Cardinal News: Then & Now takes a look back at the stories we brought you over the last 12 months. Through the end of the year, we’re sharing updates on some of the people and issues that made news in 2025. This installment: the fate of emergency management funding.
State funding cuts to emergency management budgets across the state have led to a lack of staffing. That lack of staffing has led emergency management to become more reactive rather than proactive, according to emergency management personnel, in areas across the state that lack full-time, dedicated emergency managers.
Lawmakers in Virginia’s General Assembly introduced bills during their 2025 session to attempt to remedy the issue. Those bills were left to languish in committees, but legislators have vowed to try again during the 2026 session.
About 25% of the localities across the commonwealth have a full-time emergency manager and enough staff to maintain essential program functions, Brian Misner, legislative co-chair for the Virginia Emergency Management Association, told the House subcommittee in January. Many localities don’t have any full-time, dedicated emergency management personnel.
Widespread devastation caused by Hurricane Helene-related weather in September 2024 drove home the need for emergency management resources.
Sen. Bill Stanley, R-Franklin County, and Del. Alex Askew, D-Virginia Beach, introduced companion legislation in the state Senate and House of Delegates during the 2025 session that would have created a state fund and grant program to support emergency management programs and personnel across the state. Those bills were left in committee.
Stanley said in an email this month that he plans to reintroduce the legislation during the 2026 session, and will continue to do so each year until it passes.
“When Hurricane Helene struck our region, it clearly demonstrated deficiencies with the current Emergency Management system,” he said. “One of the most critical lessons we learned is that we need to dedicate more money, organization, and state resources to our localities to make sure that we are ready next time a natural disaster occurs.”
“We know that there will be more incidents that occur in Virginia in the future that will require the Governor to declare a state of emergency, and while our local governments do all that they can to help their people who are significantly affected by these natural catastrophes, our dedicated emergency management teams are woefully underfunded, lack physical resources to assist them, and there are even counties that lack a full-time emergency management team because they simply cannot afford to fund them at the local level,” he added.
Peter McCann, director of the Office of Emergency Management at Radford University, works full-time as an emergency manager and shared in an interview what mitigation could look like if positions such as his were funded in localities across the state.
It could include considering all outcomes of a potential disaster, preparing for those outcomes, educating the community and coordinating efforts with surrounding localities to make disaster-related losses as small as possible.
The Virginia Department of Emergency Management relies on non-disaster federal grants to fund 65% of its core functions, but that federal funding has not kept up with inflation and a 10% reduction in that funding occurred in fiscal year 2024, Misner said in January.
In December, Misner said that VEMA is working with several legislators to draft a funding package for emergency management for the 2026 legislative session.
He added that recent federal changes to funding for grants administered by the Federal Emergency Management Agency highlight the need for state lawmakers to identify stable, non-federal funding for emergency management services at the state and local level.
A spokesperson for VDEM said in December that changes to federal disaster grants administered through FEMA could affect the state agency’s budget, going forward. Funding for those grants has not yet been appropriated by Congress for 2026.