4 – The territory,

Despite the challenges identified in our prior findings, USVI has also made great strides in creating capacity, expending funds, and navigating the system. One of the efforts to improve recovery response has been the discussed establishment of the ODR in 2019. All of this being said, it is important to review programs. ODR is in charge of putting forward priority projects for the territory to complete. Since inception, ODR has identified 45 priority projects just on St. Croix that are in varying stages of planning, construction, or completion. To complete the current 45 priority projects, it would take $1.2B or around 15% of total allocated recovery funding. Of these 45 projects over half are managed by just three government agencies, Department of Public Works (12); Department of Sports, Parks, and Recreation (7); and Department of Human Resources (4).

For this analysis, we mapped the priority projects across St. Croix and from the two maps, one could see there is a distribution of projects that span the whole island. That being said, when mapping features of the projects, there are nuances to address.

One of the maps shows projects’ respective cost in relation to the Social Vulnerability Index. Notably from this map, we identified more investment in terms of project costs near Christiansted whereas Frederiksted has less investment despite being a more socially vulnerable area. This inequity between the towns was further identified when examining intervention type (or what the action of the project would be). In this map, we noticed that Frederiksted only has repair projects whereas Christiansted has more diversity in project interventions (repair, new installation, demolition and reconstruction)–creating more potential for additional investment in the area. While great strides have been made in recovery for the territory, we believe that equity should be at the center of implementation.

Source: ODR, the Government of the Virgin Islands