BRADENTON BEACH – Police Chief and Public Works Director John Cosby outlined the challenges the city faces with the anticipated receipt of approximately $500,000 in hurricane-related FEMA reimbursements.
“FEMA (Federal Emergency Management Agency) is giving us pushback on six things they’ve just flatly denied, so we’re in the process of filing an appeal,” Cosby said during the Jan. 15 city commission meeting. “The appeal letters have already been sent.”
Cosby said eight additional claims are going back to FEMA for errors and omissions review.
“We didn’t agree on the language and some of the scope of work that was done,” he said.
He said he was unsure how long the appeals process could take.
“They’re backed up and everybody is having issues, so there’s been a lot of appeals filed,” Cosby said. “It generally takes about 18-24 months and we’ve got $500,000 on the line. We utilized 70% of our reserves in order to recover (from the 2024 hurricanes).”
Cosby stressed that when the next budget is determined, the city has to be cognizant of putting more money into the reserve fund to prepare for storm events.
“We know at $2.3 million we were able to handle back-to-back hurricanes without borrowing,” he said. “Shayne (City Treasurer Shayne Thompson) did secure a $5 million line of credit and we’re going to renew that in April.”
Cosby said the city was fortunate because some of the contractors generously waited for payment, without charging a late fee, until ad valorem property tax revenues came to the city at the beginning of the year.
“That helped us not to have to borrow money, so we’re grateful for that. Again, we did very well financially with the money we had to still shell out, but we’ve got to get that back,” he said.
“The reason this happened was we thought that it would happen a little quicker,” Cosby said. “We do know that a lot of people are still fighting their insurance company for payments and it’s hard to get contractors, but there are a number of permits that have come in. I believe there’s 10 major developments in process. So, not this next budget year, but the budget year after, when the tax money starts coming in 2027, we should be good again.”
After the meeting, Thompson said there is some disparity between the city and FEMA for the cost of some repairs.
“If we say a road took $100,000 to fix, FEMA might be saying $13,000,” Thompson said.
He said a “healthy dent” has been made in the city’s reserve fund, but the city was fortunate to have the funds in reserve.
“The million (dollars) is the big bucket. The $500,000 has been obligated; they’ve agreed to it,” Thompson said. “The state has looked at it, now it’s in financial services for the state to issue the check. There’s $500,000 now that’s being disputed.”
