SAN MARCOS, Texas (KXAN) — The city of San Marcos is trying to figure out how to use a big grant.
It received about $24 million dollars in federal funding last fall and needs to come up with a flood mitigation plan by March.
The public comment period is set to go live on Monday.
One San Marcos neighborhood is getting extra attention, where many people still get uneasy when severe weather looms.
“Once you get scared the first time, you’re going to get scared the second time,” says Erasmo DelBosque, who’s lived in Blanco Gardens since 1981.
The area was among the hardest hit by the 2015 floods.
“We lost everything,” DelBosque says. He and his family were out of a home for months.
“I had to go every day to New Braunfels, and bring them back to school and then take them back again. For seven months,” DelBosque says.
Now, the city has $24 million to figure out how to help prevent flood damage like that from happening again.
Previous federal funding was for flood relief recovery efforts.
Council members are considering more warning signs and barricades and $16 million toward drainage improvements in Blanco Gardens.
But council member Ed Mihalkanin wants a levee for the Blanco River.
“My memory is that the two floods in 2015 weren’t because of drainage. It was because of the river and so that to me is — that is a bigger priority than any other single thing in that neighborhood,” Mihalkanin said during a December 17th city council meeting.
DelBosque agrees.
“It’s not the rain, it’s the river; the water gets out,” he says.
As his family works to recover a $58,000 flood loss from five years ago, he wants city staff to contain on the river before it rises again.
“I wouldn’t like to see that happen, I would not like to see that happen because it’s terrible,” DelBosque says.
Total funding
The federal government awarded the City of San Marcos a total of $57.8 million through three separate grants to address damage from the floods of 2015.
The money comes from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development Community Development Block Grant Disaster Recovery (CDBG-DR) Program.
City spokesperson Kristy Stark says the majority of those funds were approved for infrastructure projects in areas prone to flooding.
Unlike previous funds for post-disaster relief, Stark says, the 2019 mitigation grant is specifically for actions taken to proactively prevent or reduce damages resulting from disasters.
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