Seven years after Hurricane Ike, Galveston is in the homestretch of completing its federally funded recovery projects, though city officials say it will still be years until they are all finished.
"The effort now is on trying to finish some of the more complex projects," said John Simsen, the city's recovery program director, tells The Galveston County Daily News.
The city has completed more than 80 percent of its projects approved by the Federal Emergency Management Agency. The city was approved for 518 projects. Simsen says that so far, 433 have been completed. The projects completed by the city represent $115 million of the $126 million awarded to the city for FEMA projects.
"The question comes up, seven years into this, why aren't we done?" Simsen said. "The breadth of the disaster was enough to indicate that it was going to take years to get through all this."
He said that in the early days, many of the projects were on the streets and sewers. As more time passed, more visible projects were completed. A beach reconstruction project off the seawall, partially funded by the city's FEMA dollars, was completed this year.
"The major stuff left to finish is moving forward this year," Simsen said.
Next week, the city plans to begin the demolition of a police storage room. A new room for storing evidence from police investigations will be built at a greater height in order to protect evidence against flooding. Work is set to begin later this month on the renovation of two fire stations.
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Simsen said that after those are completed, the city's FEMA projects will be down to only the most "meddlesome" issues, including the restoration of the city's trolley system.
Along with the FEMA projects, the city is in working on projects funded by the Department of Housing and Urban Development's Community Development Block Grant Disaster Recovery program.
Simsen said there is still about $44 million left in unallocated funding from the CDBG projects, and a plan for the rest of that money could be presented to the City Council by the end of the year. Among the projects envisioned for that funding is a new central fire station and public works facility.
