In his latest blog post, Mayor Friedberg gives an update on the FEMS CRS rating for Bellaire.
In his last communication on the subject, he said that “FEMA officials had been telling the city staff and CRS consultant: that we were well on track to achieve the full restoration of our prior classification of 7, effective October 1, 2022.” However, last month FEMA pushed the reclassification to October 1, 2023. He stated that “on an all-hands conference call last week FEMA confirmed their decision to slow things down, citing the need for “measurable time to verify compliance with CRS requirements” and to ensure the City’s corrective action plan is being fully implemented and maintained.”
Last September, FEMA agreed to expedite a partial restoration to Class 9 effective April 1, 2022 even though they normally require a year for a city to come back into the program. The Mayor explains that FEMA “recognizes the City’s past failures that resulted in our retrograde were limited to the individual personnel involved, and not indicative of a wider, systemic problem. They continue to express confidence in the staff who subsequently inherited the situation and have been so diligent in addressing it. ”
See the Mayor’s full blog post here.
