With some last-minute hesitation about how to spend almost a third of a billion dollars, the Volusia County Council Jan. 16 adopted a blueprint for recovering from Hurricane Ian and fending off future catastrophic damage.

The council voted 4-2 in favor of a plan to allocate $328.9 million in federal Community Development Block Grant funds for disaster recovery. The massive aid package includes payments for home repairs, new construction, job training and infrastructure and disaster mitigation. More than half of the funds will go to single-family home repair or replacement or the construction of new multifamily dwellings. 

“The priority is with housing. It’s housing and urban development that it stands for. It may or may not be approved if it’s changed,” county Recovery and Resiliency Director Dona Butler said.

Some council members wanted to change the plan and dedicate more funding for infrastructure, especially stormwater control and drainage. 

“I’d much rather see as much money as possible go to infrastructure, whether it’s called infrastructure or mitigation — whatever you want to call it. I want it to go to the masses, as opposed to individuals,” Council Member Don Dempsey said.

Dempsey wanted to spend more on infrastructure than the $50 million set in the plan.

That would require securing approval from HUD. Such late-in-coming changes could be risky, the council learned.

“Well, we went through a very lengthy process to get our action plan to you. It took us about four months. So, if you want to make an amendment to this plan now, we would have to write the language. We would have to have another 30-day public comment, and then we would have to send it back to HUD for another 60 days, with no guarantee that they’re going to approve it,” Butler warned.

The plan was carefully crafted following information-gathering and public hearings on how to spend the CDBG-DR cash that is over and above the usual annual CDBG grants given to local governments by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. The latter long-standing grant program is supposed to be spent on projects and activities that benefit low- and moderate-income households.

As for the CDBG-DR funds, Butler noted, the county’s program includes $50 million for heading off damage from future catastrophes.

“It includes the information from our hazard mitigation plan and the cities and the county emergency management department or division have been working on together,” she said. “There is also a lot of maintenance work that probably needs to be done to upgrade stormwater, other utility systems that would prevent some of the flooding from happening, and that was mitigation.”

CDBG-DR GRANT FUNDING
Administration — $16,445,500
Planning — $18,554,500
Single-Family Home Repair or Replacement — $145,000,000
Rental Repair — $5,000,000
Multifamily New Construction — $50,000,000
Infrastructure — $50,000,000
Mitigation — $42,910,000
Total — $328,910,000

Butler cautioned against diverting dollars from one category to another, telling council members again the county may fall out of favor with HUD.

“The criticism is that it’s made to look like we took this money out of the general fund to put into low-income housing,” County Chair Jeff Brower said. “This money — and it’s still taxpayer money, but it comes from the federal government. Everybody in the U.S. put into this. … The thing about it is, it doesn’t go away even if we had voted, ‘No, we don’t want this money.’ It goes to the State of Florida, and they get to choose how to spend it and we have no say on it. This way, we can have this conversation that Don [Dempsey] has correctly brought up. We can decide how the money is spent that best suits our community.”

“My question is,” Brower continued, “if we vote to change it, you said that we start over again. Tell me what that looks like.”

“Then we come back and start the process all over again,” Butler replied.

Any new draft plan for the county’s share of the CDBG-DR grant “might be [approved by HUD], but it may not be.”

Dempsey pressed once again for damage prevention.

“The west side — I mean we are overrun with flooding issues,” he told his colleagues and Butler. “We need to allocate as much as possible for infrastructure to fix the problem on the west side with all this flooding. … Let’s fix the bigger problem.”

Butler noted Volusia County is also due to receive $48 million from the Federal Emergency Management Agency for hazard mitigation, separate and in addition to the CDBG-DR funds.

Council Member at Large Jake Johansson said the county could also seek anti-flooding help from other sources.

“You have grants from the St. Johns River Water Management District that we can put toward infrastructure, that we can’t put toward housing,” he suggested. “We can discuss with our legislators, and we do, about infrastructure programs that we can put toward infrastructure that we can’t put toward housing.”

A majority of the County Council adopted the CDBG-DR program. Brower, Johansson, Vice Chair Troy Kent and Council Member Matt Reinhart formed the majority. Dempsey and Council Member Danny Robins dissented. Council Member David Santiago was absent.