Money intended to help public broadcasters beef up their emergency alerting capabilities appears to be caught up in bureaucratic wrangling in Washington.
The Corporation for Public Broadcasting has brought a complaint in federal district court against the Federal Emergency Management Agency over access to the grant money. CPB told the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia on Thursday that FEMA, without explanation, has placed a purported “hold” on funds that are part of a grant from the Department of Homeland Security and FEMA relating to the Next Generation Warning System.
Radio World has reached out to the FEMA press office to invite comment or reply.
The grant was issued in 2022. CPB told the court that FEMA has not given any reason for a “hold” and that its failure to process submissions “severely and negatively impacts the ability of federal, state and local authorities to issue real-time emergency alerts.”
“FEMA’s hold on these funds is arbitrary, capricious, an abuse of discretion, in violation of law, and undermines the emergency alert system relied upon throughout the nation by millions of people whose only access to emergency information is through publicly issued alerts by public broadcasting stations,” CPB wrote.
“FEMA did not even attempt to explain its unilateral conduct,” CPB told the court.
According to CPB, the grant among other things is supposed to help TV stations upgrade to ATSC 3.0; enable radio stations to upgrade to digital capabilities to enable the broadcast of IPAWS alerts; help stations alert individuals with disabilities or limited English; and improve warning coverage in remote rural areas.
Congress appropriated $40 million for the 2022 grant for CPB to administer. Stations are supposed to incur expenses and seek reimbursement from CPB, which would in turn be repaid by FEMA.
It said CPB needs to submit reimbursements and receive payments owing to 42 stations that have committed funds to purchase equipment. It said $18.7 million was fully committed.
“At no point has FEMA indicated that CPB has done anything that would call this grant into question. At no point has FEMA indicated that it is canceling the grant or taking any other adverse action with respect to the grant.”
CPB submits reimbursement through an online system. But on Feb. 19, that system indicated that funds were “on hold,” effectively meaning that there were no funds available under the NGWS Grant.
It said this has left public media stations with hundreds of thousands of dollars of unreimbursed expenses. To date, $1.88 million of incurred expenses need to be reimbursed. It gave an example of a station in Alaska that has spent about $98,000 of its grant, none of which has been reimbursed.
In addition to the sub-awards, CPB told the court that the jobs of at least five people are at risk because their positions are wholly or partly funded through the grant.
CPB said neither DHS nor FEMA has responded to its efforts to find out what’s going on. It said that in late February, FEMA sent a general email apparently to all recipients of any grant referring to an effort “to ensure the alignment of its grant programs with [Homeland Security] Secretary [Kristi] Noem’s direction” but that it gave no answers about the CPB program.
It asked the court to issue a restraining order and preliminary injunction barring FEMA from any steps to enforce a “hold” and requiring that full payments under the grant proceed.
It also noted that there are separate court cases going on right now in which courts have put preliminary injunctions in place to prevent various agencies from pausing disbursement of appropriated federal funds.
