Riverside is still pursuing an overdue update to its village building code after more than $22,000 in federal grant funding was rescinded by the Trump administration.
Village trustees on April 18 directed staff to continue working on the project, which will align Riverside’s 20-year-old building code with new Illinois standards from last year while maintaining village-specific amendments. It has a maximum budgeted cost of $18,000. Riverside had previously budgeted $15,000 for the project in 2025.
Riverside had been awarded $22,138.50 for the project through the Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities (BRIC) program offered by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA).
That funding was rescinded on April 4, when FEMA announced it had ended the program and would be canceling all BRIC applications from 2020-2023 to “ensure that grant funding aligns with the President’s executive orders.”
Executive orders do not have the same legally binding power as laws, which must be passed by Congress, but instead direct the federal government in its execution of existing laws.
“A good deal of the funds required to complete the project were awarded, essentially, early this year. We were able to work for five weeks with our consultant team, which we’d been planning for for two years, and then we had no grant funding,” Assistant Village Manager Ashley Monroe said Thursday. “If we want to proceed with the project, which staff recommends, we would need to do it without any kind of reimbursement.”
Monroe said the village’s currently adopted codes date back to 2005 and 2006 and no longer conform to state requirements. She said the deadline for the update was Jan. 1, 2025, so it “behooves” the village to update the code “as soon as possible.”
“We’ve been trying to execute this project for a couple of years,” she said. “We don’t want to be a jurisdiction without a building code, in which case we have to adhere to the codes from the state, and that won’t include our amendments that are specific to Riverside.”
She said Riverside has so far paid out $7,000 toward the project, which constituted the village’s local match with the grant funding for the total estimated cost of about $29,000.
According to a village memo, in the wake of losing the grant funds, Riverside staff recommended spending village monies to continue to partner with a consulting firm, as completing the project internally is possible “theoretically” but “would take considerably longer.” Future code updates will be completed internally, the memo said.
Monroe said staff estimated Riverside would need to spend about $6,000 to $8,000 more on the project but wanted to set the budget cap at $18,000 in case the costs exceed those figures. She said she expects the updated building code to go into effect around the end of the year.
According to the memo, about $2,500 will go toward buying new technology so village staff can access building plans and other information while in the field rather than continuing to use “papers and pens,” Monroe said.
According to an archived FEMA webpage, the agency previously described BRIC as a program that “aim[ed] to categorically shift the federal focus away from reactive disaster spending and toward research-supported, proactive investment in community resilience.”
As of April 4, a written statement “attributable to a FEMA spokesperson” instead said the program was “wasteful and ineffective” and did not “[help] Americans affected by natural disasters.”