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FEMA Chief Says Go Big on Mitigation Projects

The question is who can go big?

Deanne Criswell recently encouraged emergency managers and jurisdictions to go big on mitigation. Stop doing small projects that elevate homes and think much bigger because of the future funding coming for Building Resilient Infrastructure Communities (BRIC). This is real money — up to $4.5 billion in funding.

All of that sounds great — stop playing small ball and swing for the fences! The problem is most emergency management programs are small and they don’t have the expertise to play in the major leagues as Criswell is encouraging. Basically, they can’t hit it out of the infield or even get wood on the ball to begin with.

Checks are not just handed out for good ideas. Expertise in doing cost benefit analysis is needed and that goes way beyond the internal capabilities of the majority of emergency managers or their organizations. Remember the pandemic, because that has been the focus for many emergency management programs for the last 18 months. I spoke to one county director who had “extricated his program from pandemic efforts” only to be sucked back into daily involvement due to the delta variant surge.

The one thing I can suggest is to get with your city or county planning department and let them know about the availability of future funding and look for them to provide expertise that you don’t have. However, a likely issue for them is they won’t have the staff to work on the grant application process, because of the everyday workload of reviewing plans, etc.

This is a Catch-22 scenario of having funding available and no way to build disaster resilience through mitigation.
Eric Holdeman is a contributing writer for Emergency Management magazine and is the former director of the King County, Wash., Office of Emergency Management.