Governor Paul LePage has made a formal request of President Barack Obama to declare a “major disaster” for Maine for a 12 day period including and following the ice storm this past December.
The ice storm caused over 218,000 customers to lose power – affecting over half a million people – and the outages persisted through a period of extreme cold, winds, and wind chills which directly endangered public safety in homes without heat, the request states.
The Governor’s request covers the period of Dec. 21, 2013, to Jan. 1, 2014, and is based on a preliminary assessment of $1,899,973 in public damages borne in the state’s 16 counties.
According to LePage’s request, he was aware of over $6 million in state-verified public assistance-eligible costs as of Jan. 10, and subsequently made a request for a joint federal, state, and local preliminary damage assessment.
The state and the Federal Emergency Management Agency concurred that impact to individuals documented during the preliminary assessment would not support a successful request for individual assistance, according to LePage’s request.
The state had to meet a roughly $1.85 million threshold in public damages in order for the Governor to make a disaster declaration request for public assistance, Maine Emergency Management Agency spokesperson Lynette Miller said previously.
According to Miller, both the state and individual counties need to meet certain per-capita thresholds in order to be eligible for federal assistance: the state’s threshold of $1.85 million is based on $1.39 in public damages per capita; counties must have $3.50 per capita.
The over five-week-long preliminary assessment found only $1.88 million in eligible public damages, and LePage wrote that the process was “unnecessarily complex and slow.”
The “inappropriate application” of Federal Emergency Management Agency policy disallowed almost all road treatment costs to keep the routes passable for emergency response and power restoration vehicles, LePage wrote.
“The nature of this emergency was the extreme threat to public safety caused by widespread power outages and debris and ice-covered roads, during a period of extreme cold which put lives at jeopardy and rendered usual means of road treatment ineffective,” LePage wrote. “In other types of events, the verified cost to keep roads open for emergency vehicles is recognized as an eligible public assistance activity.”
The joint preliminary damage assessment found only two counties met their threshold for public damages: Washington County represented the lion’s share of the entire state, with $1,149,642, or $34.99 per capita, and Waldo County had $136,498 in eligible damages, or $3.52 per capita.
Lincoln County came in at $22,111 in public damages, or just $0.64 per capita.
Lincoln County was previously thought to have met its $120,600 threshold, according to Kristin Draper, the finance and administration officer for Lincoln County Emergency Management Agency, but the disqualification of over $70,000 in Department of Transportation costs in Lincoln County set the total back.
Figures for Lincoln County included in LePage’s request include $17,694 in public damages to Waldoboro, $3308 to Somerville, and $1109 to the DOT.
If the state as a whole is determined to have met its public damage threshold, Maine Emergency Management Agency will be looking again to see if other counties could still be added to the disaster declaration, Miller said previously.
In an interview Feb. 24, Miller said though disaster declarations for enormous disasters like the Ice Storm of 1998 are almost instantaneous, it may take anywhere from two to four weeks for a response to the Governor’s current request.
The state is likely to hear back whether the request is approved or denied, Miller said. “We always get an answer one way or another.”
If the disaster declaration request is denied, the state will have the opportunity to appeal.
“What they have generally told us in the past is for an appeal to successful, there needs to be additional information offered,” Miller said. “We typically would not go back to them and say we think you interpreted things wrong.”
If the disaster is declared, the state would be informed in which counties the disaster has been declared, public officials from those counties would be briefed, and FEMA would deploy officials to work with towns to determine exactly which costs are eligible for reimbursement, Miller said.
There would be no upper limit on how much would be reimbursed, and reimbursements would be based on actual costs, including future costs like debris removal after the snow melts this spring, she said.
In such reimbursement, 75 percent of the actual costs would be paid for by FEMA, 15 percent would come from the state, and the remaining 10 percent would be borne by the town, Miller said.
Separate from his disaster declaration request, LePage also made a request of the U.S. Small Business Administration to assist businesses affected by the ice storm.
The request includes a sampling of eight businesses in Waldo, Kennebec, Hancock, Cumberland, and Androscoggin counties, which in total showed a decline of hundreds of thousands of dollars in gross income in December and January over the same period the year before.
Though a presidential disaster declaration would automatically invoke assistance from the Small Business Administration, the SBA can also make its own decision to assist those counties, according to Richard Daigle, a public affairs specialist with the SBA.
If approval for such assistance is granted, it would also apply to any businesses in counties contiguous to the five counties included in the request, Daigle said. That would mean all but Piscataquis and Aroostook counties would be covered.
The SBA would make available federal “disaster assistance loans” to businesses and nonprofits in those counties that suffered losses related to the ice storm, Daigle said.
Bill Card, an economic development specialist for the Maine office of the SBA, said such loans would be offered at about a 2.875 annual percentage rate for nonprofits and a 4 percent APR for businesses over terms of up to 30 years.
“It can be used to pay for fixed debts, payroll, accounts payable, and other expenses that could have been paid had the disaster not occurred,” Card said.
