LEWISTON – City and town officials throughout Androscoggin County are in a push to complete a Homeland Security training program and preserve access to grants and disaster reimbursement dollars.

Most Androscoggin County municipalities won’t finish the most basic National Incident Management Training before the Sept. 30 deadline, according to Joanne Potvin, county Emergency Management Authority director.

“We’ve been talking about this for a year and half, but it’s still coming down to the wire,” she said. “So right now, we’re being as aggressive as we can, doing three training sessions a day, but we’re still not going to make it.”

Last year, FEMA directed $1.8 million in grants to Androscoggin County and its municipalities for emergency management and homeland security projects. The federal government has made completing the classes a requirement for getting future grants as well as other money.

“It also includes the hundreds of thousands of dollars they can apply for if some sort of disaster should befall us,” Potvin said.

The national system was adopted in the wake of the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks as a set of procedures that emergency personnel could use to make sure problems are contained efficiently. Those could include natural disasters like hurricanes or ice storms, or man-made problems like terrorist attacks or hazardous chemical spills.

The system became more critical in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. FEMA and the Department of Homeland Security made adopting and understanding the guidelines a requirement for any government agency getting federal homeland security grants or other dollars.

FEMA set a deadline, Sept. 30, for governments to have the most basic training complete for fire and other public safety personnel. The Maine Emergency Management Agency added city officials and elected leaders to that list, she said. That includes two classes, an introduction to incident management and an overview of the national system.

Potvin, who is in charge of doing the training for Androscoggin County’s 14 municipalities, said they won’t make that deadline.

“There’s just not enough time to get everybody trained,” Potvin said. Most local fire departments meet the standards, but police and public works employees in many cities and towns still need the training. City councilors and selectman, managers and top municipal staff need at least the basic level of training as well.

She’s finished training for Androscoggin County, Sabattus and Livermore. She’s scheduled to do training for Durham, Livermore Falls, Turner and Leeds later this fall and hopes to schedule with Lewiston and Auburn soon.

“But my goal now is to have everybody in the county trained to that basic level by Nov. 15,” she said.

She hopes that will satisfy federal officials.

“I’m hoping they just accept that we have the training scheduled and won’t mind beyond that,” she said.