Santa Cruz County officials react to Trump’s plan to phase out FEMA
SANTA CRUZ COUNTY, Calif. (KION-TV) -- Local governments are reacting to President Trump’s announcement to phase out FEMA funding and transfer that responsibility to the states.
Dave Reid, director of response recovery and resilience for the county of Santa Cruz says, “It's definitely a little bit stronger language. I don't think that we know for sure what that means right now, but we know that change is coming.”
President Trump is looking to reduce FEMA funding by November of this year. The President is announcing these efforts after a warning by NOAA about a potentially deadly hurricane season.
“We are going to give out less money. We are going to give it out directly. It’ll be from the president’s office. We will have someone here,” said President Trump.
The Santa Cruz County officials saying they are still waiting for reimbursements from previous disasters.
“I wouldn't expect us to not be in reimbursed, but it may cause further delays in when we get reimbursed, which is absolutely impactful to our county budget,” added Reid.
Santa Cruz County says in 2023, the community received funding from FEMA in response to two major disasters. They say that while local donations and philanthropy work help their efforts, it does not compare to the budget scale of the federal agency.
“With the exception of CZU (fire), where we got a lot of philanthropic dollars to come in and help recovery, we can't always rely on that as a model to think that people are gonna donate money to help us recover,” said Dave Reid.
With the trump administration looking to push the responsibility on state governments, Dave Reid says California’s lack of an individual assistance program will put pressure on both CalOES and local government budgets.
“Our office has a small kind of disaster contingency budget, but it's very, very difficult to budget for the damages of a disaster,” Reid said. “If FEMA goes away or changes, or the bar of when they will come in and help support recovery changes, that puts a lot more financial burden on local government.”
The Trump administration hopes to enact this phase-out project in November, at the end of hurricane season. At the moment, a plan for how they will do this is not clear.
