Thread: DHS stalemate leaves local governments hanging

http://www.politico.com/story/2015/0...ng-115306.html

DHS stalemate leaves local governments hanging

City, county and state governments rely on grants that the department cannot provide without a full spending bill.

By David Rogers
2/19/15 5:33 AM EST
Updated 2/19/15 6:10 AM EST

If all politics is truly local, the big sleeper in Washington’s 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 DHS’s stopgap continuing resolution runs out on Feb. 27. But lost in this discussion is how much the past five months have already disrupted the department’s annual grant process, which is worth $1.6 billion to state and local governments writing their own budgets this summer.

That’s because a continuing resolution is just that: a temporary fix to “continue” 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, it’s “a show-stopper.”

In House Speaker John Boehner’s 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. “It’s a bad day when it happens,” said Russell Decker, who ran the county office and just recently moved up to a state post. “But it could have been much worse if we didn’t have the funding to facilitate those training exercises.”

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 didn’t go out until June. And if the CR is simply extended without any adjustments, the lag will get only worse.

“You budget with that grant in mind,” said Wendy Smith-Reeve, director of the Arizona Division of Emergency Management, which must deal with a July 1 start to its budget year. “You’re 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 it’s a negative impact to your entire operation.”

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 — and refineries blowing up.

Money is provided on a 50-50 formula — with quarterly reimbursements — for what are often payroll costs. Thus any delay in these grant awards is “more “problematic,” said Nancy Ward, a veteran of FEMA and now chief deputy director for California’s 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.

“What those grants basically do is quite frankly fund and resource the emergency management foundation and structure across the nation,” Ward said. “The majority of local and state emergency management offices are funded through EMPG. … 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.

“There are many states where if it goes on long enough, they don’t have the wherewithal to do that for an elongated period of time,” Ward said. “Depending on the dollars that they receive, that becomes problematic the longer it goes.”

California is better off but scarcely immune.

“Right 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,” Ward said. “The 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.”

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. “Other localities probably can’t and they really rely on that quarterly reimbursement process,” he said.

“The EMPG represented about 50 percent of the funding in my county, and we’ve been a county under tight budgets for years,” said the 58-year-old Decker of his own Allen County experience as an emergency manager. “We haven’t had pay raises in Allen County in seven years. It’s 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?”

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 — representing the localities — 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, NEMA’s executive director, soon after followed up.

“Obviously cities and counties are smaller and have a lot less leeway. States have a greater ability to manage this over a period of time,” she said. “When my staff said that, they were strictly speaking from a state perspective.”

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 enacted—if grants are to go out fully this fiscal year.

“A lack of a full-year appropriation after March 15, 2015 will complicate FEMA’s ability to disburse funds over the remainder of the fiscal year, including to critical needs, such as Emergency Management Performance Grants,” a spokesperson said. “Without 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.

Read more: http://www.politico.com/story/2015/0...#ixzz3SIf7rmQO

The goal of the DHS funding stall is to stop Obama Amnesty, and the very first beneficiaries of that will be states and local governments who will not be required to provide and fund this illegal alien population the same as if they were citizens. So the gain of stopping Obama Amnesty for states and local governments far outweighs any pinch they may feel from a delay in grants to fund law enforcement and emergency management.

The greatest threat and current emergency is illegal immigration, stopping it, removing them, and preventing future illegal alien populations from invading our country.

So waiting for the funding from the feds for awhile to fund some new equipment or what not is a very minor issue hardly worth mentioning given the gravity and severity of the larger issue of illegal immigration and the adverse impacts it has on our nation and citizens.