The federal government in 2022 awarded almost $9 million to the rural Cuba City school district in Wisconsin. District leaders planned to use the grant to outfit a new gymnasium building with a safe room where students and community members could shelter during a tornado outbreak.
More than four years later, the district still hasn’t seen a cent of that money, and the plan to build a safe room is still on hold.
First, the district needed to get its project plans approved by the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which awarded the grant through its Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities (BRIC) program. But the agency is short-staffed, and that process itself took almost three years.