Trends in Grant Funding for Port Authority

Summary of the Discussion Session Content and Duration: Trends are favorable for grants allocation to port authorities. Grants are a way to distribute federal investment in critical infrastructure such as transportation, bridges, and port. In this session there will be a mix to panelist from grant funders, port authorities, private and NGO to discuss their statements of needs now and in the future.

With the passage of the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA) and other key federal initiatives, understanding of the critical funding trends is essential to winning a significant share of federal funds for port authorities. For Port-specific funding, federal funding initiatives flow down from IIJA to grant funders such as the U.S. Department of Transportation, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, and the Federal Emergency Management Agency, to name a few. These initiatives provide significant infrastructure and resilience improvements to port facilities.

Understanding, experience, and qualification are important aspects of a grant submittal for port marine infrastructure resilience and capital improvement projects. It is also important to know the process from pre-positioning to closeout to increase chances of winning grants.

This panel discussion will provide attendees with a practical understanding and overview of federal and state infrastructure grants, the trends in funding, and the capital improvement needs of port authorities. This discussion will provide an overview of port, transportation, and resiliency-related competitive grants from the perspective of requirements from the needs and opportunities of grant agencies and the recipient port authorities. Questions that this panel will address during the session, include:

• Funding agencies perspectives on what they would like the port community to know about their grants and how to be competitive.
• Defining grantor and grantee needs and explore opportunities.
• Port Authority’s perspective on how strategic grants supplement port infrastructure upgrades and when and how to pursue.
• Past and future trends in funding, sources, and types of projects.
• Typical port projects funded in the United States.
• Key factors in how to write a winning grant-funded on project scope.
• Why including multi-hazards considerations in a Benefit-Cost analysis (BCA) can be a discriminator for successful awards.

It is anticipated the session to be a 1 to 2 hour discussion.

Target Audience for the Discussion Session: The target audience for this paper is planners, engineers, grant specialist, port authorities, and decision-makers.

Description of the Benefit of the Discussion Session to Conference Attendees: Federal and state grants are critical in assisting and supporting port infrastructure, planning, and resilience projects. It is valuable to have perspectives from the grant makers, grantees, and professional grant writers to improve knowledge, project scopes, and quality of port submittals.

The nature and availability of port grant funding is a trending topic since additional funding drives innovation and creativity in port project scoping and helps supplement limited capital funding. The topic of port grants is innovative to this conference since it will be a unique offering as a discussion panel in the main conference.