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When local governments should buy resilience software, use free federal tools or build their own, and the procurement and grant rules that decide it.
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Build or buy climate resilience planning tools?
The money behind local resilience work arrives more slowly, and less surely, than the plans that depend on it. By March 2025, FEMA had allocated about $2.5 billion to 1,245 BRIC subgrants but reimbursed $62 million, and only 37 had completed work. The program's fiscal 2024-25 round, worth $1 billion, closed on July 23, 2026, and selections were still pending at FEMA's last update. As of January 2026, the Congressional Research Service found that HMGP had not been approved for a new major disaster declaration since March 18, 2025.
Local governments should buy software for workflows many jurisdictions share, such as grants administration or capital budgeting, and use FEMA's and NOAA's free tools for hazard data and benefit-cost analysis. Build, or configure a platform, for the part that is yours: community-defined criteria, the ranking and the public view. Fund neither from a single grant.
We have been on both sides of this decision. Council Fire was an implementation and stakeholder engagement partner on the Annapolis Maritime Resilience Initiative for the Resilience Authority of Annapolis and Anne Arundel County, which the County describes as the first multi-jurisdictional resilience authority in the nation, with 32 projects completed or underway and more than $50 million secured by April 2026. When the Authority needed one record to carry its projects from community-chosen criteria through funding to a public portfolio, Council Fire Labs built Aptation with it.
Aptation is now a product we offer to other jurisdictions, so read what follows knowing we sell one of the options. Where something we do not make fits better, a spreadsheet included, we say so.
What do you already have before you build or buy anything?
More than most software requests assume. The hazard layer is free: FEMA's National Risk Index covers 18 natural hazards for every U.S. county and census tract, and its December 2025 release is available through FEMA's Resilience Analysis and Planning Tool and as downloads. NOAA's annual high tide flooding outlook predicts a record national median of 7 to 12 flood days from May 2026 to April 2027, and an average of 55 to 85 days a year by 2050. Our free Climate Risk Lookup puts FEMA's rating and the hazard mitigation plan status for any county on one page.
So is the economics layer. For FEMA mitigation grants, applicants must use FEMA-approved benefit-cost methods and tools, and a project counts as cost-effective at a ratio of 1.0 or more. Projects not obligated by April 8, 2025 use a 7% discount rate, up from 3.1%, and the current BCA Toolkit, version 6.0, dates from 2019. Run FEMA's method early instead of building your own; for a first estimate, our Adaptation Payback Calculator applies the National Institute of Building Sciences' ratios, which put the return on federal mitigation grants at about $6 for every $1.
You probably own the rest already: a GIS license, a spreadsheet the planning office trusts, a grants tracker and the finance office's capital planning system. The gap is rarely data. It is the connective record that carries one project from the hazard mitigation plan through the ranking, the funding match and the capital budget to a public report, the job our guides to prioritizing resilience projects and building resilience into the capital improvement plan describe.
Treat every federal layer as an input you can swap. NOAA retired its Billion-Dollar Weather and Climate Disasters product in May 2025, with no updates beyond 2024, though the archive from 1980 on remains available. When we rebuilt the Climate Risk Lookup in October 2026, we had it name the version of FEMA's index it reads and pull plan status from FEMA's daily feed, so anyone can see which data a result rests on.
What you need | Usually | Who this is for | Watch for |
|---|---|---|---|
Hazard and risk data | Free federal sources such as FEMA's National Risk Index and NOAA's outlooks | Every jurisdiction | Paying a vendor to resell public data you could cite directly |
Benefit-cost analysis for FEMA grants | FEMA's BCA Toolkit or another FEMA-approved method | Applicants to FEMA mitigation programs | A custom benefit-cost engine FEMA will not accept |
Grant applications, awards and compliance | Buy grants management software | Grant offices managing many awards | It tracks grants, not the portfolio's priorities |
The capital program and budget | Extend the finance office's capital planning tools | Finance and budget offices | Resilience criteria and benefits are rarely modeled |
The portfolio: criteria, ranking, funding fit, delivery, public view | Buy a configurable resilience platform; build when governance is unusual | Counties, cities and authorities running projects across departments | Buying before your criteria are agreed |
Connections and the public story | Build small, on your own data | Teams whose systems disagree | A platform-wide integration to fix one feed |
Who this is for: resilience coordinators, planners and grants managers writing a first software budget or request for proposals.
When should a local government buy?
Buy when your workflow looks like everyone else's. The Census Bureau counted 91,438 local governments in 2025, and a vendor can spread the cost of standard work such as permitting or capital budgeting across many of them. A custom build spreads its cost across one budget, yours, for as long as it runs, and running is where most software money goes: U.S. federal agencies report spending about 80% of their IT budgets maintaining what they already have.
Buy when the obligations attached to the software are heavy. The Justice Department's ADA Title II rule requires the web content and apps a state or local government provides, including those it provides through contractual, licensing or other arrangements, to meet WCAG 2.1 Level AA, and in April 2026 it moved the compliance dates to April 26, 2027 for governments serving 50,000 people or more and April 26, 2028 for smaller ones and special districts. A maintained product spreads that work, along with cloud security reviews such as GovRAMP, across its customers. A custom public portal puts all of it on you, and our guide to cybersecurity for connected community systems covers what that involves.
Buy when your team is small. A product with a support line and other customers asking for the same fixes beats a custom tool whose one expert has moved on.
Be honest about which product:
- If the job is grant applications, awards and federal compliance reporting, buy grants management software; a resilience portfolio platform, ours included, is not built for that.
- If you carry a short list with one owner, a spreadsheet and a GIS story map may be all you need; our guide to cloud platforms for spatial disaster data compares the mapping options.
- If the job is the capital program, start with the finance office's capital planning tools before adding another system.
- If you run a portfolio of projects across departments and need to rank, fund and report it in one place, a configurable resilience platform such as Aptation is the category to evaluate.
Who this is for: small and mid-size cities and counties, and any jurisdiction whose resilience work runs through standard grant, capital and permitting processes.
When does a custom build make sense?
Build, or configure deeply, when your governance is unusual. A resilience authority that finances projects across a county and city line, or a regional body with its own revenue, runs on rules no product ships with by default. The founding ordinance and the funders set the workflow, and the software has to follow it.
Build when the criteria are the point. On the Annapolis Maritime Resilience Initiative, residents and community members identified 38 sites of concern over 18 months, and partners weighed them on climate vulnerability, ecological function, equity, community interest and feasibility before ten advanced to concept design. Those criteria and their weights belong to the community. If a product cannot hold your criteria, show the math behind each rank and let you change the weights, configure one that can or build it.
Build when the public view matters. A public portfolio that residents can explore is part of the accountability, and under the Title II rule it must be accessible whoever builds it. The Authority's public portfolio, Resilient & Ready Anne Arundel, runs on Aptation, so the projects residents see are the projects staff manage.
Most jurisdictions land in between: a configurable platform for the portfolio, the free federal tools for hazards and benefit-cost, the finance system for the budget, and small custom pieces for the connections and the public view. Our one-workflow build brief helps scope those pieces, and the custom software budget worksheet prices them.
Who this is for: resilience authorities and larger counties whose governance or public reporting does not fit a product's defaults. If equity is one of your criteria, our guide to embedding equity in local resilience planning covers how to weight it.
How do procurement and grant rules change the math?
Federal money brings federal buying rules. When a purchase is paid from a federal award, 2 CFR 200.320 lets micro-purchases go without competitive quotes if the price is reasonable and documented, requires quotes from an adequate number of qualified sources for simplified acquisitions, and requires formal procurement above the simplified acquisition threshold. The federal thresholds are $15,000 and $350,000, and under conditions the rule sets out, a recipient can self-certify a micro-purchase threshold of up to $50,000; your own procurement code may set lower limits. A small, fixed-price pilot can often move under the informal methods, while a platform contract usually needs the formal route.
Know who owns what grant money builds. Under the federal rule on intangible property, a recipient may copyright software developed under a federal award, but the awarding agency keeps a royalty-free, nonexclusive and irrevocable right to use it for federal purposes. Write everything else into the contract: source code, data, hosting accounts, documentation and the right to export it all in a usable format.
Grants end; subscriptions and maintenance do not. A license or hosting fee paid from a grant becomes a general fund request the year after the award closes, and federal money can arrive slowly even after it is awarded. Budget the operating cost in a recurring line before you sign, or choose something you can afford to keep when the grant is gone; our guides to funding resilience without federal grants and our 2026 federal climate funding playbook cover the sources.
Put these in every scope of work, whether you buy or build:
- Accessibility to WCAG 2.1 Level AA for anything the public sees, with the vendor's conformance evidence.
- Ownership of your data, with a scheduled export in a documented format.
- Who hosts it, who holds the administrator accounts and what happens at termination.
- How records are retained and retrieved when a public records request arrives.
- The price in the years after the grant, not only the first.
Buy or build for the five-year cycle, not the launch. Local hazard mitigation plans must be revised and resubmitted within 5 years to keep grant eligibility, and must describe how the plan feeds other planning mechanisms such as capital improvement plans. Whatever holds your projects should produce that evidence of progress without a scramble; our guide to implementing a hazard mitigation plan between updates shows what the record looks like.
Who this is for: procurement and grants staff writing a scope of work, and the resilience directors who sign it. If the scope is for a plan or an application rather than software, our RFP guides for a hazard mitigation plan update and a FEMA mitigation grant application set out what to ask for.
How do you test the choice before you commit?
Ask for a demonstration on your own project list, not a sample city. Require each shortlisted vendor to load your spreadsheet, score it on your criteria and weights, attach two of your real funding sources and produce the public view, then compare how long each one took. If a build is on the table, commission a prototype on the same list and compare it the same way.
Five questions separate a good fit from a good demo:
- Can we set our own criteria and weights, and can a resident see how a project's rank was calculated?
- Where does the hazard data come from, which version is it, and can we swap the source?
- What happens to our records and the public portfolio if we stop paying?
- Who meets the Title II accessibility rule for the public pages, and with what evidence?
- What will it cost in the first year after the grant ends?
In our work with resilience programs, the teams that have already agreed how they will prioritize projects and measure progress choose software faster and regret it less. They are buying a container for decisions they have already made. Council Fire works with municipalities and government agencies on those decisions first.
Frequently asked questions
01Should a local government build or buy climate resilience planning software?
Buy resilience planning software for workflows many jurisdictions share, such as grants administration and capital budgeting, and use FEMA's free tools for hazard data and benefit-cost analysis. Build or configure for your own criteria, ranking and public view. Fund neither from one grant: GAO found FEMA had reimbursed $62 million of about $2.5 billion allocated to BRIC subgrants.
02What does climate resilience planning software do?
Climate resilience planning software keeps one record of every project from plan to delivery: location, scores against your criteria, funding sources and gaps, budget, status and expected benefits, plus a public view. Aptation, built with the Resilience Authority of Annapolis and Anne Arundel County, is one example; the Authority's public portfolio, Resilient & Ready Anne Arundel, runs on it.
03Can federal grants pay for resilience planning software?
Sometimes, depending on the program and the activity, so confirm eligibility with the program office first. If federal money pays, 2 CFR 200 procurement rules apply: above your micro-purchase threshold, which federal rules set at $15,000 unless you document a different one, you need competitive quotes or formal procurement. Our 2026 federal funding playbook tracks the programs.
04Who owns software built with federal grant money?
Your contract decides, within a federal rule. Under 2 CFR 200.315, a recipient may copyright work developed under a federal award, but the awarding agency keeps a royalty-free, nonexclusive and irrevocable right to use it for federal purposes. Put source code, data, hosting accounts and exports in your agreement with the builder.
05Do accessibility rules apply to resilience software a city buys?
Yes, for public-facing web content and apps. The ADA Title II rule covers content governments provide directly or through contracts and requires WCAG 2.1 Level AA, from April 26, 2027 for governments of 50,000 people or more and April 26, 2028 for smaller ones and special districts. Ask vendors for conformance evidence before you sign.
06Where should local governments get hazard data?
Start with free federal sources: FEMA's National Risk Index covers 18 natural hazards for every county and census tract, and NOAA publishes sea level and high tide flooding outlooks. Treat each as a versioned input you can swap. Our free Climate Risk Lookup shows any county's FEMA risk rating and plan status.
07Is a spreadsheet enough to manage resilience projects?
For a short list with one owner, often yes. It breaks when several departments, funders and residents need the same record. A peer-reviewed review of 44 U.S. local adaptation plans found most failed to prioritize strategies or set out implementation, the gap a shared portfolio record is meant to close. Our guide to prioritizing resilience projects covers the method.
Related Resources
Plan and prioritize
- How to prioritize climate resilience projects that get done: the criteria and weights a platform should hold.
- How to implement a hazard mitigation plan between updates: keeping actions moving through the five-year cycle.
- How to measure climate resilience progress, honestly: reporting what the portfolio delivers.
- Climate resilience planning guides: the library's planning and assessment guides.
- How to write an RFP for a hazard mitigation plan update: scoping the plan before the software.
Fund and govern
- How to build resilience into your capital improvement plan: getting ranked projects into the budget.
- What is a resilience authority, and when do you need one?: the financing vehicle with the most unusual workflow.
- Funding resilience without federal grants: recurring sources for the years after a grant.
- Resilience funding guides: the programs and funding tools we track.
- How to write an RFP for a FEMA mitigation grant application: outside help with the application itself.
Tools and builds
- Aptation: the resilience planning and delivery platform we built with the Resilience Authority.
- Resilience planning software: Aptation set up for your program, or a tool built around it.
- Build or buy sustainability software?: the same decision for companies, NGOs and foundations.
- Climate Risk Lookup: FEMA risk ratings and plan status for any county.
- Adaptation Payback Calculator: a first benefit estimate by hazard.
- How to choose sustainability software: buy, configure or build?: the general decision matrix.
- Annapolis Maritime Resilience Initiative: from 38 sites of concern to ten priority projects.
- Anne Arundel County climate risk and resilience profile: the hazards behind one public portfolio.
Bring your project list and your procurement rules
Send us the project list you are working from and the procurement and grant rules you have to follow. We will tell you what to buy, what to use for free and what, if anything, is worth building, including whether Aptation fits or a product we do not make fits better. If a build wins, Council Fire Labs' fixed-price Tool Sprint delivers a working prototype on your own data in two to three weeks for $12,500, a single purchase you can check against your own thresholds. Talk to us on our contact page and choose Climate resilience or Software & AI (CF Labs).
About the Author
George Chmael II is Council Fire's Founder & CEO. He has led the firm since its founding and through its B Corp certification in 2010. Council Fire's climate resilience practice works with cities, counties, ports and authorities on planning, funding and delivery, and Council Fire Labs builds the software that holds that work together.
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