Snohomish County may lose $1 million in homeland security money because a key deadline was missed.
The federal grant was set aside in 2005 to pay for electronics and other equipment needed to upgrade the county’s emergency command center.
A detailed plan for spending the money was due Dec. 31, but the missed deadline means the $1 million is now up for grabs and could instead go to projects in King and Pierce counties.
“Somebody dropped the ball, bottom line, and law enforcement is extremely disappointed,” Snohomish County Sheriff Rick Bart said Tuesday.
County Executive Aaron Reardon said he didn’t learn about the problem until it was too late.
Any blame rests with those who handled emergency management planning in the county prior to Jan. 1, Reardon said. That’s when the county absorbed a separate agency that had handled emergency management here since 1951.
“We have $1 million that is in jeopardy of being lost because of mismanagement” by others, Reardon said.
Reardon mostly blames Roger Serra, who served as executive director of emergency management in the county for more than six years. Serra resigned the day the county took over his agency and is now director of security and emergency management with Seattle City Light.
Serra on Tuesday said nobody should have been surprised by the grant deadline. He said he repeatedly told people inside and outside county government about it.
“They needed to provide me guidance on how they wanted to spend” the grant, he said. “It isn’t that we didn’t have a plan. We were trying to develop a plan, but there wasn’t anything finalized on the direction the county wanted to go in.”
Part of the problem was that county and city leaders couldn’t agree on where the new equipment should go, he said.
The county has $150,000 in its budget this year to figure out where to build the command center and how big it should be, and to start hammering out details.
Marysville Mayor Dennis Kendall served for two years as chairman of the board that oversaw Serra’s agency. Serra never hinted that the grant might be at risk, Kendall said.
“I had no idea whatsoever,” he said.
Bart doesn’t care who is at fault. He said the community needs a new emergency operations center – and fast.
“We need to have a building that is big enough and dedicated to handle emergencies in the future,” Bart said. “It is like traffic. We sat around on our rear ends, and look what happened.”
Homeland security grants are a legacy of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks in New York City and Washington, D.C. At least $10 million has been directed to Snohomish County-based programs since 2003.
A panel of officials from Seattle and King, Pierce and Snohomish counties will decide by early March who gets the grant money, said Rob Harper, a spokesman for the state emergency management division.
Reardon said he pressed to make the emergency management part of county government because he had doubts about the formerly independent Snohomish County Department of Emergency Management.
“What we have found is a mess,” he said.
He plans to ask state and county auditors for a thorough review, not only of the status of all grants, but also of the adequacy of emergency plans.
“Critical analysis needs to be performed so we know what it is we inherited,” Reardon said.
Gary Weikel, former deputy county executive, said Serra regularly told county leaders there was a need to move ahead on a new emergency operations center.
Weikel, who now is county parks director, said he didn’t learn about problems with the grant until a mid-December meeting with Serra and Mark Soine, who is now deputy executive.
“We thought the plan we had in place was sufficient,” Weikel said. “I had no idea we would lose the money.”
Reporter Scott North: 425-339-3431 or north@heraldnet.com.
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