Program Support
Correspondence
Hurricane Maria | Puerto Rico
Disaster recovery under the Public Assistance (PA) Program requires a host of technical stakeholders to review and approve projects before recovery funds can be obligated. Larger projects – those valued at $1 million or more, require an additional level of review and approval with the Federal Office of Management & Budget (OMB) before submission for Congressional review – a process referred to as Large Project Notification (LPN). Given the scale of the disaster caused by Hurricane Maria in 2017, the majority of recovery projects fell into the LPN category. The increased volume of projects requiring additional review produced a bottleneck for moving recovery efforts through to obligation. As part of the Puerto Rico PA Operations & Communications Unit, I was able to facilitate a more efficient process to smoothly transition projects to the OMB. Our team created a dedicated LPN Desk as a single point of contact to strategically document and track the progress of LPNs in coordination with all levels of FEMA management. To date, the LPN Desk has processed over $18 billion in projects for the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico.