Reforming the Stafford Act
Luke Meyers, Hawaii’s Governor’s Office Disaster Management Coordinator posted the message below on LinkedIn.
“Since the August 8th wildfires, there has been a tremendous amount of assistance provided to survivors and to dependents of victims. The private and public opportunities don't remove the impacts whether physically or emotionally, but are important to the community in their regaining a many paths ahead.
On the public side, the county, state, and federal funding is critical. As we continue, as in other federally declared disasters, the puzzle pieces of Stafford Act, SBA, FHWA, and others are being leveraged and programmed for now and future years.
Our community though is waiting on supplemental community development block grant disaster recovery funding. There are challenges with all types of funding, but the time and delay between programs implemented and block grant is filled with miss opportunities for the survivors and the general community.
As recovery from incidents of this scale can take many years and potentially out to a decade or longer, one may ask why change the system. The flexibility of CDBG-DR if applied and implemented in year one or two versus years three and beyond would create avenues of resilience that are being delayed or even not created. Waiting on a supplemental seems out of touch in the day and age of large scale disasters occurring annually not once every 5 to 10 years. A federal shift in these funds must be considered and not at the political will in Washington. As the fundamentals are reworked, the methodology for the funding needs to truly transparent and behind the curtain.
A focus area that could leverage this more permanent type of funding are renters. As disasters expose any community profile, last August exposed over 70% renters in an overheated and out of touch housing market. There has been value in the form of Rental Assistance and CTHA and Direct Lease and FEMA ATTHU, but these are temporary. Blending a more agile and timely grant funding for permanent housing needs to be considered.”
Luke has been up to his ears in the disaster recovery process from the 2023 Hawaii Wildfires which caused so much destruction and loss of life. You can listen to Luke discuss more about disaster recovery by listening to this Disaster Zone Podcast: Policy Implications of the Maui Firestorm recorded earlier this year.
