Working with FEMA: (I'm from the government--I'm here to help).

• Author: Harrington, Ed
• Position: Federal Emergency Management Agency

The Associated Press reported on September 25, 2007. New Orleans--nearly 2, 000 pages spell out in excruciating detail something that is plain to Virgil Tiller but not the Federal Emergency Management Agency. His school was destroyed and needs to be rebuilt.

FEMA has yet to find the school is 51 percent destroyed--the clerical benchmark that must be reached before the agency will pay to completely rebuild something. And so, two years after Katrina, while the state and federal government haggle over the extent of the damage, the school lies empty, a ruin of toppled bricks, sagging roofs, and missing window panes.

"The story could be written that the federal government is nitpicking," a FEMA spokesperson said. "The other side is that we're trying to be good stewards of the taxpayer dollar."

When your city or jurisdiction suffers a disaster and emergency response is needed, without question the first priority is taking care of life and property But after that first response, the financial reality of a disaster looms large for most governments. Doing some planning and preparing for the financial cost recovery aspects of a disaster will serve you well. And being prepared to deal with the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and state offices of emergency services is key. This article is intended to give local government finance officials some basic information for dealing with disaster finance realities.

My first disaster was a storm in the mid-1980s. The San Francisco Water Department received about $800,000 from FEMA for storm-related damage. Seven years later after all the auditors were done, we kept about $70,000. Clearly we needed to do something differently. When we had the 1989 earthquake, we actually had state auditors in our offices helping us apply for more FEMA reimbursement than we had requested. Trust me, this is a better place to be.

When you are dealing with a disaster, you will often be working with staff from your state Office of Emergency Services (OES) or private contractors hired by FEMA. They are all representing FEMA and trying to follow FEMA rules. In this article, when I say FEMA, I am including all of these others who are involved.

WHAT CAN YOU DO NOW?

DOCUMENT, DOCUMENT, DOCUMENT

A good accountant knows that documentation of costs should be an important part of any request for reimbursement. What is different here is the kind of documentation that may be needed and the long time period that may be involved in reviews of that documentation.

After any major disaster strikes, you should expect to be dealing with FEMA for anywhere from five to seven years before the incident is closed. FEMA staff that you will be working with will change. FEMA rules will change. Items that have been approved at one level will be denied at another level. The only protection you have is to document everything that is humanly possible to document.

Pictures. Yes, a picture is worth a thousand words. Any conversation about the need for emergency repair work is much easier if you have a picture of the situation before and after the emergency repair work is done. It is worthwhile to...