We have all been faced with these "bottlenecks" in the past. The one that raised its ugly head about three years ago for the Homeland Security Grant process was the Environmental Historic Preservation (EHP) requirements that had never been enforced, but then FEMA found out that it needed to be incorporated into the grant process. It was a mess at first. Every project, even if it was a functional exercise, had to to through EHP review. This slowed the grant approval speed to a crawl. Today thankfully they have reviewed what "really needs to be done" and the promise is that we will have a much quicker review of only those projects that could potentially have an EHP impact.
The challenge is that sometimes the bottlenecks are not that obvious. Read the linked article above and the example given. There are other emergency management bottlenecks for sure. The disaster recovery process at FEMA is another one that could use examining. And, it would pay for us to look internally at our own organizations to see what needs to be improved. Time is money and the faster we address issues the better functioning and efficient our jurisdictions will be.
