Iowa will receive more than $22 million this year in homeland security grants to be used for terrorism prevention within the state.

“Response, recovery, prevention — that’s the only thing that this funding can be used for,” said Lori Morrissey, emergency management coordinator and homeland security contact for Story County.

Morrissey said Iowa has been split into six regions, and each region must apply to receive a portion of the money. This is the first year the regions have been formed — in the past, the money went directly to the counties.

“The good thing about that is it’s going to force us to do more planning and regional analysis as far as our needs,” Morrissey said.

Representatives for each county in Region 1 — of which Story County is a part — are meeting weekly to determine the projects and equipment they would like funding for.

“The entire group will determine what the need for the region is,” Morrissey said.

“Most of the representatives are emergency management, hospital and law enforcement. There’s a good mix that understand terrorism and the needs for response to terrorism.”

Story County’s representative is Jane Halliburton, emergency management commission chair and a Story County supervisor.

“In Story County, we believe having a strong base level of preparedness is the key to being able to respond to any emergency,” Halliburton said.

“Much of the funding that has been released from the federal government is still being debated in terms of how we can best approach this; they’re right now putting a lot of emphasis on terrorism prevention. But the base-level preparedness is still the key for the variety of things we’d have to respond to, whether it be a natural disaster or a medical response.”

Halliburton said the regional group, which is now focusing on the organizational process, will continue to meet in order to form an organizational structure throughout the state in terms of emergency response.

Story County has its own group that will meet after the county knows how much money it will receive to determine how the funding will be distributed.

“We have a terrorism task force that’s made up of law enforcement, fire, medical, vets, and it meets on an as-needed basis to determine the need for how the money is allocated,” Morrissey said. “The task force brings all of our emergency responders together. We’d be looking at agriculture, facilities themselves, all types of emergency response.”

Halliburton said one of Story County’s goals is to purchase a mobile unit that could be taken anywhere in the county to be set up as an emergency response center.

Region 1 is hoping to hear the amount of funding that it will receive sometime this week, Morrissey said.

She said the portion of the funding each region receives is based on population, agricultural production value and critical facilities and assets. Similar aspects are looked at in the federal government allocating grants to each state.

“Iowa, being a rural state, receives less funding,” Halliburton said.

“That’s because the federal government has a number of different programs, and the program of their emphasis right now is a program of urban development. The federal government assumes that the very large urban areas are going to have the more critical assets, and so most funding is given to those areas.”