FEMA

Throughout our organization's history, we have had the opportunity to serve many communities in the management of the FEMA disaster recovery grant (Public Assistance).

During our experience, we followed certain practices and procedures which enabled our clients to meet the requirements of the program and to fully fund the eligible disaster recovery costs. We have recorded these for your use and hope they are of some benefit as you begin the recovery process.

1. Appoint a Director of the program - The person should be responsible to learn the program requirements and to make certain your municipality has established the systems, procedures, and processes which will be required for public-assistance funding. The director will need to represent your government at all state and federal meetings and get the required information for processing disaster-recovery claims. FEMA will require an authorized representative. His name should be used as the authorized representative for your organization.

2. Empower your Director - Provide your director with full authority to implement any and all processes required in the program. Follow your municipality’s legal requirements in doing so.

3. Determine legal contracting requirements - Document the legal contracting requirements of your organization during an emergency, and adhere to them in awarding contracts for disaster recovery efforts. Under FEMA regulations, you are responsible to follow local/state regulations and you may need to document these.

4. Identify and document the damages - Identify the damages and the emergency recovery efforts in effect during the storm and immediately thereafter. Document the efforts and begin to identify the costs involved with those efforts. If this cost exceeds small project limitations, reimbursement from FEMA is based on actual costs. These costs must be supported by detailed documentation (contracts, time cards, project descriptions, time records of equipment used, etc.)

FEMA has provided sample documentation on its website. Look it over, and make sure yours meets their fields of information required, and add whatever will help you track your projects.

Wherever possible, take pictures and link these to the documentation and records. FEMA and State personnel will not possibly be able to visit every site and will probably attend to those with the highest damage priority.

5. Get the projects done - Once the projects are identified, determine the best means to get them completed. You will either do them with your own resources (force account) or contract them out. If done in house by your forces, you need to thoroughly document the effort with all the items mentioned in 4 above. FEMA may fund these on a project by project basis and write an individual PW (Project Worksheet). Pay particular attention to the details of this report, and whenever and wherever possible, link this to your accounting system for financial accountability. If contracts are awarded, the individual contracts should be linked to the PW. FEMA may not particularly be inclined to do this, because it means processing more PWs, but in the long run it will clearly establish the final cost of the reimbursement of the individual projects. Keep copies of the contracts, and related change orders and balance these costs with the program costs as reflected in your accounting system.