Lyon County was lucky when it came to the ice storms the week of Dec. 10 but because the county fared well, it won’t be making the cutoff of $102,000 in storm damages to be eligible for aid money.
Rick Frevert of Lyon County Emergency Management said Lyon County won’t even come close to the $102,000 cutoff.
“It does not look like we’re going to make it this time,” Frevert said. “It’s very minimal at this point compared to everything else out there.”
Chip Woods, Lyon County engineer, said the Lyon County Highway Department incurred about $28,000 in expenses due to the ice storm. Frevert said Emporia Public Works incurred about $4,000 and Lyon County Sheriff incurred less than $1,000.
“I did not hear from fire/EMS or city law,” Frevert said. “The only other major player would be the rural cooperatives. Westar money will not qualify.”
The city doesn’t yet have a firm estimate of the total cleanup cost following last week’s weather, director of administrative services Larry Bucklinger said Tuesday.
Bucklinger and other city staff discussed the cleanup at a meeting Tuesday morning.
“It’s probably going to be towards the end of the week before we have (a figure) that we’d really feel comfortable in passing out,” Bucklinger said.
He said payroll costs wouldn’t be known until today, “and there’s some other stuff besides personnel costs that we’re trying to get a handle on, and getting all the bills.”
City Manager Matt Zimmerman said the city would have to pay some overtime to extra crews called in last weekend to make sure William Lindsay White Auditorium was ready for Emporia State’s commencement.
“But ultimately, of course, we didn’t really need them, so that helped reduce our costs a little bit,” he said. “But you still have all your callout costs that were here that did some additional work, just not nearly as long as we thought that it was going to (be).
“But other than that, we pretty much handled everything as we always do, so I don’t anticipate there’s going to be a lot of extra expenses.”
Even without the final city figures, Frevert said the approximate cost of the storm to the community will be about $67,000 — $37,000 short of the cutoff.
“They are telling us it will be after Christmas before the damage reports are in enough to see if the state will qualify for federal assistance should a Federal Presidential Declaration be signed.” Frevert said. “The state threshold is just over $3 million.”