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The findings emerged from a summit at Minnesota State College-Southeast Technical attended by local leaders and officials in Minnesota’s economic, housing, emergency-management and environmental agencies. All are members of the Minnesota Recovers Task Force, which Gov. Tim Pawlenty convened after the disaster to oversee recovery efforts.
Task force members gave themselves high marks for assessing damage and disbursing disaster aid in record time, but they gave lower grades for planning lapses that delayed some relief funds and an aid-application process that required victims to complete mountains of paperwork.
The task-force feedback was mixed for the Minnesota Housing Finance Agency, which gave 389 forgivable Quick Start loans to flooded homeowners, many of whom didn’t qualify for federal, non-forgivable loans.
Some praised the Quick Start program for changing its loan terms to be more inclusive and disbursing more than $11 million to flooded families. Others wished the agency had streamlined the application process.
“A lot of families got frustrated” by the paperwork, said Joe Wheeler, director of the Southeast Minnesota Multi-County Housing and Redevelopment Authority, which helped administer Quick Start.
The Department of Employment and Economic Development, which issued partially forgivable loans to more than 100 flooded businesses, also got a varied response. Rushford, Minn., residents bristled in September 2007 at the state’s initial proposal for administering the business loans, though DEED officials responded by making the loan terms more favorable.
Linda Grover, who chairs the Winona County Economic Development Authority, said the more than $28 million that DEED loaned to businesses was integral to recovery.
“Not a day goes by when (business owners) don’t tell me: ‘If it wasn’t for this program, they couldn’t have made it,’” said Grover, who disbursed the business loans in Winona County.
The flood exposed flaws in local planning efforts as well, including poor land-use decisions to build homes in certain low-lying areas, officials said. They also noted that five flooded counties — Houston, Fillmore, Olmsted, Dodge and Wabasha — didn’t have hazard-mitigation plans before the flood, which slowed their ability to obtain federal funds for public-works projects to reduce the impacts of future floods. State officials responded to that issue by using DNR funds to buy out flooded properties in those counties; property owners there might otherwise have waited far longer for federal buyout dollars.
Some state employees earned praise for responding to the flood amid unusual adversity: SEMCAC, a community-action agency headquartered in Rushford, administered relief funds from Winona after floodwaters displaced them from their Rushford office. A DNR employee risked his life to help first responders rescue victims from raging floodwaters in at least one incident in Houston County, said Kevin Kelleher, who oversaw the task force.
Kelleher said last week’s meeting likely was the second-to-last for the task force, though the group could reconvene in event of another disaster.
Mark Sommerhauser may be reached at (507) 453-3514 or msommerhauser@winonadailynews.com.
reader wrote on Nov 2, 2008 8:52 PM: