FEMA & Natural Disasters | FEMA reform or dissolution?

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“…On debris removal alone, Yancey County has racked up about $37 million in bills, with a lot more work still to do. The county’s budget for the entire fiscal year: also $37 million.

It’s “a little tight,” Austin, the county manager, half-joked.

More than a year after Helene, Yancey and other storm-battered counties across this region are still waiting for the federal government to make good on its promises to pay back millions upon millions of dollars that local officials have spent or allocated for recovery. The process has been agonizingly slow and unusually complicated, Austin and officials from other counties say. That delay has upended local budgets and hindered reconstruction.

And while comparisons can be tricky, North Carolina officials don’t know how to reconcile that their state has received less than some of its neighbors in certain types of FEMA aid after Helene, even though the storm wrecked hundreds of roads and bridges in the Tar Heel State, crippled water systems and damaged or destroyed more than 73,000 homes.

Recovering from a major disaster takes years at best, and navigating FEMA’s bureaucracy has always been arduous, but the Trump administration has instituted new layers of red tape that have made it even harder for communities, especially ones with small staffs and budgets, to recoup the unprecedented sums they have had to spend since Helene.…”
 
nycfan said:


“…On debris removal alone, Yancey County has racked up about $37 million in bills, with a lot more work still to do. The county’s budget for the entire fiscal year: also $37 million.

It’s “a little tight,” Austin, the county manager, half-joked.

More than a year after Helene, Yancey and other storm-battered counties across this region are still waiting for the federal government to make good on its promises to pay back millions upon millions of dollars that local officials have spent or allocated for recovery. The process has been agonizingly slow and unusually complicated, Austin and officials from other counties say. That delay has upended local budgets and hindered reconstruction.

And while comparisons can be tricky, North Carolina officials don’t know how to reconcile that their state has received less than some of its neighbors in certain types of FEMA aid after Helene, even though the storm wrecked hundreds of roads and bridges in the Tar Heel State, crippled water systems and damaged or destroyed more than 73,000 homes.

Recovering from a major disaster takes years at best, and navigating FEMA’s bureaucracy has always been arduous, but the Trump administration has instituted new layers of red tape that have made it even harder for communities, especially ones with small staffs and budgets, to recoup the unprecedented sums they have had to spend since Helene.…”
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“… The FEMA statement blamed Democrats for shutting down the government and said before that, Noem “was driving major reforms to make FEMA more efficient and accelerate the flow of recovery dollars to impacted communities.”

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North Carolina’s state government has in some cases stepped in to ensure that communities such as Yancey don’t go under. But the state, while having been allocated more than $6 billion by various federal agencies after Helene, estimates that it still has more than $40 billion in its own unfunded needs related to the storm.

Gov. Josh Stein, a Democrat, and other state officials have been pressing the Trump administration for more answers and more money. They note that as of Friday, the federal government has so far covered barely 10 percent of the damagefrom Helene, though it picked up more than 70 percent of the damage caused by historic storms such as Hurricanes Katrina, Sandy and Maria.…”
 
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