DHS stalemate leaves local governments hanging
If all politics is truly local, the big sleeper in Washingtonâs fight over the Homeland Security budget could be the city and county agencies that depend on the same bill to help finance their emergency response teams. Congress is most focused now on the threat of a shutdown next week if lawmakers cannot reach an agreement before DHSâs stopgap continuing resolution runs out on Feb. 27. But lost in this discussion is how much the past five months have already disrupted the departmentâs annual grant process, which is worth $1.6 billion to state and local governments writing their own budgets this summer. Story Continued Below Thatâs because a continuing resolution is just that: a temporary fix to âcontinueâ operations as they were before Oct. 1, the beginning of the current 2015 fiscal year. New grant applications for 2015 count as new starts, which are not authorized at this stage. In the words of Craig Fugate, who oversees the grants as administrator of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, itâs âa show-stopper.â In House Speaker John Boehnerâs native Ohio, the real-life stakes are well illustrated by a refinery explosion and fire that rocked the city of Lima last month. The Allen County emergency management office, which relies on federal grant money for about 50 percent of its budget, had run an exercise just last May with fire, refinery and health personnel in preparation for such a hazard. âItâs a bad day when it happens,â said Russell Decker, who ran the county office and just recently moved up to a state post. âBut it could have been much worse if we didnât have the funding to facilitate those training exercises.â If and when Congress finally enacts a Homeland Security budget, FEMA will surely try to truncate the application process and make up for lost time. But Congress is already two months behind the pace of last year, when much of the money didnât go out until June. And if the CR is simply extended without any adjustments, the lag will get only worse. âYou budget with that grant in mind,â said Wendy Smith-Reeve, director of the Arizona Division of Emergency Management, which must deal with a July 1 start to its budget year. âYouâre planning a year in advance what you are going to execute. You are relying on that grant, and if that grant is not available as a funding resource then itâs a negative impact to your entire operation.â The crunch appears to be greatest at the local level, and among smaller states with fewer resources than a California or New York. The number of homeland security preparedness grants grew after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks and today include $587 million to address the needs of dense urban areas like New York, Chicago and Washington, D.C., which could be potential targets. Smaller, more narrowly focused programs exist for transit and port security as well. And while Congress is mired in a debate about immigration policy, the impacts of the delay are felt by Operation Stonegarden, a $55 million program to better secure roads from the Southwest border. But the most time-sensitive money may be the estimated $350 million Emergency Management Performance Grant program, which goes back decades before Sept. 11 and fosters a national network of state and local managers to respond to all manner of hazards, natural and man-made. Terrorism is part of its portfolio now, but the greater focus is on preparing for and managing the local response to the likes of storms, tornadoes, wildfires, train derailments â and refineries blowing up. Money is provided on a 50-50 formula â with quarterly reimbursements â for what are often payroll costs. Thus any delay in these grant awards is âmore âproblematic,â said Nancy Ward, a veteran of FEMA and now chief deputy director for Californiaâs Office of Emergency Services under Gov. Jerry Brown. The crunch gets greater moving down the ladder to local jurisdictions less equipped to carry the costs while Washington debates. âWhat those grants basically do is quite frankly fund and resource the emergency management foundation and structure across the nation,â Ward said. âThe majority of local and state emergency management offices are funded through EMPG. â¦ States have to fund those dollars up front because the majority of their staff and their training and exercise and planning dollars are caught up in those grants. âThere are many states where if it goes on long enough, they donât have the wherewithal to do that for an elongated period of time,â Ward said. âDepending on the dollars that they receive, that becomes problematic the longer it goes.â California is better off but scarcely immune. âRight now we have the ability to weather this challenge but if it goes much longer that will start to be a problem in California as well,â Ward said. âThe local level or maybe even smaller states have a harder time being able to shoulder their portion of the grant, especially when it involves paying salaries to their workers.â Branch Strickland, director for finance and grants at the New York City Office of Emergency Management, estimated that the annual EMPG grant is worth about $3 million for the city, but the delays now are more of a cash-flow issue, which New York can handle given its size. âOther localities probably canât and they really rely on that quarterly reimbursement process,â he said. âThe EMPG represented about 50 percent of the funding in my county, and weâve been a county under tight budgets for years,â said the 58-year-old Decker of his own Allen County experience as an emergency manager. âWe havenât had pay raises in Allen County in seven years. Itâs not like we have an abundance of funding, so when half of our funding is in question, it certainly impacts my bosses, the elected officials. How are we going to pay for these services?â Thus far in the debate in Congress, the dollars for local and state grants have received relatively little attention. But that could begin to change as the National Association of Counties is scheduled to hold a five-day meeting in Washington that begins this weekend and will surely include visits with local House members, when they return from the Presidents Day recess.. The National Emergency Management Association, which happens to be based in the home state of Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), has stayed more in the background since its focus is more on state, not local, emergency managers. But the U.S. Conference of Mayors and International Association of Emergency Managers â representing the localities â have joined the counties in pressing the case for action in a series of letters to the Senate Appropriations Committee leadership. NEMA itself will have its own meeting in Washington in a few weeks and could yet be more drawn into the fray if the impasse continued. When a press spokesman told POLITICO on Wednesday that the grant delay was not a concern for the group, Trina Sheets, NEMAâs executive director, soon after followed up. âObviously cities and counties are smaller and have a lot less leeway. States have a greater ability to manage this over a period of time,â she said. âWhen my staff said that, they were strictly speaking from a state perspective.â In a statement released to POLITICO late Wednesday night, FEMA appeared to set March 15 as a make-or-break date for getting a DHS appropriations bill enactedâif grants are to go out fully this fiscal year. âA lack of a full-year appropriation after March 15, 2015 will complicate FEMAâs ability to disburse funds over the remainder of the fiscal year, including to critical needs, such as Emergency Management Performance Grants,â a spokesperson said. âWithout the matching federal grants, our state, local, and tribal partners may face difficult choices about how they will make ends meet or curtail their activities.