The Federal Emergency Management Agency has been criticized in the past for its slow response times. Kansas Watchdog reports on other delays that impact the public, as the agency took more than two months to respond to its Freedom of Information Act request:

A Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request was sent to the regional Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) office in Kansas City in early August to learn more about federal spending in response to the June 2008 tornado in Dickinson County, Kansas, and in particular the city of Chapman.

After exchanging several E-mails and phone calls, and after learning about FEMA project worksheets and clarifying my request, I finally received hundreds of pages of documents yesterday at the Kansas City FEMA office.  These FEMA project worksheets describe their response to the Dickinson County disaster.

The initial analysis of these documents will be to summarize two key aspects of each project worksheet:  the scope of the project, and the amount of money involved with each project.

Shown below is a sample of one of the nearly 100 project worksheets obtained yesterday: