First city checks go to flood victims for possessions lost in the June 2008 flood

CEDAR RAPIDS – The first of an expected 1,300 or more checks for up to $10,000 have gone out to flood victims to pay for personal possessions lost in the June 2008 flood using local-option sales tax revenue.

Mayor Ron Corbett and four of his eight City Council colleagues quietly delivered the first two checks last Friday, Corbett said on Tuesday.

The paperwork in what is a City Hall program with little red tape already is in place to issue checks to 400 of the 1,300 households that have applied for the personal-possessions benefit, Corbett said.

The mayor said most will see checks in the coming weeks.

The program has been designed by the City Council to require little documentation of loss, though all who had federal disaster funds or insurance paid to them for personal pssessions will have those amounts deducted from the maximum payment of $10,000.

Corbett said one of the first two checks went to a single mother who had been forced to replace some of what she lost in the flood with credit-card debt. The second of the first checks went to a couple with one son coming home from war in Iraq and other in the war in Afghanistan, the mayor said.

"I don't know who crying the most, me, him or her," council member Don Karr said when the check was given to the couple. "This is the right thing to do. We want to get these people healthy again."

Corbett pushed for the personal-possession payments to flood victims, in part, because the city had yet to spend very much of the local-option sales tax revenue it was accumulating and, in part, because the city's home buyout program with a tangle of federal requirements has moved so slowly.

"This is something that is really going to happen and in a more timely way than the buyout money," the mayor said.