FEMA’s Hazard Mitigation Funding & CDRZ

FEMA has several Hazard Mitigation Assistance (HMA) programs that provide grants for planning, resilient infrastructure, household mitigation, and buyouts:

1. Hazard Mitigation Grant Program (HMGP)
   • provides funding to local governments so they can develop hazard mitigation plans and rebuild in a way that reduces, or mitigates, future disaster losses in their communities.
     
   • Availability: after a presidentially declared disaster.
     
   • Activities: Planning (code enforcements, buyouts); Flood Protection (levees, floodwalls, elevations, drainage); Retrofitting
     
2. Flood Mitigation Assistance (FMA)
   • provides funding to local governments for projects that reduce risk of repetitive flood damage to NFIP insured buildings
   • Subsumed two defunct programs: Repetitive Flood Claims grant program (RFC) & Severe Repetitive Loss grant program (SRL)
     
   • Availability:
     
   • Activities:
     
3. Building Resilient Communities (BRIC)
   • Subsumed Pre-disaster Mitigation Program (PDM), which ended out of 2018
   • Availability:
   • Activities: “Capability and capacity building”
4. Legislative Pre-disaster Mitigation grant program (LPDM)
   • Also known as “Pre-disaster Mitigation congressional community projects”
     
   • As far as I can tell, this is competitive PDM funding that is just extra and for some reason not branded as BRIC?

The full extent of how FEMA and other agencies will use the new CDRZ designations is still unknown, but FEMA has announced that CDRZ census tracts will receive priority in selection and increased federal cost share support under BRIC. We explore whether that represents a significant shift in where historical BRIC funding has been directed.

Datasets:

• Hazard Mitigation Assistance Projects (V3)
  • funded projects under HMA grant programs, including HMGP, FMA, PDM, and BRIC
  • FY2002 - FY2023 (FY2019 for BRIC)
• HMA Subapplications
  • subapplications / subgrants for FEMA HMA grants, with data collected under FEMA Grants Outcome (FEMA GO) grant system. Contains fields not included in prior project data, due to improved grant management system.
  • Includes BRIC & FMA; will include BRIC in CY 2023
    
  • FY2020 - FY2022
    
• Hazard Mitigation Assistance Mitigated Properties
  • data on the individual properties that were mitigated under HMA grant programs, representing a subset of the HMA Projects (V3) funds
  • FY1989 - FY2023

History of all HMA funding

History of PDM / BRIC Funding

PDM / BRIC FUNDING:
BRIC is one of the programs that CDRZs designations will affect funding for.

• Prior to 2020: HMA Projects
  • Pre-2019: BRIC was called the “pre-disaster mitigation” (PDM) program
    
  • 2019: renamed as “BRIC”
    
• 2020 onward: HMA Subapplications

Comparing previous funding vs. CDRZ designations

• Estimations at county level
  
• BRIC funding post FY2020 attributed to all “benefitting counties”. When multiple are listed, total obligated funds are equally distributed
  
• Per County Funding summed across all fiscal years (FY2000 - FY2021)
  
• CDRZ summed as a count within the county
  
• Some historical records pre FY2020 do not have a “benefitting county” designated. I’ve omitted those for now.