City Hall delivers more than it thought it could for flood victims

CEDAR RAPIDS - Flash back just a few months ago, and you'd have found a City Hall struggling to imagine it would be able to provide help for flood victims in the way it now says it can.

Push back and persistence, especially from Mayor Ron Corbett, has led to three recent funding victories.

For months, state and federal officials have told the city that the 400 or so families that received up to $25,000 in state and federal funds for replacement housing would have that amount of money subtracted from the money paid them in the buyout of their home. In most cases, that is not now true, and in those in which it is, the city will make up the money with local-option sales tax revenue, Corbett now says.

In addition, state officials have said for months that the up to $10,000 in energy efficiency appliances that many flooded homeowners received also would be deducted from the buyout check. It now won't be, Corbett says the state of Iowa now has concluded.

 Then last week, the City Council set aside an estimated $10.5 million in revenue from the local-option sales tax for a newly invented flood-recovery benefit: to provide some 1,400 flood-hit, owner-occupant households up to $10,000 for “unmet needs” to replace possessions lost in the flood. Most who are eligible won't get the full $10,000, but will have earlier payments for personal belongings from the Federal Emergency Management Agency, for instance, subtracted from the $10,000.

The push by City Hall for the grants of up to $10,000 for “unmet needs” came about, in part, because of City Hall frustration with the federal and state governments' insistence that replacement-housing and energy-efficiency funds be considered “duplication of benefits” and so subtracted from buyout check. Now the city has gotten its way on those matters.

Corbett says the new unmet-needs grants is not a giveaway.

“Even this program doesn't come close to meeting the needs of those who lost so many personal possessions in the flood,” Corbett says. “You look at, especially, the elderly who spent a lifetime accumulating things.”

To qualify for the unmet-needs grants, flood victims must have previously filled out paperwork and received federal funds for “personal,” flood-recovery needs.

The requirement of previous federal funds comes, in part, to meet the local ballot language for the local-option sales tax. Ninety percent of the revenue, the ballot said, is to be used for property acquisition and rehabilitation of flood-damaged housing and “matching funds for federal flood dollars to assist with flood recovery.”

Gary Ficken, who provided input into the ballot language and who is now chairman of the Local-Option Sales Tax Oversight Committee, says that the initial idea to use some of the local revenue as “matching funds” was really more for instances in which federal funding was contingent on a local match of funds. That is not the case with the city's new “unmet needs” idea, Ficken says.

Ficken, though, says city officials have pointed to insurance tables to show that those who lose much in a disaster lose far more in value that the few thousand dollars that FEMA pays out immediately after the flood for personal possessions.

“So I felt better about it,” Ficken says. “The main focus of the (citizen) vote was, ‘Let's get some money to the victims.' … So I'm comfortable with it. At least somebody gets something.”

City Council member Chuck Wieneke, who is the council liaison to the flood community, says there is no question that the majority of flood victims lost more than $10,000 in personal property in the flood.

Wieneke says he wishes there was some kind of system of receipts to show what somebody owned before the flood only because he thinks a few will “game” the system. But for every one of those, there will be nine who deserve the help, he says.

He also notes that not everyone benefits from the funding. Renters, for instance, don't have access to unmet-needs grants, he points out.

In the first days after the flood, government officials stressed that government can help, but it could not make people “whole.”

Council member Wieneke says some flood victims are getting closer to being made whole than the city ever thought possible. He points out that the federal and state governments now, too, will pay Cedar Rapids property owners 107 percent of pre-flood value in a buyout, up from 100 percent value that owners were expecting before Corbett pushed for the change after talking office in January.