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Upper Pine River Fire Protection District has secured a federal grant to help Vallecito recover from catastrophic flooding that occurred in October.
The agreement was signed Dec. 22, according to a post on the department’s Facebook page. The fire district was awarded $5 million through the Natural Resources Conservation Service’s Emergency Watershed Protection Program, said Upper Pine president Paul Black.
“It’s roughly $5 million,” Black said. “They thought that would cover the engineering and the actual work to be done in the channel from the forest down to just above the Vallecito Reservoir.”
The funding is divvied into two sections: technical assistance and financial assistance. Under the technical assistance – which covers the initial engineering and surveying of the project – the NCRS will pay 100% of the cost. Under the financial assistance – which gets into remediating or making private property more resistant to future disasters – that is the 75%-25% split between the federal government and the community, Chief Bruce Evans said.
Evans said the NRCS will reimburse up to 75% of the project’s total cost, with the state of Colorado covering another 12.5% because the flooding received a state disaster declaration from the governor.
Evans said individual homeowners will pay 12.5% of whatever work is done on their property. For example, if crews working on someone’s property strengthened the bank, dredged water off the property and cut down trees, 87.5% of the total cost for that specific property would be covered by the state and federal governments, Evans said.
“So the homeowner, technically, would only be on the hook for 12.5% of the total cost of whatever the project is going to cost on their property,” Evans said
The NRCS will reimburse Upper Pine once the work is completed, Evans said.
“We’re doing the project management on it, which is what we’ve been contracted to do,” Evans said. “We still have to run the approvals through the NRCS and make sure that we’re getting the proper permits.”
Upper Pine must coordinate with engineers to approve the projects, then hire contractors to perform the remediation work. Upper Pine will then pass those bills on to the NRCS for reimbursement, and landowners who have remediation work done will pay 12.5% of whatever the cost of the work on their specific property is, Evans said.
Additionally, the decision to contract with Upper Pine is all voluntary, Evans said. Landowners can either choose to work with the department for the discounted rate, or pay the whole bill themselves without any reimbursement.
“We have to keep very meticulous documentation on this, and it’s all a reimbursement,” Evans said.
Additionally, Evans said, the department is enterprising the funding – meaning that the accounting for the Vallecito remediation is kept completely separate from the department’s personal financing. That way, the department remains accountable and only receives money for what it is billed by contractors and property owners in Vallecito.
“When we enterprise something, it means that this money does not get commingled with fire district money,” Evans said.
Evans said the agreement has a tight timeline – the engineering plan must be submitted to the NRCS within 30 days after Upper Pine signed the agreement, and the remediation work itself must be completed within 220 days. Even though they could ask for an extension, Evans said the department is going to work hard to ensure they don’t have to.
sedmondson@durangoherald.com
