Each year, FEMA requires that our region document whether all entities requesting and receiving homeland security grant funds are compliant with NIMS and its principles. To meet this requirement, all jurisdictions must submit answers to a series of questions. An answer of “no” to any question disqualifies you from receiving grant funds, but FEMA also allows for documentation that you are in the process of meeting a requirement or meet it via an alternate method in order to remain eligible to receive funding.
The survey below should be completed once per jurisdiction per grant year. Deadlines will be announced by the UASI Program Manager or their designee. Note that the survey below intentionally does not include any “no” answer choices; you should only complete the survey once you are sure you can select one of the allowed answer choices (yes, in process, or alternate method, as applicable to the question). Also note that the survey is generally completed for an entire jurisdiction as a whole (so for a City, it only needs to be completed once, not individually by police, fire, OEM, health department, public works, etc.).
As FEMA performs ongoing updates to the NIMS guidance and related documentation, they may introduce new questions or terms. For the reports due in Q4 2022, users who have completed NIMS surveys in the past will notice multiple new questions. To assist with these new questions, two additional documents have been provided. The first is the NIMS Implementation Objectives (2018 version), which describes some of the criteria necessary to meet the requirements in the questions below. Note that the question numbering in that document differs slightly from the numbering below (which is specific to the grant reporting system currently in use). The second is a fact sheet on grant requirements related to FEMA’s National Qualification System, or NQS. This is an update to the formalized Position Task Books (PTBs) used prior to 2021, and it allows individual entities to write their own qualification standards for various positions, working off of generic templates. Information on the NQS itself can be found on FEMA’s website.
You may also find the following resources helpful in completing this document: