Federal changes affect emergency management

HOOD RIVER — In his election bid, President Trump promised to rid the federal government of waste. Some of the resulting cuts, especially ones regarding emergency preparedness and response, may have negative impacts on disaster management efforts in Hood River.

Charles Young, Hood River County’s emergency manager, said the most significant impacts of these are changes to the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s (FEMA) organization and grant requirements, the cancellation of the Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities grant, and the removal of the Environmental Protection Agency’s Climate and Economic Justice Screening Tool. These changes put funding for urgent wildfire mitigation and earthquake preparation efforts at risk, and increase the complexity of decisions the county must make regarding disasters.

Grant uncertainty

Changes to FEMA policy, and uncertainty at the agency in general, are making Young’s job more difficult, and also jeopardizing funding for his role. For instance, grant agreements have had immigration enforcement language added that conflicts with Oregon’s Sanctuary State laws. Oregon is a party to a multi-state lawsuit that is challenging these new requirements.

One of these grants, the Emergency Management Performance Grant (EMPG), is a reimbursement grant that the state applies for and disperses out to counties to be spent on emergency preparation efforts. Young said that his position in the county is partly funded by the EMPG. If a court rules that the FEMA immigration enforcement language is legal, the conflict with Oregon’s sanctuary state laws means counties that take the grant funding risk “having to give back the grant money,” he said.

These changes add complexity that “makes it difficult for counties to plan,” Young said. “Grant cycles are long and complex,” he added, and the increased uncertainty adds risk to emergency preparation and response efforts in Hood River.

In addition to increasing uncertainty, the cancellation of another FEMA grant, the Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities (BRIC) grant, has impacted Hood River County’s disaster preparation efforts. Young said that while this grant is “not talked about often,” it was a “key funding lifeline for large mitigation projects.” The grant funds projects that build more resilient public infrastructure, ensuring that when disaster strikes, the harms are reduced.

Hood River County had “a couple of BRIC applications open,” he said. “One was a seismic study for county buildings and another for the courthouse.”

The need for this work has been determined in the last five years, after a Department of Geology and Mineral Industries study found that Hood River County is at risk of an earthquake from a fault line south of Cascade Locks. According to Young, Hood River has “emergency services and county services” along with “half of the county’s cell service” located in “unreinforced buildings.”

Since “we don’t have much money as a county,” the BRIC grant was the best option to pay for updating buildings that are not earthquake safe, Young said. Now, the county will have to start again and find different sources of money.

Young said it could take another two years to apply for another grant. Further, the primary alternative funding source would be Oregon’s seismic grant.

However, that wouldn’t pay for a new building, he said; the grant would only help reinforce current infrastructure. Beyond the impact of losing grant funding, Young said the time spent by emergency management, public works, and county administration over the past years to apply for these grants, which was “at the time, worthwhile, could’ve been spent in many other places.”

With the removal of the BRIC grant, Hood River County remains short of a funding source to replace vulnerable infrastructure, despite years of work by county officials.

Wildfire prevention

Along with the changes in FEMA and its grants, the removal of the EPA’s Climate and Economic Justice Screening Tool (CEJST) has hampered the county’s financial wherewithal, too. The CEJST “declared that Hood River County was subject to economic stressors” that would make it difficult for the county to find the “local match that most grants require,” Young said. The CEJST showed that Hood River doesn’t “have it in the budget to pay 25%” of large-scale projects.

As a result, federal grantors used this tool to determine whether a county’s local match could be reduced, so instead of paying 25% of a project, they may only have to pay 10% or even waive the local match altogether.

The removal of CEJST will reduce the amount Hood River can receive from the United States Forest Services’ Community Wildfire Defense Grant (CWDG). According to Young, “wildfire is a significant risk to the county.” The EPA toolkit allowed the county to apply for more money from the CWDG for the “funding to do large-scale fuels mitigation, fire breaks, thinning, and prescribed burns.”

After the removal of the CEJST, instead of asking for $7 million from the CWDG, the county can only ask for a couple of hundred thousand, as they couldn’t afford the higher local match. This change means that many mitigation efforts the county had planned will no longer be able to be funded through CWDG.

Before the removal of the CEJST, the county had planned forest fuels reduction, community fuels projects, and hiring a project manager and a wildfire mitigation coordinator to work across the county. Following the removal, the county applied only for enough money to fund the wildfire mitigation coordinator to “organize community groups to prepare defensible space around homes,” he said.

The coordinator will work to encourage more Firewise community development in Hood River, including in particularly vulnerable areas along Indian Creek Trail. Firewise communities are communities that are in “good standing” with the National Fire Protection Association.

The county is still “hopeful” that all their high-priority mitigation efforts can happen, Young said, but they will “need alternative funding sources.”

He added that, “on the upside for Hood River County,” there are people in the community who really care and want to work towards mitigation efforts, allowing the county to “do a lot with a small amount of money.” He also said that “state grants are still available,” and that a wildfire mitigation coordinator can “help to organize and encourage communities to apply for those grants.”

The main risk the removal of the CEJST will have to the county is that “things will be happening less quickly, and the county may not be able to apply for certain grants.” As Hood River County is “incredibly forested,” and federal changes have resulted in “fewer Forest Rangers and experts in the field,” Young said, the slowing down of mitigation efforts only contributes to the already “extreme risk of wildfire” in the county.

Some positives

Though the federal changes to FEMA grants and the removal of the CEJST negatively impact the county’s wildfire mitigation efforts, infrastructure, and overall financial strength, Young said that it’s “not all doom and gloom,” because “people are keen to step up.” Despite the impact on Hood River County’s Emergency Management, if the community is “willing to go out and do the work themselves,” to help “everybody to prepare for natural disasters,” it will be possible to reduce the risks of disasters devastating the county, he said.

Young “urges people to volunteer,” and suggests that if anyone wants more information on how they can help, they should read “Before Wildfire Strikes,” a booklet from the county that walks through what individual preparedness looks like.

A link to the booklet is available in the last county newsletter on the county website, or it can be picked up at all local fire, county, and city offices.

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Riley McNamara is a 2025 Hood River Valley High School graduate and is attending Oregon State University this fall. McNamara worked as an intern at Columbia Gorge News this summer.