My Storm Cleanup Idea Flopped
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DAVE’S WORLD
By David Howell
A few weeks ago I had a grand idea to try and help the ongoing winter storm debris cleanup in Yalobusha County.
As you may recall, the county is responsible for 12.5 percent of the debris removal cost, a project now looking like it could approach $9 million in the county alone. FEMA pays 75 percent and MEMA pays another 12.5 percent. The county can receive credit toward its portion through in-kind work such as county employee labor, equipment use and volunteer cleanup efforts connected to the storm recovery.
A quick calculation shows the county’s share could land somewhere around $1.08 million. So far, officials say there has already been more than a half million dollars in in-kind work from county crews, county equipment and volunteers, with much of the volunteer tally coming in the days and weeks after the storm when there was a huge effort. Every meal served at the Multi-Purpose Building that operated as a shelter and every volunteer hour counted toward the county’s 12.5 percent.
The idea was to reach out to as many people in the county as possible to see if county officials could document more volunteer hours. We all have neighbors and friends who helped with the recovery, deeds that ranged from cleaning up driveways and roads to helping neighbors get trees off houses.
So the “Count the Hours, Cut the Cost” campaign was launched. We hoped people who spent hours helping after the storm would provide information about their time and equipment use so the county could potentially apply it toward that local match. A county employee was assigned to the project by supervisors and the campaign got underway both in the newspaper and on social media.
It flopped.
Maybe folks were simply stormed out by that point. Maybe people did not fully understand the idea. One caller even wanted to know how much money they were getting paid.
While that effort flopped, county supervisors recently received some good news. It appears that debris hauled to the county’s rubbish pit may also count toward that in-kind contribution total. Considering the tens of thousands of cubic yards of debris already hauled there, that discovery could become a major financial break for county taxpayers.
In fact, if the numbers work out, there is now a possibility the county may not have to spend local tax dollars at all on its portion of the storm debris cleanup. That would save money likely otherwise diverted from county road funds, and we all know the dollars allocated for roads in Yalobusha County never seem to match the need.
There are signs the cleanup effort is finally beginning to wind down. During Monday’s Board of Supervisors meeting, officials discussed what they described as the “final pass” through many county roads. Supervisors are now helping document roads that have been completed, in part to prevent new debris from being placed on rights-of-way after cleanup crews finish their final pass.
Remember, the deadline to place debris along county rights-of-way was April 30.
Even so, there is still going to be plenty of work ahead once the debris contractors finally pull out of the county. In some places, roadsides still look like logging operations moved through. Broken limbs still hang over certain roads, and ditches and shoulders in places have taken a beating from months of cleanup traffic.
There are a few places where scars from the 1994 ice storm can still be found today. My guess is Winter Storm Fern will leave a few reminders of its own for years to come.
