Iowa native at FEMA doesn’t give C.R. advantage

It's been a jolt for Cedar Rapids as the Federal Emergency Management Agency seemingly shifted gears, complicated plans to replace the city's flood-damaged library and put some $35 million in other federal disaster funds in doubt.

“I'm calling Beth,” Mayor Ron Corbett said after the September library surprise.

Beth Freeman took over as the White House-appointed administrator of FEMA's four-state Region VII in December 2009. She had worked as Sen. Tom Harkin's regional director in Cedar Rapids for the previous 19 years.

FEMA's regional administrator matters to Cedar Rapids and other Iowa communities as they work to come back from the 2008 flooding and four, smaller, federally declared disasters in the past 10 months. The regional administrator reviews decisions made by FEMA field staff and rules on appeals.

So what better than having Freeman on the other end of the phone line?

The Iowa native has no interest in denying the obvious - her connection to and fondness for Cedar Rapids and Iowa - but don't read too much into that, she added.

From the FEMA regional headquarters on the south side of Kansas City, Mo., Freeman said last week that she figured officials in Cedar Rapids liked the fact that someone with strong ties to the city held the FEMA regional post.

“I'm sure there is a comfort level,” says Freeman, 56, “and I'm very comfortable talking about projects in Cedar Rapids, because I am so familiar with them.”

No special treatment

Impossible to miss in her large office is a framed picture of The Gazette's “Epic surge” front page from June 2008.

Freeman also pointed out that she was still the district representative in Cedar Rapids for Harkin for nearly 18 months after the flood, working to research and then weigh in on behalf of the city and other Iowa jurisdictions in front of FEMA.

She helped on two successful Cedar Rapids appeals that went all the way to FEMA headquarters in Washington - one secured permission to replace the city's flood-damaged Central Fire Station and the other provided funding for the public library's temporary home.

Even so, Freeman said her past record of work for Cedar Rapids and Iowa doesn't now translate into any special home-court advantage at FEMA.

“I have a four-state area (Iowa, Missouri, Kansas and Nebraska), and I firmly believe that it's my job and my staff's job that Cedar Rapids, Iowa, and every other community in this region gets every penny that they are entitled to in disaster assistance,” she said. “It is not FEMA's job to not give disaster assistance. It's our job to make sure that they get it.”

Cedar Rapids, she said, has not and is not getting a better deal than anyone else.

“Cedar Rapids was also very badly damaged. So in some perspective, it may appear that way,” Freeman said, “but then when I start talking to people about the kind of damages Cedar Rapids received in 2008, I almost always get a reaction, ‘Oh, I didn't know they had that much damage up there.' ”

In FEMA parlance, the Iowa flooding of 2008 is referred to as disaster 1763. According to FEMA figures, FEMA has paid $145 million in individual disaster assistance in Iowa, with an additional $272 million coming from the Small Business Administration.

In assistance for public facilities, $268 million has been obligated for Cedar Rapids. In comparison, $154 million has been obligated for public facilities for the University of Iowa, $8 million for Iowa City and $4.2 million for Coralville.

From smooth to bumpy

By early this past summer, Cedar Rapids had come to view its support from FEMA as an ongoing, smooth-running enterprise. FEMA's top staff in Iowa had worked with the City Council on a FEMA program that provides disaster payments for damaged facilities that are not intended to be brought back for public use.

Along the way, the council had come to think that the city would receive about $35 million for two flood-damaged, city-owned properties - the partially used Sinclair plant and a hydroelectric plant at the base of the 5-in-1 bridge, which was in disrepair at the time of the flood. Meanwhile, the city also was continuing to work with FEMA on obtaining disaster funds to replace the city's flood-damaged library on a site across Fourth Avenue SE from Greene Square Park.

Then, the city says, the story from FEMA changed.

In July, FEMA announced that the city would receive no alternative-project money related to the Sinclair and hydroelectric dams. On Sept. 14, FEMA said it wanted the city to build the new library on the site of the former library, an option the city thought had been dismissed long ago.

Freeman said no policy had changed at FEMA. “We probably could have communicated better, and city officials could maybe have listened a little better,” she said.

Freeman said part of the confusion came when FEMA asked the City Council to put together a list of projects for which it would spend alternative-project funds IF the agency approved such funding for the Sinclair and hydroelectric plants.

“They were also told that these project worksheets were subject to approval, to review,” she says. “It's a many-step process. … There's a lot of things we have to look at, and they were told that.”

The city has appealed FEMA's decision on the hydroelectric plant and will do the same on Sinclair. Freeman will be the one to rule on both matters. As for FEMA's back-and-forth decision on the library, Freeman acknowledged that she weighed in on the matter with her staff as part of the review process.

“When I started hearing about that, I just asked the folks up there and said, ‘You really need to look at that project and make sure what you're doing is correct,' ” Freeman said.

FEMA's Iowa staff set aside its view that the city should rebuild on the former library site, with FEMA contributing about $18 million. Instead, FEMA will provide $19.5 million toward the preferred new site.

Freeman pointed out that the Iowa floods of 2008 generated some 11,000 FEMA worksheets. Nearly all those projects have been approved and completed or are being completed.

“So what's left, two years later, are the big projects, the hard projects, the complicated projects,” she said, “and that's what you're hearing about.”

Freeman says FEMA's job, too, is to be “good stewards of taxpayer dollars,” and she said every FEMA-funded project is open to federal audit, a fact she says she never forgets. She wants to make sure FEMA passes those audits, which are sure to come, she said.

“The worst thing I could see to happen was, say, the city got $30 million for something ... and a year or two later, the Inspector General's Office is doing their audit and they say, ‘Oops, that was a wrong decision. That wasn't eligible,' ” Freeman said. “Now the city has to pay that money back. Where would the city get that kind of money? To me, that would be real tragedy.”