Two Haines landowners have lost an avenue to recover some of their losses in the 2020 landslide after the Trump administration ended a grant program meant to help communities prepare for disasters.
The Department of Military and Veteran’s Affairs notified the borough that FEMA’s Building Resilient Infrastructure & Community, or BRIC, program had been shuttered.
“As per the DHS/FEMA guidance, all projects not yet awarded from FY2020, 2021, 2022 & 2023 will not be awarded,” according to an email sent Sunday to interim manager Alekka Fullerton.
The BRIC program was launched in 2018, during Trump’s first term. The program has awarded nearly a billion dollars to tribes, states and individual communities around the country.
In January, the agency put out a notice of $750 million in matching grants available. But FEMA canceled all of those – and any in the BRIC program that have not yet been paid out.
The agency announced the closure with a press release, calling it a “waste, politicized grant program,” that was not within the agency’s core mission of helping Americans recover from natural disasters.
Fullerton informed the assembly Monday morning, reminding them that the borough had two pending BRIC applications to assist homeowners Steve Wishstar and Dennis Franks with economic recovery from the 2020 landslide.
Franks and the Wishstar family own neighboring property on Beach Road near the site of the landslide that killed two people Dec. 2, 2020.
Steve and Vanessa Wishstar’s home is in a hazard zone below a crack in bedrock that caused the landslide. Their home was 530 feet away from being swept away.
They moved to Mud Bay after the slide and have not moved back into their Beach Road home. The couple has not sold their home or the land it sits on.
Vanessa Wishstar wrote in an email that the loss of this potential grant funding through the BRIC program is another impediment to the family’s attempts to save themselves.
“Life has yet to return to having stability and the definition of being stable will continually have to be redefined, but in truth, there’s less emotional trauma given our work on healing that, yet more financial trauma during this time than ever before,” Vanessa Wishstar wrote. “It’s the shackles of being transferred from one imprisonment to the next that makes ‘moving on’ impossible. So when we have blows like the current government’s action of removing FEMA (and BRIC) it’s devastating and neglectful to all survivors.”
She said the family’s loss has less to do with money – though they have been impacted by that.
“No one should ever have to go through what we’ve lived through, when it’s preventable. Those who chose to continue to live there, they’ve already lived through that horror and they know what is at stake, so I trust that they are making the best decision for them, but also to understand that our decision not to live there has cost us everything and then some.”
Steve Wishstar wrote in the same email that of all of the houses impacted by the landslide, just two of them applied for the grant, which would have required the Wishstars to dismantle their home and transfer the land to the state.
“This was a primary goal of ours because selling our home under these conditions is gravely negligent in our opinion,” he wrote.
He wrote that there’s a second option for hazard mitigation – called the Hazard Mitigation Grant Program.
“This is also a FEMA-funded program but it is run by the state of Alaska. This is the program we originally applied under. The state wanted to try the BRIC path first probably because BRIC doesn’t require 25% matching funds from the borough and it probably didn’t dip into state funding for other disasters,” he wrote. “With the disappearance of BRIC, we are back on our original path.”
Steve Wishstar said he knows a lot about these two programs because the state’s Hazard Mitigation Team briefed a borough assembly committee in 2021, outlining both programs. He took notes and drew up a plan for people who owned threatened homes and other projects around the borough.
He said he has not yet heard from the borough about the loss of that grant program.
Dennis Franks did not immediately return an email seeking more information about how the loss of the grant could impact him.
It’s not immediately clear what other avenues Franks and the Wishstar family could pursue to relieve the financial burden of the disaster.
The state’s BRIC program manager Rick Dembroski said he had to check with his public information officer and supervisors before he could answer questions about how the loss of the BRIC grant program would affect communities across the state.
But, in his email to Fullerton announcing the closure of the program, he wrote that “the State of Alaska, Division of Homeland Security & Emergency Management (DHS&EM) are confused by the DHS/FEMA decision to end this program as much as you are and will be standing by to assist you when the need arises.”
During Tuesday evening’s assembly meeting, Fullerton said she is working with the Department of Military and Veteran’s Affairs to convert those BRIC applications into hazard mitigation grant program applications.
“We’re not sure if that will work, but we’ll give it a try,” she said.