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FEMA Lacks Measures of Regional Collaboration |
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by Mickey McCarter
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Friday, 03 July 2009 |
Thus it cannot truly measure effectiveness of UASI grants, GAO says
The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) lacks a means to measure the performance of urban areas to confirm that they are collaborating to build regional capabilities, therefore it lacks certainty that cities are spending their Urban Area Security Initiative (UASI) grants effectively, congressional investigators found.
The Government Accountability Office (GAO) recommended that FEMA develop performance measures to determine what progress cities have made in developing the means to collaborate regionally. FEMA agreed with the recommendation, which was made public Thursday in a GAO report titled "Urban Area Security Initiative: FEMA Lacks Measures to Assess How Regional Collaboration Efforts Build Preparedness Capabilities."
FEMA has been gathering data on regions eligible for UASI grants to examine their spending on specific projects and to rate their preparedness priorities and capabilities but the agency has not taken a look at how well those regions have collaborated to build preparedness capabilities--a key goal of the UASI grants, GAO said.
"An executive directive, departmental policy, and agency guidance all require that preparedness priorities and capabilities be measurable so that FEMA can determine current capabilities, gaps, and assess national resource needs," the report read.
FEMA has been asking states to describe the collaborative activities taking place in their regions but does not have any means to measure how collaboration has progressed against national priorities, GAO said.
The agency is working on creating a comprehensive assessment system to measure that progress, which would help FEMA evaluate the return on investment on the $5 billion in UASI grants it has awarded under the program since it began in fiscal 2003.
GAO surveyed 49 UASI regions in the study to prepare its report. It discovered that 46 of them report having active mutual aid agreements, and 44 of them identified "training and exercises as activities they use to build regional preparedness capabilities."
The Implementing Recommendations of the 9/11 Commission Act of 2007 (Public Law 110-53) directed FEMA to change the way it defines a geographic region when determining its eligibility for UASI grants. But the urban areas affected by these determinations do not necessary agree with how FEMA defines their areas.
Of the 49 regions in the GAO survey, 27 regions said FEMA included additional jurisdictions in their geographic area when the agency assessed risk related to UASI grant determinations. But those regions do not consider those additional jurisdictions to actually belong to their urban area.
Seventeen of those regions said they evaluated how FEMA defined their areas to evaluate including the additional jurisdictions in their own definitions. Three of those said they planned to expand their urban area while seven said they would not.
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Mickey McCarter |
| About the author: |
| eNewsletter Editor/Senior Washington Correspondent,
is a journalist with more than a decade of experience in reporting
on
military affairs and information technology.
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