Virginia communities awarded $8.7M in 2023 for emergency preparedness, security

Virginia has been awarded $8.7 million in fiscal year 2023 federal funds for the Homeland Security Grant Program.

The grant program is administered by the Virginia Department of Emergency Management (VDEM), and supports a variety of emergency preparedness and security operations, equipment replacement, training, planning and exercise programs by local governments and entities.

The State Homeland Security Program (SHSP) is one component of six programs announced by FEMA in the fiscal year 2023 grant cycle. VDEM received 88 grant requests for the competitive portion of federal funds. Thirty-eight projects were awarded a total of $3.2 million, from competitive SHSP funds. The Virginia Modeling and Simulation Center (VMASC) at Old Dominion University manages a peer-review process conducted by Virginia’s public safety stakeholders for competitive grants, and scores proposals based upon benefit-cost ratios. Awards fund a diverse group of programs such as community outreach and preparedness programs, interoperability efforts, sheltering, equipment enhancement and exercises.

Emergency managers throughout Virginia have worked to become more strategic about allocating limited funding to meet the greatest needs with VDEM support. Nearly 119 local leaders from emergency management, law enforcement, fire and rescue, and EMS representing communities in the Commonwealth participated in evaluating potential projects to allocate the limited funding to do the most good.

FEMA implemented six national priority services areas for the fiscal year 2023 funding cycle. The new federal requirements require a total of 30 percent of the entire HSGP funding to support national priority investments with the following minimum funding thresholds:

• Enhancing protection of soft targets/crowded places – 3 percent
  • Enhancing information and intelligence sharing – 3 percent
  • Addressing domestic violent extremism – 3 percent
  • Community preparedness – 3 percent
  • Cybersecurity – no minimum
  • Election Security – 3 percent

Public safety stakeholders will be allocated $2.5 million in non-competitive grants from this year’s SHSP program to fund projects sustaining hazardous materials teams, technical rescue teams, incident management teams, radio communications caches, and the Virginia Fusion Center.

Communities in the Hampton Roads area were awarded $3 million in Hampton Roads Urban Area Security Initiative (HR UASI) Competitive Grants to address the unique needs of this high-threat, high-density urban area.