The FY 2012 grant announcement was made today. In sum:
Port Security Grant Program (PSGP)— provides more than $97 million to help protect critical port infrastructure from terrorism, enhance maritime domain awareness and strengthen risk management capabilities in order to protect against improvised explosive devices and other non-conventional weapons.
This is down from $400M in annual funding from just a couple of years ago. There are some big changes for this grant cycle. One is that the Fiduciary Agent (FA) process is not being used for this year, and I expect will be discontinued into the future. All ports will have to apply directly to FEMA. There are also no funding allocations by Coast Guard Port Sector. The grants are described as being fully competitive.
Ports will compete for grant funds based on their size and which group they are in:
- Group 1 ports will compete for 60% of the funding available
- Group 2 ports will compete for 30% of the funding available
- Group 3 ports will competed for 30% of the funding available
- And, I'm not sure how the remaining 10% will be allocated
The cash match is back for this grant round. 50% match for the private sector and 25% match for the government sector. Waivers of the match will be considered on a case-by-case basis. I think I may have heard that the ability to grant a waiver has been delegated down to FEMA.
One of the other big items is that they are looking for these funds to all be spent quickly, remembering that you only have two years for the performance period, not the usual five that it has been taking. They are promoting the funding of operational costs and allowing for paying for overtime (OT). What is not clear to me is what type of OT is allowable. For Urban Areas it was allowed for when the national threat level went up and more cops where deployed on the street.
The big issue is that over $8B in funding that has been allocated for homeland security activities remains unspent. This sends the message that additional funding is not needed. FEMA wants to ensure that every opportunity is taken to spend down existing grants and fully allocate and spend the FY 2012 grant within the two year period allowed.
For more information on other FY 2012 Homeland Security Grants see my blog post at
Disaster-Zone.com
