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Governor’s defense office says village needs assessment grant will fund mayor-level resilience work
Summary
Vera Tapascia, executive director of the Community Defense Liaison Office, briefed mayors on CDLO grants tied to military buildup mitigation, including a near-term village needs assessment expected to fund mayoral vulnerability and emergency-response work.
Vera Tapascia, executive director of the Community Defense Liaison Office (CDLO) in the governor’s office, told the Mayor’s Council that the office manages defense-mitigation grants and is closing on a village needs assessment grant the office expects to award Sept. 1 to help mayors evaluate local emergency-response vulnerabilities.
Tapascia described CDLO responsibilities that include negotiating mitigation projects with the Department of Defense and administering grants under the Office of Local Defense Community Cooperation to address infrastructure needs tied to military growth. She said past grants supported a wastewater treatment plant, a cultural repository, a biosafety laboratory and hospital assessments and that CDLO is pursuing projects such as undergrounding power lines and port modernization to reduce infrastructure risks tied to base expansion.
On the village needs assessment: Tapascia said the grant is intended to provide funding and subject-matter expertise—engineers, environmental specialists, planners and economists—to help the Mayor’s Council and individual villages perform vulnerability assessments covering communication, emergency shelters, cyber resilience and other local needs. “We will be receiving that grant award on September 1,” she said.
Council members raised questions about whether facilities such as Guam High School on base could be used in emergencies and how village hardening should be prioritized. Tapascia said the assessment will include village-level participation and recommend priorities that could be packaged to DOD and other funders to secure additional mitigation money. She noted the CDLO office is small—seven staff—but manages mitigation portfolios tied to several billion dollars of planned Department of Defense work on Guam over coming years and leads a civil–military coordinating council that meets regularly with DOD and government leaders.
Why it matters: Rapid defense-related construction and program acceleration have raised infrastructure, environmental and service-delivery concerns for villages. The village needs assessment is designed to give mayors tailored vulnerability analyses and a prioritized list of mitigation projects that CDLO can present to federal partners for funding.
Next steps: CDLO expects the award Sept. 1 and will work with the Mayor’s Council to hire or contract subject-matter experts and begin village-level vulnerability assessments and emergency-response planning.
