Studer Community Institute

How we rebuilt Northwest Florida

January 16, 2014
/ Shannon Nickinson
/ community-dashboard

Garrett Walton is the executive director of Rebuild Northwest Florida. He was one of a core group of community volunteers who after Hurricane Ivan roared ashore in September of 2004, founded Rebuild, first to help those who couldn’t afford storm repairs to their homes make them. The members of the original board of directors were Walton, Richard L. Appleyard, Walter J. Ritchie, Jr., Thomas D. Tait, Carolyn P. Appleyard, Jackie B. Bell, Pete Gandy, Edward Gray, Denise H. Ivey, Sharon Kerrigan, Martin H. Levin, Eric J. Nickelsen, Deborah J. Ritchie and Harriet Riley. Rebuild morphed its mission into mitigation, using federal money that comes available in the wake of disaster declarations for projects and programs that will mitigate the damage of future disasters. To date, Rebuild has made improvements to more than 9,000 homes in the Escambia and Santa Rosa areas that should make them better able to withstand the damage that hurricane-force winds can inflict on a home. Rebuild is without question one of this community’s greatest success stories. Walton spoke with Progress+Promise Editor Shannon Nickinson recently about the history of Rebuild and the secrets of its success. QUESTION: How did Rebuild Northwest Florida begin? ANSWER: (It) was formed by businesspeople. Hurricane Ivan was far worse than anything we had had happened before. The original mission was to make storm-related repairs to homes whose owners couldn’t afford to do it. Over the next couple years we repaired 2,000 homes, solely need-based. After we got into that, it dawned on us, “How do we keep from having to go through this again?” Q: What did you come up with? A: What we did find was that there is a good body of science out there about techniques that will better prepare a structure to prevent wind damage. So we got the state and FEMA involved in discussions about what can we do to homes so that the next time we have a storm, the damage won’t be so severe. During this time, my daughter was living in Miami, I went with her house hunting, and I was impressed with the number of houses that had shutters. Shutters wasn’t even in our vocabulary then. Q: Did state officials have suggestions? A: (The Florida building code was revamped in 2002 in part due to the lessons learned from Hurricane Andrew) So when Rebuild got into asking how to keep it from happening again, the state said let’s look at your building code. (That covers new construction, but what if you have a lot of homes) built before 2002 code. The state said, we have money for that. It’s called federal mitigation money. Q: How does that work? A: One of the things FEMA does after a disaster is declared is that they set aside some money for damaged communities for different kinds of mitigation projects and that can be a fairly significant amount of money. If you haven’t had a disaster declaration, you won’t get that money. (After the 2004-2005 hurricane seasons) there was a lot of that money headed toward Florida and floating around. That money is difficult to deal with, and nobody had ever used that money for anything like this before. Because that money is so difficult to use, even local governments weren’t eager to apply for it. The first time, we applied for $10 million, but there was more money that hadn’t been applied for, so we applied for the rest of it. Next thing we know we’re at $80 million to $90 million. Traditionally the biggest use of that money is drainage projects. Santa Rosa took a lot of that mitigation money and used it for drainage projects in Gulf Breeze and Midway and Milton. Escambia County did a few. Only not-for-profits and govts can use it. Q: Did FEMA set ground rules for the program? A: FEMA says two basic things: We want to harden the entire envelope of the house (all the openings, doors, windows, etc.). You can’t just do shutters, you’ve got to do the entire thing. Second thing is, what standard do you set for the work. The minimum standard is to withstand 130 mph, to increase to 160 mph it starts to get expensive. We started in 2008, it was probably pretty ugly at first. We recently passed 9,000 houses. We have enough money left to do 11,000 homes. Then we’ll be out of money. Q: How much does the average Rebuild project cost? A: The average is $10,000-$12,000, (the homeowner must pay 25 percent of the cost; Rebuild pays the other 75 percent.) There is no income guideline or size limit on the house. There is a cap of $15,000 on the federal share of what we will spend on the house. If it would cost more than $15,000, the homeowner would have to come up with the rest. Q: We’re coming up on the 10th anniversary of Ivan. How have you kept the hardening program on people’s radar? A: Now it’s out of sight, out of mind. Originally what motivated people was the freshness of the memory (of Ivan). Today what motivates people to do it is the economics, the insurance savings. Last year we started some outreach to get the word out to people that we still have money to do the work in Escambia County. Q: FEMA has done videos about Rebuild, other states and communities have looked at it to try to emulate it, but no one ever really has been able to do it as successfully as we did. Why? A: One was our determination. We have some people who are hard-headed, and there was some good leadership in Tallahassee at the time that shared our vision and they were good, creative people and early FEMA contacts were open minded enough to see the benefit of something like this. I’ve lived here since the mid-70s. After Ivan, everybody wanted to do something. All people asked was how can we help. The people in West Florida are self-reliant people. They are people of goodwill, determination and self-reliance. They shone brightly in those days. By February of 2005, we had completed a few houses, we were feeling happy about it and the next thing we knew here comes a call from Gov. Jeb Bush’s office and someone says, “The governor wants to see you.” He came over and asked, “How come you haven’t been to us to ask for help. Don’t you need money?” He was very impressed that we had taken the initiative and we had not gone to Tallahassee and asked anybody for help.

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