03/10/11 Marshall County Emergency Management Director Clyde Avery appeared before the Commissioners this week to bring to their attention that everyone in the county is not participating in submitting cost estimates for a FEMA reimbursement for last month’s blizzard. Avery said, “We need everyone to help meet the threshold collectively. If not it hurts everyone.”
The individual counties in Indiana collect the data from qualifying entities including non-profist initially and send their estimates on to the state. The State of Indiana needs to qualify by meeting the threshold of approximately $8.5 million to be eligible to receive disaster help in the form of reimbursements for expenditures during emergency events. If the State meets the threshold then counties in the state that have keep track of their expenditures, submitted them by the deadline and meet the threshold can be eligible for federal reimbursement.
The eligible expenditures that governmental agencies keep track of can be reimbursed up to 75%. Expenditures can include: overtime wages, fuel, equipment cost, materials such as salt and sand, supplies that are used to clean up after the storm and event for contracted work.
The agency applying for the reimbursement must provide documentation of the dollar amount spent in the effort which must pass a certain threshold amount in order to be eligible for the federal dollars.
There is a formula for eligibility that takes the number of citizens in a jurisdiction, in this case, Marshall County which is 47,050 and multiplies it by $3.37. Our threshold is $158,558.
Avery said the state has asked for the declaration in seeking the money. He was disappointed that all Marshall County agencies did not submit figures. Agencies submitting included the Marshall County Highway Department, the Indiana Department of Transportation, St. Joseph Regional Medical Center and the town of Bourbon and Argos. Several school systems also submitted costs for their emergency protection actions. The three largest municipalities in Marshall County: Plymouth, Bremen and Culver did not submit numbers to the EMA Director before the deadline. Those that did submit numbers have a preliminary estimates of $180,719 used in manpower, equipment and materials fighting the February snow storm, exceeding the threshold.
