Virginia’s General Assembly punted bills to create a fund to support emergency management efforts for a second time since Hurricane Helene-related weather caused widespread damage across Southwest and Southside in 2024.
A pair of bills introduced by Sen. Bill Stanley, R-Franklin County, in the state Senate and Del. Alex Askew, D-Virginia Beach, in the House of Delegates would have created a $5 million matching fund to help localities hire full-time emergency managers. Both bills were converted to studies as they made their way through the General Assembly.
Stanley’s bill passed the Senate Finance and Appropriations Committee on Wednesday, and Askew’s bill passed the House of Delegates on Thursday. Stanley had introduced legislation to create a fund for emergency management coordinators in 2025, just months after the remnants of Hurricane Helene swept through the region. The bill was left in Senate finance last year.
“What [Helene] demonstrated is that we weren’t prepared,” he told the committee last week. “We weren’t coordinating in the ways that we should, localities weren’t coordinating in the way that they should, we are not sharing information in the ways that we should and we didn’t have even the equipment to do some of the things that we needed to do, even just to get the power on as quickly as possible.”
He added that the emergency management preparedness fund would have provided for collaboration across the different regions and localities in the commonwealth.
“I will not stop fighting to modernize the Emergency Management System in our region and throughout the commonwealth until it is done. We must be prepared for when the next natural disaster strikes,” Stanley said Thursday when asked by Cardinal News if he plans to introduce a bill to establish the fund again during the 2027 session.
Instead of creating the fund, the restructured bills would create a work group to evaluate existing emergency management needs and funding structure. That work group is expected to be a collection of personnel from the Department of Emergency Management, the Department of Planning and Budget, the Virginia Emergency Management Association, the Virginia Association of Counties, the Virginia Municipal League and others. The group would be required to submit a report on its findings in October. The process is expected to cost roughly $130,000 to pay for a contractor, according to the bill’s fiscal impact statement.
The Virginia Emergency Management Association said Thursday in a statement that the organization, composed of emergency managers from across the commonwealth, is encouraged by the “forward progress” on the legislation. It called the amended legislation a “step in the right direction,” though noted that “there is more work to be done to support Virginia’s emergency managers.”
“While it’s not what I hoped for, it still moves the ball forward,” Stanley said of the amended bill. He added that “big ideas” like his original bill take time for the General Assembly to accept and that he will not be deterred.
About two-thirds of the funding for the Virginia Department of Emergency Management comes from federal grants.
“That’s a tenuous situation now, when you have the president who has said he wants to disband FEMA [Federal Emergency Management Agency], there’s cuts coming at FEMA,” Robb Bohannon, a spokesperson for VEMA, told the Senate committee. “More is going to be pushed down to the state and local level.”
Virginia code requires every locality to have an emergency management coordinator.
Less than half of the emergency managers in Virginia are employed full time and invest at least 75% of that time in emergency management programming in 2025, according to data provided by the Virginia Emergency Management Association.
Roughly 34% of emergency managers reported sufficient staffing levels in their department, and less than half reported that emergency management is their primary discipline, meaning more than half work other jobs — like fire chief or city or county manager — in addition to their emergency management role.