NC Solvency- Disaster Response

2NC Solvency- Disaster Response

State governments solve disaster response

In the aftermath of Katrina, the FEMA Administrator and his team focused on ensuring that the next responses would be effective. A three-year process led to the National Response Framework (NRF) as a replacement for the National Response Plan (NRP) and the update of the National Incident Management System (NIMS). The NRF documented the roles and responsibilities for response and recognized that FEMA has a major role in short-term recovery, but FEMA is not organized, equipped, or resourced to lead a major long-term recovery effort. As we saw after Katrina, national media and communications create a public expectation for immediate and well-organized recovery processes that produce results that make people whole. They also imply that the federal government is in charge for whatever happens. The reality is just the opposite. The fact is that recovery is primarily a state, local, and private-sector role. Over the past 20 years, response doctrine like the NRF has been debated and has evolved. Recovery doctrine, however, has not received such attention. It's much more complicated, harder to address, far more expensive, and longer-term in scope.

And the federal government fails as disaster response

Nivola 2005 (Pietro, Senior Fellow, Governance Studies, The Brookings Institution“Why Federalism Matters,” Brookings Policy Brief Series #146, http://www3.brookings.edu/papers/2005/10governance_nivola.aspx October, AS)

Why the paternalists in Washington cannot resist dabbling in the quotidian tasks that need to be performed by state and local officials would require a lengthy treatise on bureaucratic behavior, congressional politics, and judicial activism. Suffice it to say that the propensity, whatever its source, poses at least two fundamental problems. The first is that some state and local governments may become sloppier about fulfilling their basic obligations. The Hurricane Katrina debacle revealed how ill-prepared the city of New Orleans and the state of Louisiana were for a potent tropical storm that could inundate the region. There were multiple explanations for this error, but one may well have been habitual dependence of state and local officials on direction, and deliverance, by Uncle Sam. In Louisiana, a state that was receiving more federal aid than any other for Army Corps of Engineers projects, the expectation seemed to be that shoring up the local defenses against floods was chiefly the responsibility of Congress and the Corps, and that if the defenses failed, bureaucrats in the Federal Emergency Management Agency would instantly ride to the rescue. That assumption proved fatal. Relentlessly pressured to spend money on other local projects, and unable to plan centrally for every possible calamity that might occur somewhere in this huge country, the federal government botched its role in the Katrina crisis every step of the way—the flood prevention, the response, and the recovery. The local authorities in this tragedy should have known better, and taken greater precautions. Apart from creating confusion and complacency in local communities, a second sort of disorder begot by a national government too immersed in their day-to-day minutia is that it may become less mindful of its own paramount priorities.

States Solve Disaster Relief

Wisconsin Emergency Management 09 (WEM, “State Disaster Assistance Programs,” WEM, 2009, http://74.125.113.132/search?q=cache:4ZHRoRjg9yoJ:emergencymanagement.wi.gov/docview.asp%3Fdocid%3D12158%26locid%3D18+Wisconsin+Disaster+Fund+Wisconsin+Emergency+Management+Contact+Diane+Kleiboer+or+Dave+LaWall+at+608-242-3232&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=1&gl=us)

Wisconsin Disaster Fund Wisconsin Emergency Management Contact Diane Kleiboer or Dave LaWall at 608-242-3232This funding is made available when the state or counties are denied federal disaster assistance or do not meet the federal eligibility criteria.  Communities that meet an established per capita threshold in damages can request assistance through the county emergency management director who applies to the Administrator of Wisconsin Emergency Management.  Tribes can apply directly to WEM.

2NC Solvency- Environment

Federal Funding of transportation investment destroys the environment- state governments solve

Edwards 2011 (Chris, Joint Economic Committee United States Congress “Infrastructure projects to fix the economy? Don’t bank on it. ” October 21 http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/infrastructure-projects-to-fix-the-economy-dont-bank-on-it/2011/10/18/gIQAgtZi3L_print.html AS)

In a recent television ad for her network, MSNBC host Rachel Maddow stands below the Hoover Dam and asks whether we are still a country that can “think this big” — Hoover Dam big. The commercial is built on the assumption that American greatness is advanced by federal spending on major infrastructure projects. If I had my own television commercial, I’d stand in front of the wreckage of Idaho’s Teton Dam, which, like the Hoover Dam, was built by the federal Bureau of Reclamation. The Teton Dam was based on shoddy engineering and a flawed economic analysis. It collapsed catastrophically in 1976, just a year after it was built. Increased infrastructure spending has significant support in Washington these days. President Obama wants a new federal infrastructure bank, and some members of both parties want to pass big highway and air-traffic-control funding bills. The politicians think these bills will create desperately needed jobs, but the cost of that perceived benefit is too high: Federal infrastructure spending has a long and painful history of pork-barrel politics and bureaucratic bungling, with money often going to wasteful and environmentally damaging projects. For plenty of examples of the downside of federal infrastructure, look at the two oldest infrastructure agencies — the Army Corps of Engineers and the Bureau of Reclamation. Their histories show that the federal government shouldn’t be in the infrastructure business. Rather, state governments and the private sector are best equipped to provide it. The Corps of Engineers has been building levees, canals and other civilian water infrastructure for more than 200 years — and it has made missteps the entire time. In the post-Civil War era, for example, there were widespread complaints about the Corps’ wastefulness and mismanagement. A 1971 book by Arthur Morgan, a distinguished engineer and former chairman of the Tennessee Valley Authority, concluded: “There have been over the past 100 years consistent and disastrous failures by the Corps in public works areas . . . resulting in enormous and unnecessary costs to ecology [and] the taxpayer.” Some of the highest-profile failures include the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927. That disaster dramatically proved the shortcomings of the Corps’ approach to flood control, which it had stubbornly defended despite outside criticism. Hurricane Katrina in 2005 was like a dreadful repeat. The flooding was in large part a man-made disaster stemming from poor engineering by the Corps and misdirected funding by Congress. Meanwhile, the Bureau of Reclamation has been building economically dubious and environmentally harmful dams since 1902. Right from the start, “every Senator . . . wanted a project in his state; every Congressman wanted one in his district; they didn’t care whether they made economic sense or not,” concluded Marc Reisner in his classic history of the agency, “Cadillac Desert.” The dam-building pork barrel went on for decades, until the agency ran out of rivers into which it could pour concrete.

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