Sneak Preview: FEMA To Review Hazard Mitigation Grant Programs

(The following is excerpted from a recent Thompson Grants 360 article.) The Department of Homeland Security Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) expects by June to develop a multi-year strategy to assess the pre-award processes for four hazard mitigation grant programs to make it easier to apply under these programs, and to enable recipients to use funding from more than one FEMA mitigation grant program on a project, in response to recent Government Accountability Office (GAO) recommendations.

From federal fiscal years (FY) 2010 to 2018, FEMA obligated about $11.3 billion through four grant programs that fund state and local disaster mitigation efforts. These are the Hazard Mitigation Grant program (HMGP), and the Flood Mitigation Assistance (FMA), Pre-Disaster Mitigation (PDM) and Public Assistance (PA) programs. In FY 2020, FEMA replaced the PDM program with the Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities (BRIC) program.

Mitigation activities under these programs must be cost-effective, and FEMA requires state and local applicants to conduct a benefit-cost analysis to demonstrate that the estimated benefits of a mitigation project will exceed the costs. However, some state and local officials told GAO that conducting the benefit-cost analysis was challenging because the costs can be difficult to calculate and “may require hundreds of pages of data or technical project information to support.” Hiring contractors to conduct the analysis also can prove expensive, they added.

GAO found that FEMA had taken some steps to make it easier for jurisdictions to complete the benefit-cost analysis, which included updating its cost analysis tool to reduce some data entry requirements and establishing “pre-calculated benefits,” which allow applicants to forgo conducting the analysis for some project types (e.g., acquisition of properties in flood zones, provision of residential safe rooms). FEMA officials told GAO that they would like to develop pre-calculated benefits for additional project types (e.g., electrical infrastructure and telecommunications).

(The full version of this story has now been made available to all for a limited time here.)

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