Sneak Preview: Longer Timeframes Sought for Watershed Projects
(The following was excerpted from a recent Thompson Grants 360 article.) Because many recipients awarded Emergency Watershed Protection (EWP) grant funds have struggled to complete projects under current regulatory timeframes, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS) now is evaluating the merits of updating its regulations to extend these timeframes, as recommended recently by the Government Accountability Office (GAO).
NRCS, which oversees the EWP program, provides technical and financial assistance to project sponsors (i.e., state, local and tribal governments) under the EWP program to relieve imminent threats to life and property caused by natural disasters (e.g., hurricanes that scatter debris into a river, thus blocking the flow and causing flooding). The funds are used for assessing damage, project oversight and reimbursing project costs, and the benefits of the project must generally outweigh the costs. Congress appropriated more than $1.3 billion to the program yearly from federal fiscal year 2015 through 2020.
Following a disaster, NRCS will assess the damage to determine whether it is “exigent,” thus requiring immediate action, or “non-exigent.” EWP regulations at 7 C.F.R §624.9 state that exigent projects must be completed in 10 days, whereas non-exigent projects must be completed in 220 days. After NRCS allocates funds to an EWP project, it enters into a cooperative agreement with the sponsor. The cooperative agreement specifies the responsibilities of the sponsor and NRCS in implementing the project, the amount of funding NRCS will provide, and cost-share requirements, among other information.
While many stakeholders reviewed by GAO described the EWP program as important for responding to disasters and said it was generally well-managed, they did identify certain challenges. Mostly, program sponsors said meeting the project completion dates was difficult because some projects entail large-scale construction that require substantial time to design and implement. One stakeholder said that a complex project, such as repairing a severely damaged dam, can often take two years to complete. In some cases, recipients said meeting the 10-day timeframe for exigent situations was impossible, with one local government sponsor noting that state law requires a 30-day bid period for contracts.
Other stakeholders said they were hampered by NRCS’ time limits for requesting EWP assistance, which is 60 days from when the natural disaster occurs or from when access to the sites becomes available. One county sponsor told GAO that 60 days was not enough time, particularly since it had limited staff, to determine the extent of the damage following a major disaster such as a hurricane, given that it had an extensive network of flood control canals that it would need to assess. The sponsor said it had to postpone other important tasks to submit the request in time.
(The full version of this story has now been made available to all for a limited time here.)
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