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The announcement came as state agencies disbursed the last of the $157 million appropriated by legislators last September to aid southeast Minnesota victims of the August floods. The legislation stipulated that state officials had to disburse the funds by June 30, 2008.
Following last-minute transfers of unused flood-relief dollars, all $157 million now is in the hands of flood victims or local government agencies, said Kevin Kelleher, spokesman for the Department of Employment and Economic Development.
“The applications have been all processed, and the money is on the streets,” Kelleher said.
The transfers included nearly $7 million that went unused by the agencies that received them as part of the September 2007 legislation.
Most of the untapped funds — roughly $6.25 million — came from the Minnesota Investment Fund, which supplied partially forgivable loans to flooded businesses. Legislators appropriated $35 million to the program last September.
Kelleher said DEED extended the application deadlines and scoured the flooded counties before transferring the unused funds. All told, the agency loaned more than $28 million to help businesses recover from the flooding, Kelleher said.
The transfers are precisely what lawmakers had in mind when the penned the flood relief bill last September, said Sen. Sharon Erickson Ropes, DFL-Winona,, one of the bill’s authors. The bill specifically granted state officials the flexibility to shift funds from one agency to another as needed, she said. Flooded businesses in southeast Minnesota are “back on their feet” after the disaster, Ropes said, while efforts such as the BoWSR conservation projects need more funding.
“We pushed the money out as quickly as we could (in September),” Ropes said. “We knew that, at some point, we would have to re-assess the dollar amounts.”
The Minnesota Recovers Task Force likely will issue a final study of the flood relief effort in September, Kelleher said.
At a glance
State officials this week transferred nearly $7 million in flood relief dollars that went unused by the agencies that originally received the funds last September. Here are some of the new uses for those funds:
Contact Mark Sommerhauser at (507) 453-3514 or msommerhauser@winonadailynews.com
