FORT PIERCE – The City Commission unanimously passed a resolution Oct. 5 adopting the latest Local Mitigation Strategy Plan drafted by St. Lucie County and submitted to the Florida Division of Emergency Management in early May, the statewide agency through which the Federal Emergency Management Agency funnels grant funding to recipients.
The County Commission formally approved the LMSP on Sept. 1 after Tallahassee signed off on the plan.
Fort Pierce Building Official Paul Thomas introduced the resolution request with a brief history of the plan operation in Florida.
“The Local Mitigation Strategy came into effect in 1999,” he said. “The state mandated that counties and cities initiate a program to be able to mitigate hazards. Once you participate in the program, it allows for there to be grant funding available. Locally, St. Lucie County runs the program, and then Port St. Lucie, the City of Fort Pierce and St. Lucie Village all contribute. So, every time they make an adjustment or update anything, then we have to reciprocate.”
Thomas proceeded to detail the broad types of grants available through the program.
“There’s a variety of grants for hazard mitigation,” he explained. “Our grant writers look at those to see if they can choose different funding streams that apply. There may be hundreds of different grants available based off whatever the needs of the city are at any given time. Then they have pre-disaster mitigation to deal with people in their homes and the different grants available to them; flood mitigation assistance, which is triggered if your house is damaged during an event; [and] grants if you want to elevate structures. All of these are only available if you participate in the LMS.”
Thomas acknowledged that he and other local municipal leaders sit down together to update their respective lists of hazard mitigation projects that then become part of the formal Local Mitigation Strategy Plan.
“Really, we’re just following suit,” he concluded. “This is a very, very valuable program to the city, and I recommend that we continue to participate.”
Commissioner Arnold Gaines was the first Board member to seek clarification afterward.
“I heard you say a hundred grants?” he asked.
“There’s many, many grants,” Thomas affirmed. “I don’t know exactly how many.”
Commissioner Gaines then noted the importance of such funding in light of the upcoming referendum on Amendment 3. If passed by a majority of Florida voters, that referendum would punch holes in municipal budgets across the state.
“And we have a grant writer that can get 99 of them?” he prodded. “Y’all are laughing, but we need to try to get them, especially because we don’t know what’s coming after November. Can a city only get one, or can we apply for as many as we can try to attain?”
“You can apply for as many grants as you qualify for,” the building official replied. “However, typically with all grants, you have to have matching funds. That then becomes the challenge to be able to allocate those funds.”
Gaines wanted staff to keep close tabs on available grant funding due to potential future budgetary cuts.
“I just wanted to make sure your department has enough time to look at these grants and make sure,” he said. “I don’t want to miss a grant and then say had we known, we could have found some money to match it.”
Thomas subsequently announced the hiring of a new employee to aid in that effort.
“Really, the LMS and these grants are a function of resilience more than anything else because they’re intended to mitigate hazards,” he explained. “I’m very pleased to say that next Monday, after many years of searching, I’m going to employ a resilience person in the Building Department who has grant-writing experience to look into these issues.”
Mayor Linda Hudson then wanted to know if the LMSP might help to fund repair or replacement of the city’s aging seawall.
“Is that part of resilience?” she asked.
“That could be,” Thomas answered. “If those grants are available to help the public, there are grants that work towards the cities and the municipalities.”
Commissioner Chris Dzadovsky, who’d served as a St. Lucie County Commissioner in the mid-2000s, recalled the negative effects of the recession on municipal budgets.
“This is another issue where Amendment 3 comes into play,” he said. “During the recession, we didn’t have funding to do matching grants. That money wasn’t there, so they were not even sought after because you couldn’t even apply. If Amendment 3 passes, these are the types of things where we could mitigate some of our issues and be able to get these grants to take some pressure off the local taxpayers.”
Commissioner Dzadovsky subsequently informed Mayor Hudson that the seawall grant funding would normally be coordinated by the Florida Inland Navigation District, an entity that would also be hamstrung by Amendment 3’s proposed property tax reductions.
“That’s an individual separate taxing district,” he explained. “If Florida Inland Navigation doesn’t have their funds, they can’t help us fund the seawall or other damage to areas in our waterways. I’m just pointing out that every little bit we do, Amendment 3 would come in and we would lose the opportunity to mitigate issues for our own taxpayers locally.”
The Fort Pierce Commission then voted unanimously to approve the resolution.
Afterward City Manager Richard Chess announced that city commissioners and staff would be hosting a handful of public workshops during the month of October on the potential negative impacts of Amendment 3’s passage.
The next one will take place Oct. 14 at Percy Peek Gymnasium hosted by Commissioner Curtis Johnson Jr. beginning at 6 p.m.
Two more will be hosted by Commissioner Arnold Gaines and Commissioner Michael Broderick that have yet to be scheduled.