AUSTIN (KXAN) — For communities impacted by devastating floods over the July 4 weekend, the recovery effort is going to be long and expensive.
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott has announced several requests, many of which have been granted, for federal funding help.
In Travis County, the flood-impacted community has been approved for individual help through FEMA, but not public federal funding.
“It’s a slower process than I would like and I get that the residents here wish that it would all be much quicker and I am with them on that,” Travis County Judge Andy Brown said.
According to Brown, the process requires a county judge to sign a disaster declaration, the state to include a specific county on its disaster declaration and then the president to approve specific counties for different types of assistance.
In Travis County the timeline of that process has been as follows:
- July 5: Travis County Judge Andy Brown declares a disaster in Travis County
- July 5: Travis County added to Gov. Greg Abbott’s state disaster declaration
- July 11: Travis County approved for private federal assistance
“That means that FEMA will come here and start working with people to assess their damage and then figure out how much they will pay people for their damage,” Brown said.
That public federal assistance is money that goes to local governments to help them with recovery efforts — and Travis County hasn’t been approved for that yet.
“Both Travis and Williamson Counties are, it appears to us they have met their threshold. We are working with them to get the documentation to FEMA. We expect those to be turned on very soon,” said Nim Kidd, Chief of the Texas Division of Emergency Management, on Monday.
Brown said that process is tedious accounting. He said a team of state and local staff have been going door-to-door in Travis County “to get an accounting basically of what houses were destroyed, that plus the other things that we’re able to quantify ourselves, we add all that up and then if we meet the threshold hopefully the president will add Travis County to the public disaster declaration.”
State leaders said Monday that even though some public federal assistance requests were still pending or yet to be submitted, the state has still been moving forward on recovery work in anticipation that the funding will come. They said they are not waiting on that funding to get communities help.