Bills to Bolster Local Emergency Management Personnel Funding Punted

In the wake of Hurricane Helene, local response was critical to clearing roads and activating rescues in Southwest Virginia while state and federal resources were on the way. But despite regular flooding and severe weather statewide — including recent snow and ice storms that immobilized much of the commonwealth for days — many localities don’t have a person solely dedicated to emergency management.

Lawmakers walk from the Virginia State Capitol Building to the Virginia General Assembly Building on Jan. 29, 2026. (Photo by Charlotte Rene Woods/Virginia Mercury)

Through House Bill 169 and Senate Bill 98, state legislators attempted to set aside $5 million in the state budget to match localities’ funding to hire full-time emergency managers. The funding proposal was nixed amid budget debates and on Thursday, and the bill was shifted into a stakeholder group to determine how Virginia can better tackle the issue.

“What (Helene) also demonstrated was that we weren’t prepared. We weren’t coordinating in the ways that we should,”  bill patron Sen. Bill Stanley, R-Franklin, said. “The localities weren’t coordinating in the ways that they should. We were not sharing information in the ways that we should. We didn’t have even the equipment to do some of the things that we needed to do.”

Virginia law requires that a political subdivision appoint an emergency coordinator; localities often task fire or police chiefs and other local government leaders with this responsibility.

Proponents of the bill said that when emergency management isn’t the primary focus of whoever embodies the coordinator role, it can be challenging for them to focus on looking for grants, cultivating contacts, and training. It can also make it tricky to coordinate with state emergency response efforts.

“If we don’t already have the contact, we generally have a network of folks that can get us the right contact pretty quickly,” said Brian Misner, a member of the Virginia Emergency Management Association (VEMA). “It’s our way to help make sure that that scene can be stabilized and start recovering faster. It takes that load off of the folks who are working on the scene so they can focus on the most immediate public safety threats.”

According to the Department of Emergency Management’s 2025 annual report, just 44% of 140 Virginia counties, cities, and towns have an emergency manager primarily dedicated to the role.

“Almost 2 million Virginians live in a locality without at least one full-time employee spending at least 75% of their time on emergency management activities,” the report reads.

The report also found that just 29% of localities said they have sufficient emergency management program staffing levels. More than 5 million Virginians live in an area “without sufficient staffing to maintain the critical functions within (the) EM program,” the report stated.

With sweeping cuts to federal funding coming from Congress, there are growing concerns over the Virginia Department of Emergency Management’s budget, because two-thirds of its funding come from the federal government.

Reductions to the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s functions that push more of the responsibility to the states also pose serious challenges, emergency management professionals warned.

“When you’ve got a state agency that’s two-thirds funded by federal grants, when that’s tenuous, and then you don’t have the capabilities at the state level, it’s really leaving Virginia in a very vulnerable position, which is why we need this to figure out the best path forward,” said Rob Bohannon with the Virginia Emergency Management Association..

Lawmakers agreed that the state can’t afford delays in response to natural disasters, whether it be a hurricane in the mountains or flooding on the coast.

“There’s a long-term trickle down in the fiscal impact of the commonwealth by not having the appropriate infrastructure across communities in both pre-planning, but also the post-incident, which we’ve seen time and time again,” said Sen. Jeremy McPike, D-Prince William. “Because there is a town manager, a county administrator, who’s also the emergency manager, or a public works director who’s also the emergency manager. There are all sorts of roles and combinations, and we’ve got to start to get this right.”

by Shannon Heckt, Virginia Mercury

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