{"id":438496,"date":"2026-08-20T16:50:50","date_gmt":"2026-08-20T16:50:50","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/438496\/"},"modified":"2026-08-20T16:50:50","modified_gmt":"2026-08-20T16:50:50","slug":"state-funding-will-help-garden-grove-recoup-chemical-incident-costs-nearby-cities-were-denied-orange-county-register","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/438496\/","title":{"rendered":"State funding will help Garden Grove recoup chemical incident costs. Nearby cities were denied \u2013 Orange County Register"},"content":{"rendered":"

The cities of Garden Grove<\/a>, Stanton and Westminster all asked for state funding to help recoup costs accrued during the Garden Grove chemical incident,<\/a> but the Governor\u2019s Office of Emergency Assistance only approved Garden Grove\u2019s request.<\/p>\n

Over the Memorial Day weekend, an overheating 34,000-gallon tank of potentially toxic and volatile methyl methacrylate at GKN Aerospace in Garden Grove triggered evacuation orders for some 50,000 residents<\/a> before emergency crews neutralized the threat. Evacuations spanned six cities, with Garden Grove, Stanton and Westminster taking the brunt of the orders.<\/p>\n

The state could reimburse up to 75% of costs related to the chemical incident, including for overtime accrued by emergency response personnel, supplies, materials and equipment, according to the California Disaster Assistance Act.<\/a><\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019ve been approved to start putting all these costs together and sending them up. So that\u2019s the work we started,\u201d Garden Grove city spokesperson Johnathan Garcia said, adding the city received state approval on Aug. 12, but there\u2019s no timeline on when the funding could be expected.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019re not gonna know what amount\u2019s going to be reimbursed until we submit all of our costs, and then we\u2019ll hear back through the CDAA process,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

Westminster <\/a>received a letter denying its reimbursement request \u201cjust over the weekend,\u201d City Manager Christine Cordon said during a City Council meeting this week. \u201cWe were the third most impacted city of the six cities, and so, this came as a very disappointing piece of news for us.\u201d<\/p>\n

Westminster is looking for other avenues for reimbursement, Cordon said, and the city is \u201cin contact with a representative that is working on behalf of GKN in terms of what GKN is doing.\u201d<\/p>\n

Last week, GKN Aerospace announced it is \u201ccurrently assessing a potential claims program<\/a> that would allow eligible people to resolve claims for losses incurred in connection with the May evacuation order,\u201d but did not offer a timeline for the potential program.<\/p>\n

\u201cUnfortunately, at this time, we don\u2019t know what that looks like, we don\u2019t know all the details, we don\u2019t know how much, et cetera. But that is still in the works,\u201d Cordon said. \u201cBut that there is a recovery effort on GKN\u2019s part, as far as other funding sources, we\u2019re looking to see what we could do as well.\u201d<\/p>\n

Cordon said the state did not offer a reason for the denial, but \u201cwe are working with some of the other cities to kind of determine if we can find out why that was the case with the other cities that were also denied as well.\u201d<\/p>\n

County officials on Tuesday could not be immediately reached about whether the county\u2019s requests for reimbursement have been answered by the state.<\/p>\n

Stanton<\/a> officials received a letter from the Office of Emergency Assistance on Aug. 12 denying the city\u2019s request for funding.<\/p>\n

\u201cAs a result of assessments conducted following the event, the determination was made the impacts from the 2026 Orange County Chemical Incident were not of such severity and magnitude to be beyond the capabilities of local government to respond to and recover from. Therefore, the city of Stanton\u2019s request for CDAA funds to address the 2026 Orange County Chemical Incident is denied,\u201d the letter said.<\/p>\n

Most of Stanton, a compact city of 3.1 square miles and 40,000 residents, falls immediately north of the GKN Aerospace plant. The bulk of the city\u2019s residents \u2014 some live just yards away from the facility<\/a> \u2014 were evacuated.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt would have been understandable if it was consistent across all cities that were impacted, but I think the concern is that it wasn\u2019t consistent,\u201d Stanton City Manager Hannah Shin-Heydorn said.<\/p>\n

\u201cWell, the next step is, the city is waiting to hear more about what GKN will be doing for the community. We\u2019re still waiting on information regarding a town hall<\/a>,\u201d Shin-Heydorn said. \u201cOf course, the city is concerned about our costs that we outlayed in support of this issue, but more importantly, we really want to understand what the avenues are for our community, our residents and businesses who are looking to be made whole.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The cities of Garden Grove, Stanton and Westminster all asked for state funding to help recoup costs accrued…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":438497,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[36],"tags":[163,165,164,7,11078,136570,1071,23,611,4036,136,6737],"class_list":["post-438496","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-anaheim","tag-anaheim","tag-anaheim-headlines","tag-anaheim-news","tag-california","tag-garden-grove","tag-garden-grove-chemical-threat","tag-local-government","tag-local-news","tag-orange-county","tag-stanton","tag-top-stories","tag-westminster"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/438496","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=438496"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/438496\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/438497"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=438496"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=438496"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=438496"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}