more fema grant reductions expected

This is the story in the news of today in the New York times, FEMA Cuts More Than $300 Million in Disaster Prevention Aid to New York

This article is all about the cancellation of the Building Resilient Community Infrastructure (BRIC) grant funding for flood mitigation efforts in New York State and New York City. What caught my attention was near the end of the article and this quotation, “In March, Zach Iscol, the head of New York City’s office of emergency management, told the City Council that the Trump administration had put as much as two-thirds of the city’s emergency response budget at risk; federal funds underwrite 66 percent of the department’s budgeted head count.”

This is for one very large city with an emergency management agency that is commensurate to its size. When the big boys and girl agencies start worrying about funding, what does that mean for medium to small agencies? More cuts are coming to different grant programs. I’m still waiting for the hammer to fall on Emergency Management Performance Grants (EMPG) which augment state and local funding for emergency management. If the concept is for states to pick up more of the responsibility for emergency management, then that should be at risk too.

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