The town clerk in Seven Springs, North Carolina, works part time and mows several acres of federal floodplain a few times a month on aging equipment. The houses that stood on that ground were bought out with FEMA money after repeated flooding. Demolition was covered. The deed restriction keeping the land as open space runs in perpetuity. So does the mowing. Nobody funded that part.
Seven Springs has fewer than a hundred residents. The clerk's routine turned up in a peer-reviewed study of North Carolina buyout programs, in which researchers interviewed 30 public-works and parks staff and put the cost of mowing alone at $192 to $1,398 per acre per year. That range covers labor, equipment, fuel. It does not cover drainage, invasive species, liability insurance, or stormwater management.
The Inflation Reduction Act and the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act together represent the largest climate adaptation investment in American history. Federal money is moving into cooling centers, school building retrofits, residential backup batteries, flood buyouts, and warning systems. Each of those things needs maintenance, staffing, replacement parts, or annual operating money to keep doing the job it was built for. The federal funding structure that builds them, with narrow exceptions, does not maintain them.
How the funding works
No one publishes a breakdown of how much IRA or IIJA climate money goes to building things versus keeping them running. The Congressional Research Service organizes appropriations by program and agency. The GAO tracks obligations and outlays by statute. The categories don't separate capital from operations, so the question can't be answered at the national level.
It can be answered program by program. FEMA's Hazard Mitigation Assistance guide rules out operation, deferred maintenance, and like-for-like repair as eligible expenses unless the work raises the level of protection above what existed before. The same agency requires applicants to identify their future maintenance costs, lay out a maintenance schedule, and name the entity responsible for carrying it out. A community has to show it knows what upkeep will cost before it can receive money that won't pay for upkeep.
There is one real exception. The IIJA funded FEMA's Safeguarding Tomorrow revolving-loan program at $500 million over five years, and FY2025 changes expressly permitted loans for ongoing and deferred maintenance. Loans, not grants. A local government borrows to keep up what an earlier grant built, then pays it back.
EPA's wildfire-smoke community buildings competition will pay for facilities staff, replacement air-cleaner filters, and sensor calibration across a three-year project period; its illustrative budget includes two facilities staff and a facilities manager. The same notice scores applicants on their plan for continuing the work once EPA money stops. The operating costs are eligible until they aren't, at which point they belong to whoever can absorb them.
Cooling centers
Phoenix spent $3.8 million on heat response in 2024 — extended library hours, a 24/7 respite site, Community Bridges staffing, police overtime, janitorial work, supplies. The money came from the general fund, from ARPA, from Maricopa County public health, from Arizona housing funds. For 2026 the city projected a need of roughly $5.25 million. That budget gets reassembled from scratch every spring out of whatever happens to be available.
What it looks like when the assembly comes up short: in 2023, ABC15 spot-checked Maricopa County cooling centers and found sites shutting their doors at 3, 4, and 5 p.m. in the middle of summer. One let a visitor stay ten minutes. Most participating libraries kept ordinary closing times rather than extending for heat relief. A church operator said more staff would let the site stay open from 6 a.m. to 8 p.m. The city's heat-response director named overtime funding as the constraint.
Phoenix has since expanded service. But the 2023 record shows what an operating shortfall produces on the ground: a protection that appears on a map and is locked when the pavement is at its hottest. Afternoon and early evening are when heat has already been building in a body all day, and they are precisely the hours the money ran out on. The air-conditioned building is the capital expense. Staff, electricity, security, supplies, janitorial service, and enough hours to cover the dangerous ones are annual costs, and they compete with every other claim on a general fund.
The smaller end of the scale runs tighter still. Delano, California, budgeted no more than $50,000 for a single cooling center in 2021, open weekdays only, noon to 6 p.m., on days forecast to hit 105 degrees. City documents cite staff shortages and historically low use. Low use is measured, necessarily, among people who came during the hours the door was open. Anyone who works a shift ending at 6, or who arrives on a Saturday, doesn't register as unmet need anywhere in the record. Whether the building had air conditioning was never the question.
Seth Carrington's earlier reporting for this publication traced a parallel gap in Arizona, where a shutoff moratorium kept electricity connected while unpaid charges piled up — a live wire to a cooling system a household might not be able to afford later. The municipal version runs the same way. The building stays cool, but nobody is paid to keep the door open.
School retrofits
Montgomery County Public Schools put $23 million of ESSER III money into building maintenance and HVAC infrastructure before that funding expired on September 30, 2024. ESSER — the pandemic-era Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief program — was emergency aid repurposed for buildings, and it was never meant to last.
The district's FY2025 maintenance plan documents where the costs went afterward: HVAC equipment replacement and filters that ESSER had covered moved into the Division of Maintenance and Operations' operating budget, which was already running a deficit. Replacing one chiller runs $250,000 to $500,000. Separately, the district approved a $2.2 million annual contract for HVAC filters and measuring services across its schools and offices — a seven-figure recurring obligation in a district that had just lost the federal funding source for that exact work.
The wider picture matches. The GAO estimated in 2020 that about 41 percent of public school districts needed HVAC updates or replacement in at least half their buildings, and that deferring those projects makes the eventual bill larger. A 2024 California State Auditor review inspected 18 schools across six districts and found that none met the state's overall "good repair" standard. California requires districts that took certain construction funding to set aside 3 percent of annual general-fund spending in a restricted maintenance account for 20 years. All six audited districts said 3 percent wasn't enough.
Ivy Marlowe's reporting on room air conditioner maintenance for this publication found a product manual assigning a monthly filter check while the institutional documents around it left the responsibility unassigned. At district scale the same gap runs through budget lines. Capital money installs the system; the filter schedule becomes an operating expense standing in line behind everything else the district can't afford.
Residential batteries
California's Self-Generation Incentive Program has funded thousands of home battery installations, many for households facing the Public Safety Power Shutoffs that utilities impose when fire conditions get bad. A CPUC-sponsored assessment found that SGIP lithium-ion systems generally carried ten-year minimum warranties guaranteeing 70 percent energy retention at year ten. For cost-effectiveness modeling, the assessment used a simplified degradation rate of 3.33 percent a year.
That figure is a modeling convenience, not a measurement from batteries in service. NREL research found wide real-world variation depending on chemistry, temperature, cycling, and use. Even the simplified rate sketches the trajectory: roughly 90 percent of original capacity at year three, 83 percent at year five. A household that sized its backup against a three-day shutoff is running against that declining number, not the one on the spec sheet. None of the programs reviewed here track capacity at the household level, which means no one outside the house knows how many hours of protection is actually sitting in the garage.
The 2026 SGIP handbook allows a new incentive for a replacement system, but only after the original has satisfied its permanency requirement, and only if the replacement meets current eligibility rules and funding is still available. That is a conditional possibility, not a replacement schedule.
PG&E's Portable Battery Program supplies batteries to medically vulnerable customers. In a 2021 CPUC filing, the utility described replacing defective units when inventory allowed. A battery that has quietly shed a quarter of its capacity but still turns on is not defective by any warranty definition. It is working, and it is less protective than it was, and nothing in the reviewed federal programs pays to replace it on those grounds.
Flood buyout parcels
The Congressional Research Service states it flatly: federal buyout programs generally do not fund future land design, maintenance, or use. FEMA's acquisition template requires the local government to keep the land as deed-restricted open space in perpetuity. One federal purchase, one permanent local expense.
Harris County, Texas, has carried that expense for over two decades. In 2003, the Houston Chronicle reported steady complaints from people living beside buyout lots — overgrown grass, weeds, trash where the houses used to be. In December 2025, the county approved a $75,000 contract extension for vegetation maintenance covering buyout lots, channels, and basins. Staff explained that the extension would prevent a lapse in service and hold down deferred maintenance, which gets more expensive the less often it's done.
Twenty-two years separate those two documents, and the underlying problem hasn't changed. Harris County can keep managing it, imperfectly, because Harris County has a budget. Seven Springs has a part-time clerk and old equipment.
Sirens
San Marcos, Texas, installed 14 outdoor warning sirens with a FEMA grant in 2011. The system went inoperable for lack of maintenance. Nothing in the grant assigned anyone the job of noticing that it had, and the city eventually contracted for repairs and upgrades at roughly $110,000, restoring full operation in August 2024. Thirteen years, and local money to bring back what federal money had built.
What converges
Montgomery County's ESSER funding expired in September 2024, and the district has already documented the consequences in its FY2025 plan. ESSER paid for the same kind of HVAC work in thousands of districts, under the same expiration date. EPA's wildfire-smoke building grants cover staff, filters, and calibration for three-year periods, so communities receiving them now hit the end of that window around 2029. Batteries installed during SGIP's expansion are moving along their degradation curves. New FEMA mitigation grants keep going to communities that have never managed assets like these.
Those clocks are running toward each other. The first serious maintenance years for a generation of federally funded adaptation will land inside the same budget cycles, in the same towns, drawing on the same local dollars. A small city with its first FEMA mitigation grant will learn what San Marcos learned, that a warning system needs testing and testing needs a line item. A county taking floodplain parcels inherits what Harris County has been mowing since the Bush administration. A district that retrofitted buildings with temporary money faces what Montgomery County wrote down: filters and chillers landing in an operating budget that was already short.
Safeguarding Tomorrow, at $500 million over five years and structured as loans, is the only federal mechanism reviewed here that explicitly funds ongoing maintenance for these assets. Set that against a capital pipeline orders of magnitude larger.
The costs land unevenly, and that unevenness is built into the design. FEMA asks the same maintenance plan of Seven Springs that it asks of Harris County, and the obligation comes to rest on budgets that aren't remotely comparable. Inside Maricopa County, some cooling sites shut at 3 p.m. while the city assembled millions to keep others open overnight. The California auditor found the same split across school districts: the ones that could route extra money into maintenance had buildings in better shape, and the ones that couldn't didn't. The federal structure never asks whether a recipient can sustain what it's about to receive. It asks whether the recipient can write a plan.
The bond measure may have delivered exactly what it promised. Whether the thing still works in year five sits with a budget line that wasn't on the ballot, in a meeting most people who voted yes will never attend.
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Buncombe County buyout closings: As of July 2026, 251 Helene-related parcels had been approved for buyout but only 23 closings were recorded, and each closed parcel will add a permanent local maintenance obligation to the county's books.
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Houston's cooling ordinance: A proposed Houston rental air-conditioning ordinance that would require habitable rooms to reach a specific temperature standard lost its committee quorum in late July and remained unenacted as of August 8, leaving enforcement of indoor cooling as a tenant-initiated complaint process without a legal standard behind it.
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Texas flood siren protocols: The Upper Guadalupe River Authority's new flood warning sirens sounded during a July 2026 flood, but activation protocols, maintenance responsibilities, and long-term funding were still being developed — a system tested by disaster before its operating rules were finished.
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Maricopa County indoor heat deaths: The county's 2025 surveillance report found air conditioning present in 94 percent of investigated indoor heat deaths, with the equipment nonfunctioning in 72 percent of those cases — a record that measures exactly the gap between an installed asset and a working protection.