(Washington, DC)– The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) has approved funding to acquire 25 residential properties in Spencer heavily damaged in the 2024 flood. The city will receive $3.4 million for the program. City Manager Kevin Robinson gave an update at Monday’s City Council meeting…
“So now there’s a lot of work the city needs to do to package the process for that. We’ll meet with the homeowners, they’ll need to gather up their abstracts, their pay off amounts, any FEMA benefits they took, income verification, and then we will schedule the abstract reviews with our attorney. We’ll schedule the demolitions for those properties. These particular 25 properties in the 404 program which is mitigation. These are all in the 100 year flood plain; there’s a couple of lower valued ones that are just out of the 100 in the 500 but most of them are in the 100 and this is the federal government’s intent to mitigate these, meaning remove those so they can’t be residential homes in the future. They need to be green spaces essentially. There’s some limited things you can do with them but they can’t be residential. The thought behind that from the federal government is any home they can buyout that’s in a 100 year flood plain that flooded in an event like we had, it’s saves the federal government from having to pay again on individual assistance for that property.”
Robinson went on to give an estimated timeline for the acquisition process…
“I would anticipate now that the project’s been obligated, properties should be acquired early fall with demolition hopefully to occur mid to late fall and then we’ll rehab those properties starting in the spring.”
A separate property buyout program through the city continues as well. Robinson says the City Attorney’s Office is currently reviewing the abstracts of 12 properties approved for that program, which is separate from the federal one.
