By Homeland1 Staff
WASHINGTON — Federal Emergency Management Agency Administrator Craig Fugate is calling for agency leaders to prioritize regional empowerment and is announcing a plan to measure performance toward his goal.
The decision was released Tuesday as part of a memorandum to FEMA personnel outlining the “Administrator’s Intent” for 2010 to 2016, serving as the “foundation for the next FEMA Strategic Plan.”
“Regional Empowerment is the idea that the regional offices must have the staff, funding, and other resources required to implement FEMA programs,” the statement said.
Under the memorandum’s overarching principle of “Regional Empowerment” are the following five priorities:
1. Strengthen the nation’s resilience to disasters
2. Build unity of effort among the entire emergency management team — federal, state, local, tribal governments, private sector, NGOs, communities, and individuals
3. Meet the needs of disaster survivors and effectively support recovery of disaster affected communities
4. Work with partners to address FEMA’s most significant risks
5. Build, sustain, and improve the agency’s mission support and workforce capabilities
As a result of the Obama administration’s agenda for building a high-performing government, Fugate announced FEMA’s High Priority Performance Goal to measure effectiveness of programs.
The memorandum lists the high performance measures for FEMA as follows:
- Percentage of shipments arriving with the requested materials at the requested location by the validated/agreed upon delivery date
- Percent of disaster households up to a capacity of 500,000 able to be temporarily housed within 60 days
- Percent of respondents reporting they are better prepared to deal with disasters and emergencies as a result of training
The performance measures were developed with the goal of being able to “articulate to the American public what their dollars are delivering in terms of impact and outcomes.”
Every priority action listed in the document’s Integrated Planning Guidance Draft section were tied to the second priority of building unity among different sections of the emergency management team.
The memorandum promises FEMA will develop “meaningful metrics that do not merely measure the processes that support disaster response and short-term recovery,” though it also acknowledges the difficulties of such a task.
“It is easy to measure a process, but it is quite another thing to measure how that process has positively impacted a family or a community,” the document said.