Ryan Potosnak, FEMA, National Unified Review Coordinator: We Are Now Stepping Into Session

Ryan Potosnak, FEMA, National Unified Review Coordinator: We are now stepping into Session 3, which is our panel discussion. We’ve got a variety of differentAgencies represented here that will talkabout different elements that feed intothe UFR, some success stories,some things on the horizon, so we’d like tostart off with Miss Danielle Schopp, Directorof the Office of Environment andEnergy with HUD.

Danielle Schopp, HUD, Director of the Office of Environment and Energy: Hi, just want to talk little bit about HUD and FEMA’s evolving partnership. After Hurricane Katrina and HUD’s extensive involvement there and worked with FEMA on the ground, we decided when Sandy came along, everyoneknew it had to be different. And we workedvery hard with our existingrelationships with Angela Gladwell and withCEQ in the very beginning to figure outsome ways to try to make it differentbefore the UFR came along. We are excitedabout using this platform to moveforward. I think our experience has beenthat learning is kind of an iterativeprocess: each disaster for the HUD side feels alittle bit different and one of thethings that was unique about Sandy was we worked through to have our CDBG Disaster Recovery Block grant moneythat is available through appropriation. Eachtime were brought into play there is a newappropriation bill. And so we workedwith FEMA and CEQ to put in language thatallows our responsible entities whomight be working on the same projectwith the same scope to actually useFEMA’s environmental review as a substitutefor our own. Knowing that they are very similar, we wanted one review as much aspossible when it made sense. And that was very helpful,especially in the early days of responsewhen we’re talking to our state and citygrantees who, you know, they’rejust dumped in with all the money andall these problems. We’re tellingthem, you know, look at FEMA and if you’redoing the same project, the same scope,use their environmentalreview, and there was an audible sigh ofrelief. And that was extremely helpfulespecially in the response scenario because ourmoney is often used as a match for response activities under Stafford Act.

We went further than thatto coordinate our regional staff and ourgrantees to develop a jointenvironmental review for individual households. We often fund the same individual householdswith elevation money, with rehabilitationmoney, recovery money, and we wanted tohave everyone understand and agree uponthe format - it gets down to the format for bureaucrats as well as the substanceof what was going into thoseenvironmental reviews. In building therelationships and trust is somethingthat our grantees have told us have beenreally helpful, so even though we haven’talways seen FEMA necessarily using these samereviews, because maybe the FEMA funds,hazardgrant,HGMP money, has been used in otherplaces that this point, it was stillhelpful for grantees to learn FEMA’s ways and processes because ourgrantees who do the environmental revieware the applicants for FEMA. So if we cancoordinate that and speed it up I think it will help all of these reviews. Timingcontinues to be something that westumble through and is an issue in everydisaster recovery, whose money goes first,getting people to talk about public assistanceprojects, HGMP projects, HUD projects. One of the things as I mentioned earlierduring the discussion is we put in ourrules basically for our funding that ourgrantees had to go to an interagency review committee before they came toHUD to tell us what they were going todo. And when they tell HUD what they’re goingto do in this, they also need to identifyother Federal funding to us and they need tohave a transparent and inclusive process. That’s something that runs throughHUD’s programs to make sure that we areinforming vulnerable communities’ environmental justice responsibilitiesas well as good governance. So we hopethat our grantees, well, we don’t hope butknow that they’ve been following thisprocess and it’s been really useful toengage with Agency staff, even pre-scoping for NEPA to get their expertise from the U.S. ArmyCorps, for example, will this oyster reef:Is this permittable? Is this crazy? And that really helped ourgrantees to scope their project to make designchanges before it came through for permitting. That was very, veryhelpful for us, and it was helpful forour grantees. We also signed onto the 106Prototype Programmatic Agreement, and that is dramatic. InMississippi, for instance, followingHurricane Katrina, it took the State ofMississippi 18 months to get aProgrammatic Agreement in place. In New YorkCity, New York State, New Jersey, it took one to two months. It is phenomenal and that in and ofitself is one of the biggest tools thatthe UFR has made available. We’re reallyexcited to understandmore about the endangered species, the ESA-type toolsthat are being developed, because that’s also something that we really struggle with, is todo these consultation processes in a timely fashion when everyone is super busy and overwhelmed. And with that, I will turn it over to the next person.

Ryan Potosnak, FEMA, National Unified Review Coordinator:Last but not least. We have Kim Pettit,who’s a member of FEMA’s Office ofEnvironmental Planning and HistoricPreservation’s GIS specialist, talking about data agreements.

Kim Pettit, FEMA, Office of Environmental Planning and Historic Preservation:I apologize, I have not prepared formal remarks, plus I’m the person who gets you guys into the weeds. I just returned from deployment in South Carolina. So I’m going to talk alittle bit about background of Data Sharing Agreements and then some of the Lessons Learned from my deployment. I literally just got backthis weekend.

So the background:Data Sharing Agreements for UFR is under theIT subgroup. When UFR first startedwe looked at what you just talked about the one GIS viewer and one source of dataand we were never going to finish that byJuly. So, what can we do that will build the infrastructure around that sowe can do that in the future as westart to implement? Data Sharing Agreements was one of the easy win pieceswhere we can say okay, let’s pre-position usto be able to share data across all theFederal and State entities because theyin general have a lot more datathat we need so that we can coordinatethis into the future. One of the pieces I think that’s reallybeen missing there is project locations,and I think you talked about it a little bit earlier about being able to use eachother’s reviews. You can’t do that if you don’t know where each other’s projects have been. We have been talking a lot about establishing Data Sharing Agreementswith our Federal partners and we’restarting to do that with FEMA, but I hopethat we’ll be able to coordinate acrossmore FederalAgencies in time to come. One of my goals in going to SouthCarolina was just piloting thisprocedure with the State. What I learnedwhen I got down there was, “this is not the time tobe doing this.” I can’t ask the DOT to write a Data Sharing Agreement when they have 80roads are still closed. Would they havedone it if I asked them? Yes, but I’m notgoing to ask them at this time. So I thinkone of the big Lessons Learned ispre-positioning and part of that I think is I got down there – I’m acting under the UFR, under the FederalDisaster Recovery Coordinator. Nobody knew what UFR was. None of thepeople in the Field knew what UFR was. I informedFederal Highways about some of their GISinfrastructure tools to help themfacilitate their project reviews – they didn’tknow they existed, and they are internal toFederal Highways. So I think one of thebig lessons that I learned down there isall of the good work that we are doing at Headquarters, these workshops, whatever, they haveto get further down into the Field tothe people who are doing the actualimplementation. One of the really coolthings that happened in South Carolina - I’m going to point to those guys right there - thePrototype Programmatic Agreement that we have in South Carolinawas hugelysuccessful in facilitating and streamliningour review process so much so that wehave additional parties signing on. Parties that had their own version ofProgrammatic Agreements, and liked ours better. So that’s a big win forthat Programmatic Agreement. We also developed workflows that were notformal agreements that actually outlinethe steps and procedures to take throughthat process. So the Programmatic Agreementput all the legal pieces into place, wedeveloped workflows to help the actualdoers complete their pieces of thepuzzle. So I think there’s probably atwo-part piece, I haven’t heard thisdiscussion about workflow before butit’s something I’m going to bring to thisgroup because I think it might be a bigtool for folks in the fieldto develop these workflow pieces. Especially lacking the infrastructure we needto facilitate these things.

The other big gap that I sawwas knowing what agreements existbeforehand is a big deal. We don’tactually have a way of sharing with eachother the agreements we already have in place. We got down there and didn’t knowFederal Highways had an agreement with SHPO. We didn’t know that theirSouth Carolina DOT had an embeddedliaison in the SHPO’s Office. This is aproblem. We should know these things,because these areresources we can leverage once we getthere. So I think there is acommunication piece that needs to happenas well, and I’m excited to see how wedevelop that and move it forward and maybesome of the infrastructure pieces youguys are developing will help be a baseline for that.

Data. Data is my big mission at FEMA. Getting allthe geospatial data, our internal viewer, of course it’s not available to anybody outside of FEMA because it’s restricted. It has like 500 different data layers that we use inour EHP process. Being able to just letpeople know what we’re using even if I can’t share the data, and what you guys are using, helps us identify those places where we doneed Data Sharing Agreements in place. I got down to SouthCarolina and the DOT there, who has a very robust EHP reviewprocess,said“I can’t get Essential FishHabitat fromNOAA.” I said it’s available online forfree, and she was thrilled. Well, had we had this conversation before, shewould have been using it already, shewould have known it existed years ago. So there’s, again,that communication piece came up, which I think is something Angie talked about.

Anybody who knowsme hears the word: we lack infrastructure,infrastructure, infrastructure, all thetime I talked about this but we don’thave a shared infrastructure. One of thebarriers that I ran into at South Carolinais Army Corps of Engineers wants to sharetheir project locations with us. We have anagreement where if they have had a reviewwithin the past five years, SHPOdoesn’t want to see it again. Well,we have beach nourishment projects that were just donelast year, we don’t need to send thoseprojects to SHPO. We’re re-nourishing thebeach again, but how do I know that if Idon’t have a layer that tells me where theirprojects have been and exactly what dates they were done on. So, again, now we’re in the situationwhere they’re actually emailingspreadsheets to me, I’m de-mobed, now I’m forwardingthings back to the disaster. We need a better infrastructure to communicate. I’malso not the person doing the projectreview. We have a whole cadre ofEHP people, they’re doing the review, sowe need better infrastructure to help us communicate.

So now I’m going to bring up the bad word, which is: NEPA cumulative effects. How many people believe thatwe do cumulative effects well acrossthe Federal government? Oh, Horst, we need to chat. I’m a believer that we do this very poorly. We do this poorly within our ownAgencies, let alone across Agencies. We also have an issuewith landscape effects, cascading effects. So, for example, we have a bunch ofprivate dams in South Carolina. Youchange one bridge culvert, one private dam, youhave a cascading effect all the waydownstream, or all the way upstream depending on whatyour situation is. We don’t have a way oflooking at those things. We don’t have a way oflooking at all of our past disasters orsteady-state projects, and saying all themoney that us as aFederal government isputting into these places - how is itaffecting us long-term, are we doing theright thing for the watershed as a whole or whatnot. That’sone of the things that I hope that wecan solve, this is one of the big thingsthat we talked about in the IT subgroup is identifying everyone’s projectlocations, what types of projects were there, and being able to examine the larger world of all of our projects, the effects within watersheds or other metrics. AndI’m really curious what Horst will say about this.

So then the other piece ofthe puzzle, which I was really happy tohear discussed earlier, was the role ofthe state and local entities. I wasreally happy to see that there was a bigfocus on that. From the UFR Advisor position being within the FDRC, theFederal Disaster RecoveryCoordination Group, there was a littlebit of confusion about how we got toplay with the State partners, which wedid quite well but I think there wasa lot of questions from the FederalCoordinating Officer level about whetheror not that was appropriate. Ithink that we need to spell that out in some of our SOP, CONOPS-type documents to makeit very important that we include our Stateand local partners in steady-state tomake these agreements:Data Sharing Agreements and Programmatic Agreements inplace before we’re in the midst of adisaster. That’s all I got. Told you, short and sweet, implementation focused.

Ryan Potosnak, EFMA, National Unified Review Coordinator: Thank you very much, it was great getting insight from resent timeout in South Carolina. That’s actually one of our most recent deployments of the UFR Advisor positionand that’s been areally interesting roll out so far. It’s been one oflarger disasters that we’ve gotten theposition out to, and seeing the differenttypes of work, thedifferent integration of various FederalAgencies, has really helped us focus theposition more, help us really tighten up our SOPs and CONOPS. While we have got this panel up here, is thereanything that was discussed here today? Questions for our paneliststhat you can ask now?

Commenter: I have an observation and a question. For the observation, maybe it would lead into the next session after lunch. The one thing that would be very important is for each of us to understand how our Programs work. Not only we have to know but a lot us know, the FederalEnvironmental Review process, what NEPA is, what Section 106 isand all that, but also understand how it’s administered because that is going to be keyin figuring out how we achieve the Unified Federal Review Process. For example in the Highwaysscenario, we push a lot of work to the State DOT, so as we think about agreements, we think about programmatic approaches,we need to think about how we can involve State DOT as well as how the State Emergency Management Agencycan involve the State DOTin achieving this, and not leave it only to the Federal level because we are going to get that situation whereat the Federal level, we may all agree, but if the State, which is our applicant which is more involved in our reviews, which has the resources, and knowswhat it’s doing, and most of the times does a lot of the work, does not know, then a lot ofthis is going to get lost. It is very important not just for the State DOT and Highways plus all the other FederalAgenciesto understand how each Agency does the environmental review process sowe can then identity what is the correct place and people to involve to achieve the Unified Review Process.

Question for Danielle, you mentioned that for Sandy you were ableto rely on the FEMA review. What did you do you for those requirementsthat were unique just for HUD? Did you prep the applicants to make sure they had those when FEMA was doing the reviews sowhen you do it on the back end you had those requirements unique to HUD to be met as well?

Danielle Schopp, HUD, Director of the Office of Environment and Energy: We kind of had two processes. One was our statutory languagewhere we substituted FEMA’s review and we just decided: HUD has three unique environmental review requirements. Of course, maybe some different implementing guidelines for other ones. Wejust decided we are just going to go with FEMA’s and not apply our own requirementsto these grants. We are very sensitive to the fact that our granteesare submitting multiple formats, multiple information for the same projects funding literally the same activities. That’s always the frustration that we hear. And that, our program, our HUD leadership always comes to my office is saying “Why is this going on?” This was one big, big win. I think this gave some people heartache - how do you know if it’s the same scope and same activities? And we are tracking that, and doing monitoring after the fact to make sure. The second thing with the joint FEMA, HUD environmental review for the individual homeowners, we made sure that our State government, who was adapting mostly to follow FEMA and how they wanted to see it. And that’s finebecause we have that flexibility. So in that case it was more all-inclusive, everything in, everything talked about, and that worked well.