MONTGOMERY – A bipartisan group in Congress is working on legislation to reform the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) at the federal level rather than sending funding through block grants to the states, according to U.S. Rep. Shomari Figures (D-Mobile).
Figures told attendees at the Montgomery Area Chamber of Commerce’s Washington Brief on Wednesday that Republicans and Democrats agree that FEMA needs to be reformed.
“Yeah, so we're working on a FEMA bill now, because everybody agrees that there are changes that need to be made to FEMA, right? We need to make sure that we can better prepare for disasters, better respond to disasters, and better distribute the resources that the federal government has in the aftermath of disasters,” Figures said. “We just had the FEMA administrator before hearing on the Transportation & Infrastructure Committee because we have a partial jurisdiction over FEMA. And we were talking about the Texas floods, which obviously were very tragic. We lost a family of five from Mobile in that disaster. And there was some response issues from FEMA, and when I asked him, I was like, ‘Can you tell me what you learned?’ And they were literally like, ‘I don't think we did anything wrong.’ There's never a perfect response, right? I don't care who you are or what you do. No matter if you are in a military operation or government operation, there’s never a perfect response, right? There's always lessons that you can learn. And so with that type of attitude at FEMA, I think it's necessary that we restructure it in a way that we can better facilitate efficiencies and getting things out the door where we need them. It's a bipartisan bill that we’re working on, one of the big party differences that we have on this is that some of our Republican colleagues want to just literally block grant disaster relief to the states, which is insane, because no state gets hit by enough disasters to keep a fully functioning, you know, like disaster response…to utilize and have those sorts of programs in place, right? The amount of staff you need to staff up to respond to a hurricane or a tornado, like, you can't put that on 50 different states and four territories. And so what we're working on now is a system that will not do that but will certainly make changes to FEMA’s organizational structure and give states more flexibility, or will remove a lot of the red tape and bureaucracy around disaster responses, and so I think we'll end up in a very good spot on it.”
He continued, “But when you need FEMA, you really need FEMA. Like, when I can go through parts of my communities, even until this day that still have tarps on their roofs, that have never rebuilt in large part because some of them threw their hands up with trying to rebuild through the FEMA process because it’s so complex, complicated, and burdensome.”
“It's a tough thing to navigate, and fingers crossed that Montgomery doesn’t need to navigate it in that way, but it is a very bureaucratic process that combines both some state issues and federal issues, right? Because when you have to rebuild, like the federal government doesn't set, like the building codes and all of the local codes that you have to be responsive to in dealing with these disasters. And so, trying to figure out a way to marry up those programs in a way that makes it more efficient is tough. We can do better, and we have to do better, and we’re going to try to do that,” Figures added.
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