The Flood Bill Breakdown – What you won’t hear

One of the first major bills of this legislative session just passed in the Senate. HF 64 takes $56 million from Iowa’s reserve funds and puts it toward disaster relief. Here’s the breakdown: $10 million going towards individuals affected by flooding. Residents may apply for grants of up to $2,500 going toward replacing lost personal items. The bill also devotes $24 million total in the form of forgivable housing loans for housing assistance and the final piece of the bill is $22 million total available in the form of grants to assist local municipalities.

A big part of this bill is the establishment of the Rebuild Iowa Office. The office was established after the floods and has been borrowing staff from other departments. This bill puts in place 32 full time employees through this office with no end in sight as to when the office will disband. Seeing as this was a 500 year flood, you’d think it would be reasonable to assume that Iowa could use the office, get rid of it and not see it for another 50 years. Not so, the bill sets it up into perpetuity.

The office will be charged with finding “innovative” financing alternatives. Take that for what you will.

What about any left over money? It is possible. Senate Republicans offered and amendment that would require leftovers to go towards small businesses since they get the short end of the stick on this issue. It was voted down.

Another strenuous point in the bill is the $2,500 for individual assistance. No stipulations other than to get it, you have to be affected by the floods. The money will come in the form of voucher debit cards. This is ripe for abuse as we all know from Hurricane Katrina.

We still don’t know a dollar amount of the damage statewide. No one seems to want to cough up the numbers. You’d think that might be important when talking about funding something. There are still millions of dollars sitting in the RIO coughers (from the feds) waiting to get into the hands of Iowans.

Regardless of what you think of the bill, victims have waited a long time to get some relief from the state. It could have happened much sooner and hopefully all the bureaucracy written into the bill can easily be weeded through so those in need came pull through. I guess we’ll wait and see how it all unfolds.