Back to work

I have been home in the Midwest for the weekend and displaced before that, so I have been a little slow in writing.

Let me start by explaining the changes that are happening. For the past four months, there have been Long Term Community Recovery teams in dozen plus Mississippi counties ( I worked for the one in Jeff Davis County). Most of those teams finished their work March 21st and disbanded. The plans they wrote were posted on a website and the people were sent home. Two counties, Biloxi County and Jefferson Davis County, were not so lucky.

In these two counties, the plans had major problems. What is happening is that most of the team members from the trouble counties were sent home and new members were brought in from more successful counties. For instance, in Jefferson Davis County, 17 staff members were sent home, three were kept. I am one of those three.

Another change is happening, but I have to back up to explain this one. FEMA was created by the Stafford Act and all our work is governed by that law. The mission of FEMA is to help communities recover from disasters. In a disaster of normal proportions, FEMA’s main role is to write checks. FEMA pays for 90 percent of the cost of rebuilding public infrastructure, like schools, roads and libraries (called public assistance). FEMA also provides support to individuals (e.g. rental assistance) as they try to move back home (called individual assistance). FEMA is not about improving communities (with a few exceptions), just putting them back how they were.

The question arises, what do you do when writing a check is not enough? Simply rebuilding all the damaged schools and libraries in Biloxi won’t put the community back together. To name a few things, the city is broke, residents are scattered around the country, businesses are closed and city employees are not coming home.

In this case, a special branch of FEMA, Long Term Community Recovery (aka Emergency Support Function 14) comes into existence. The goal of LTCR is to provide planning to help communities make better decisions and better use of the money. We help communities identify projects that will let them recover from the disaster (and go beyond the scope of just rebuilding what was already there). But, many Bush appointees do not believe in this mission.

They believe FEMA’s role should be the traditional individual and public assistance. Part of the reason we have struggled is because the FEMA bosses do not support LTCR. One indication of this is that we have had 6 bosses of LTCR is 5 months.

So, what is happening now in Mississippi is that LTCR is being shut down. The implementation phase is being handed off to the Mississippi National Guard (which will be a disaster, but that is another essay). The two counties that have not finished their plans are being transferred to a different division of FEMA, essentially the logistics division. So when I return, rather than working for Long Term Community Recovery, I will work for the logistics division (called Planning in FEMAspeak).

It is not clear how or if this will affect the work we do. I suspect it will not change too much, considering we are only here for another four weeks.