Kiowa County Emergency Management

Kiowa County Emergency Management and the Local Emergency Planning Committee serves a population of approximately 10,000 people. Being a rural county in Southwest Oklahoma, with a low population, we have a very limited tax base in which to fund all the offices required by state and federal laws and mandates. Most of those laws and mandates are unfunded. Our local LEPC receives no funding in which to operate from from the local government. If the required reporting requirements are implemented for local LEPC's, someone will have to work to gather, collect and dissimenate that information. This means someone will have to fund the position. If the local government has to fund this position, it means there will have to be cuts made somewhere in the local government. Most generally this means the Emergency Manager will have to be cut from employement, or that the Sheriff will have to eliminate one of his two deputies. The HMEP Grant that the small local jurisdictions receive are important to keep an all volunteer LEPC operating and meeting and conducting business. If reporting requirements to the local LEPC are imposed, it will be harder to get local people to serve on the LEPC. I feel that if the reporting requirements are imposed, more funding will have to be given to the small, rural jurisdictions to pay someone to fill the position created by the bureacry of this reporting requirement Stephen T. Grayson Vice Chairman Kiowa County LEPC