Lincoln County will discontinue its participation in a federal grant program because of changes to the terms and conditions attached to the funding.
Meeting with the Lincoln County Board of Commissioners in Wiscasset on Aug. 5, Lincoln County Administrator Carrie Kipfer said new grant stipulations require recipients step up collaboration with Immigration and Customs Enforcement upon request.
“I’ve never had an experience where our emergency management agency was now going to be required to be part of the immigration enforcement arm of the federal government,” Kipfer said. “We do homeland security grants for community resiliency, to prepare for disaster and to be able to recover from disaster, not to worry about immigration law.”
The grant program, administered by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, has in years past funded some emergency preparedness projects separately from the county budget, Kipfer said. The county would have applied for about $135,000 in funding through the program had it decided to move forward despite the changes.
Lincoln County Emergency Management Agency Director Emily Huber said she had envisioned using money from the upcoming grant cycle for projects including purchasing equipment to analyze the contents of seized narcotics and replacing generators used to power communications towers in case of power loss due to severe weather or terrorism.
“There were a few projects in there that were going to be really intricate, and it’s not a huge loss, but long term it will be,” she said.
New requirements in the terms and conditions include a mandate that fund recipients “honor requests” to participate in joint operations with Homeland Security agencies, to share information and to detain noncitizens subject to immigration detainers issued by ICE.
These requirements do not align with county policies, Kipfer said. “The terms of the grant has completely changed,” she said.
The Lincoln County Sheriff’s Office enforces judicial, or criminal, warrants, Sheriff Todd Brackett said in May. These differ from administrative warrants, issued by federal administrative bodies such as ICE and the Environmental Protection Agency. Administrative warrants pertain to civil issues, rather than criminal cases, and require a lower standard of probable cause, according to the website of Cornell University’s Legal Information Institute.
In response to inquiries from concerned citizens at commissioners’ meetings in May, Brackett also said he did not intend to “enter an agreement” with ICE.
Two Bridges Regional Jail Correctional Administrator Col. James Bailey also said at the time the jail would maintain a similar policy, declining to hold inmates detained on noncriminal charges.
According to Kipfer, the requirements associated with the Homeland Security funding, Kipfer said, are “contrary to what the sheriff’s office policy is.”
“It is contrary to what Two Bridges Jail, their acceptance of federal inmates is, and I didn’t, in good faith, think that we could apply for these grant funds knowing that we were going to be required to fall within these terms and conditions,” she said.
Kipfer said the state had not communicated specifics about the updates to the terms and conditions, which she discovered in the course of reading through the contract herself. The situation was complicated by the brief application window, which gave applicants less than a week to review the contracts, according to Kipfer and Huber.
“This is the way the federal government is trying to get support in all areas,” Lincoln County Commissioner William Blodgett said.
“This is homeland security stuff,” Commissioner David Levesque said. “We’re not in the business of doing immigration, and now they’re mixing the two without giving us a heads up … I am concerned about things that we can’t purchase now and how we’re going to meet that need in the future, especially if these grants are going to go away.”
Kipfer said she expected the updated terms and conditions to affect other federal grants distributed by the Maine Emergency Management Agency and U.S. Department of Homeland Security in the near future.
The Maine attorney general’s office has indicated they would fight to see the conditions removed from the funding, she added.
“While we hope the attorney general can do what he can do to get that off the contracts, I suspect it’s not going to be effective because of what the federal government wants,” Levesque said.
The next meeting of the Lincoln County Board of Commissioners is set for 9 a.m. on Aug. 19, in the commissioners’ office at Lincoln County Superior Court in Wiscasset. For more information, call 882-6311.
This story appears through a media partnership with The Lincoln County News.
