support an ambitious flood-reduction project, she jumped at the chance.
This project, the Camden Coastal Resilience Plan, aims to use restored wetlands, playing fields that double as reservoirs and other types of “green infrastructure” to redirect and absorb Marlton’s floodwater.
Irizarry was glad to be part of an effort that would save money, improve public health, beautify the neighborhood and make the area more attractive to business. But this vision for the future is now on uncertain ground. The project’s coordinators had been hoping for a second round of funding through a federal program but did not receive it.
Across the country, demand for federal conservation dollars has long outstripped supply. This gap is now growing wider. As the federal government slashes conservation funding, programs and staff, communities hoping for help are increasingly being left high and dry—or, in Marlton’s case, low and wet.
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A federal flood resilience grant brings hope to Marlton
In Camden, flooding comes from both sky and sea. Much of the city sits on a floodplain defined by two tidal rivers, the Delaware and Cooper. These rivers, being directly connected to the Atlantic Ocean, often experience storm surges, high tides and sea-level rise. At the same time, increasingly heavy rainfall routinely swamps the city’s century-old sewer system.
In 2022, a local nonprofit, the Center for Environmental Transformation, applied for a federal grant through the National Coastal Resilience Fund. This program, which is administered by the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation, had recently received an infusion of funding from the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act and the Inflation Reduction Act. It invests in projects that use natural elements—wetlands, oyster reefs, forests and dunes—to protect coastal communities from flooding, storms and other hazards.
In 2023, CFET was awarded a $500,000 grant to cover the research and planning phase of the project. The organization worked with engineers, hydrologists, Camden’s planning and sewage authorities and other partners to create a flood-risk map of the city and model future flooding scenarios. The goal of this work was to find potential project sites offering the “most bang for your buck,” says Jon Compton, CFET’s executive director.
This effort narrowed in on Marlton. The neighborhood has Camden’s highest concentration of residents living below the poverty line and the highest concentration of households that have filed three or more flood claims in the last decade. It’s also one of the city’s few neighborhoods that directly suffers from storm surges and high tides.
At the beginning of 2025, CFET hired Irizarry as a community outreach coordinator. She managed a team of organizers who spoke to hundreds of residents about the area’s flooding history and what the community hoped to gain from flood reduction efforts.
Through this process, CFET learned of past plans to tackle Marlton’s flooding problem, which had gone nowhere due to lack of funding. “It’s very demotivating for communities to put in the effort to participate in a planning process and then have it not go anywhere,” Compton says. “We tried to be sensitive to that.”
Quote: Shirley Irizarry
We want Camden to be as beautiful as we know it can be.
A plan comes into focus—as funding grows scarce
Near the end of 2025, after two years of research and discussion, CFET unveiled a new report that lays out 11 projects that would work in concert to channel floodwater away from residences and businesses and safely store it in revived natural areas.
In the underdeveloped 25-acre Gateway Park, which hugs the Cooper River, an elevated hiking trail would act as a berm to control coastal flooding, beyond which a shoreline of native plants would buffer storm surges and offer habitat. Playing fields and grassy gathering areas would do double duty as temporary lakes during heavy rainfall.
Elsewhere in the neighborhood, sunken rain gardens would capture precipitation along busy roads. The unused land inside of a highway cloverleaf would be turned into a wetland to absorb and filter runoff.
CFET applied for a second round of funding through the National Coastal Resilience Fund but did not receive it. This speaks not to the quality of the project—it had been praised by multiple partners at the city and state level—but to the mounting budgetary limitations that face the federal agencies charged with administering this and similar grants.
CFET is now looking for alternative means of funding, both through federal and private sources. While the organization has secured additional grants, these have not been as comprehensive as the National Coastal Resilience Fund, which allowed CFET to cover salaries, consultants and community outreach.
Irizarry knows that this type of funding would be transformative for her neighborhood. Camden residents, she says, have been made to feel like “we’re supposed to just take the scraps that we’re given.” This project, if realized, would help foster a sense of local pride and self-worth. “We want Camden to be as beautiful as we know it can be,” she says.
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