HUD Awards $25 Million In Disaster Recovery Funds To San Marcos

Funding to help San Marcos community impacted by last year’s severe flooding

Today, the City of San Marcos is receiving $25 million approved by Congress in December and allocated now by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.  These funds will help meet remaining housing needs, economic development, and infrastructure rehabilitation needs that resulted from so many homes and small businesses being damaged or destroyed.

“Since the devastating floods in May and October the City of San Marcos staff and officials have been working tirelessly to implement solutions to mitigate and prevent the damages caused by repeated flooding in our community,” said San Marcos Mayor Daniel Guerrero.  “We have brainstormed innovate and creative projects, but the price tags prevented the city from moving forward.  This federal assistance will give us the funds to bring those projects to life and reduce the threat of catastrophic flooding in the future.”

The San Marcos funding is part of a total of $142 million for disaster recovery efforts related to last year’s historic floods.  Other Texas cities and counties can apply for a portion of these funds through the Texas General Land Office which will administer $50 million in funds. The state will have to develop an action plan which fully describes the method of distribution to local governments.  The action plan submission process will be outlined in Federal Register notice.

Congress appropriated $300 million to address the unmet recovery needs in communities that were most impacted and distressed by a major flooding disaster in 2015. Communities in Texas and South Carolina, which will also receive recovery funds, were determined to have significantly higher unmet needs than jurisdictions impacted by other eligible disasters last year. With these funds, HUD is also encouraging grantees to incorporate resilience measures into their local action plans to ensure communities are more prepared for the next storm. Since Hurricane Sandy, HUD has taken significant steps to encourage resiliency planning and disaster preparedness in communities nationwide, including the $1 billion National Disaster Resilience Competition.

HUD allocates CDBG-Disaster Recovery funds based on the best available data from the Federal Emergency Management Agency and the Small Business Administration disaster loan programs to identify the areas of greatest need in the impacted region. Following a Presidential disaster declaration, CDBG-DR funds may be made available to states, local governments and insular areas that have significant unmet recovery needs and the capacity to carry out a disaster recovery program.