When I emailed the architect about when I would need the building plans to start a plan review before they put this out for bid in the very near future he wanted to schedule a call to "explain things".
I would go ahead with the meeting, and I would try to have the town's corporation counsel, the head of the board of education, and the school superintendent attend, as well. Too often, people assume facts not in evidence, or hear what they want to hear.
Many years ago I was on the building committee (I was appointed by the mayor, for reasons I still haven't figured out) for a major addition and renovation program for our high school and junior high schools. The board of education hadn't even hired an architect yet, but the schools were overcrowded so they wanted to bring in temporary classrooms to take up the slack. But there was no budget for renting or buying portable classrooms.
So a meeting was set up for the school district's financial officer with the state Department of Education to see if the State would pay for portable classrooms. I was the person from the building committee designated to attend the meeting. What the Department of Education told us was that the cost of renting portable classrooms was eligible for State funding
when the portable classrooms were used as swing space during construction of a State-funded construction project. That seemed pretty clear to me.
There was a meeting of the Board of Education and the building committee later the same afternoon as the meeting with the Department of Education. I drove straight from the Department of Education to the Board of Ed meeting, and I walked into that second meeting just in time to hear the finance director tell the Board of Ed that the State would pay for portable classrooms. He conveniently omitted mention of the limitation that the State would pay only when the portable classrooms were being used as swing space during a State-funded construction project. Fortunately, I arrived in time to correct the record.
I wasn't surprised when that finance director had to leave a couple of years later, with some rather serious questions lingering about his handling of the district's finances.
My point being, to echo Ronald Reagan, "Trust, but verify." I've read several articles about the FEMA storm shelter grant program since seeing this question. Everything I have found seems to agree that this is nothing but a funding grant, with FEMA funding a maximum of 75% of the cost. That (to my uneducated brain) tells me that these are still local projects and are subject to whatever building and fire codes are in effect at the site of the proposed construction. I read at least half a dozen different articles, and nothing in any of them suggested that these projects are in any way exempt from local building permits and local building inspections.
