Marshall County EMA Director Gets Grant Approval, Organizational Meeting Today

Marshall County EMA Director Clyde Avery presented two grant opportunities to the county commissioners Monday morning for approval.

One grant is the 2017 Emergency Management Performance Grant. He said this FEMA grant money can be used for training and exercise.

“With this grant, there’s $100,000 available for the entire state,” said Avery. “I’m requesting permission to apply for this grant in order to provide some incident command system 300 which is the intermediate incident command system and incident command system 400 which is the advanced command system training.”

As part of this grant, he is also requesting to contract with someone to conduct a tabletop exercise for the newly adopted emergency disaster recovery annex. He said this grant is getting more competitive as funds shrink. The contract alone would be for $8,000. It is a reimbursable grant.

The second grant he would apply for is the SHSP grant which is a pass-through and a reimbursable grant. He explained that the funding is to be used specifically for terrorism prevention.

“This is something I’ll have to work on with some of our partners such as law enforcement and fire to see if there’s anything specific that they’d like to request through the grant. I don’t have a dollar value yet. The award amount for the entire state of Indiana is $2,969,600 with a maximum for each individual county of no more than $50,000.”

Both grant applications were approved by the commissioners and both are due by Sept. 1.

Avery is holding the first meeting of the Emergency Disaster Relief Foundation Board today (Thursday). Avery said the agenda includes organization and the development of bylaws. The group will be working with County Attorney James Clevenger to change the status of the group to a non-profit 501(C)(3) organization.