FEMA grants of $1.9 million for 2024 flood damage expected to come in several payments
- Charlene Sims, Journal staff
- 4 days ago
- 3 min read
By Charlene Sims
MOUND CITY – The Linn County Commissioners heard updates from Joyce Hall, Linn County Public Works Office Manager, about where Linn County stood with the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) funds for damages received from the storm in April 2024. Commissioners also approved a two-year contract with gWorks Cloud Operations Enterprise in the amount of $24,596 for the software program for the Public Works Department.
Hall told the commissioners that Emergency Management Director Randy Hegwald is the one that will notify the commission when there is a natural disaster and then at that time all of the reporting goes through the Public Works office grants portal and with Hall working with the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) directly.
Hall gave the commissioners a summary of what she had submitted for the 2024 disaster. She said that so far the county has submitted more than $1.9 million in claims.
Hall said that in order to determine how FEMA pays the county for these kind of events, she went back and looked at a disaster event in 2019.
“We don’t just get paid in just one check,” said Hall. “We get multiple checks. So from the April 2019 report or flood event, we got three different checks. One was received in July of 2020, one in November of 2020 and then the final one was May of 2021.
“And, I’m trying to remember. I think the way they did it, they gave us the initial check was for just our debris removal, and then another check came for just our north district expenses, and then the third came for our south district expenses. That’s kind of how they split it up.
“The deadline for our FEMA is Jan. 16, 2026. So we may be based on prior experience, might get some of that reimbursement in 2026 but we might not get the full reimbursement until the following year.”
Hall went on to explain that FEMA would reimburse the county 75% but 10% also comes from the state. So the total reimbursement would be 85%.
Hall then gave an update on the gWorks update. She said that she had talked with the gWorks representative Phil McGrath, and the total cost per year for gWorks is $15,000. She said that was their base cost.
She explained that for year one for Linn County, gWorks is charging the county a loyal client bundle price of nearly $11,100. She said that gWorks is also for year one applying a 50% discount of more than $5,500. So that leaves the county a cost of more than $5,500 plus $8,000 as a one-time implementation fee to migrate all of the county’s information over to the new software. The total fee will be more than $13,500.
Hall continued with the price for year two, the county can also expect the nearly $11,100 price according to what McGrath had told her. That’s the loyal client pricing for that year. Then year three and beyond McGrath said that we can expect an estimated 5% to 7% yearly increase of that $11,100.
Hall said that once they received that contract from Linn County, McGrath will be working with the county’s gWorks staff to input the county’s PubWorks data into their hyper web system. Linn County will continue to be working on PubWorks as normal. McGrath estimated that it would take two to three weeks for the data to be transferred over to the new system.
After it is all entered in Hyper Web, two or three meetings will be scheduled with primary staff to verify that the data is transferred correctly and to troubleshoot any issues. After it is verified that everything has been transferred correctly, Linn County will receive an invoice for the remaining $5,500, less any prior amount from the county’s prior contract and a go-live date will be scheduled.