Wilmington City Council members approved $9 million to fund Hurricane Florence recovery and clean-up. But officials say they’ll need more – possibly $11 million.
At Tuesday’s meeting, council members lavished praise on the community and City employees who worked through the storm.
Tony Caudle is Deputy City Manager.
“These folks have done things for you and done things for the community that you should never expect of folks like this. As best I can tell somewhere between 600 and 700 of your employees responded during the storm. We started some 2 days, 3 days ahead of the storm with our operation and we went a full week afterwards.”
Caudle says when the Emergency Operations Center or EOC and 911 systems went down, tensions were high, but the staff pushed through to provide essential services.
Though the City will pull the $9 million from the unassigned fund balance, staff say they expect FEMA to reimburse 75% of overall damage costs, and the other 25% will come from the state. This process could take 2-3 years to complete.