Video: Louisville FEMA Funds

by Victoria Bailey

LOUISVILLE, Miss. (WCBI)—On April 28th in 2014 the City of Louisville, along with the surrounding area, suffered at the hands of a devastating F4 tornado with winds up to 185 mph. The storm left parts of the city in ruins.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency better known as FEMA provided residents impacted by the storm with assistance.

Today, the federal government says the City of Louisville should repay a $25.4 million grant awarded for recovery efforts from the 2014 tornado.

They cited that the city did not follow federal standards in awarding 12 contracts totaling $23.9 million.
Louisville Mayor Will Hill tells me it’s just a misunderstanding.

“What we are responding to is a little bit of old news to us. We have with full intent the city working with the state and the federal government doing everything we can to comply. We went through an audit of the O.I.G. many months ago. So finding were there to help us as preventative damage,”said Louisville Mayor Will Hill.

The magnitude of this storm and the amount of dollars set to come to Louisville raised question about where the money was going.

After receiving aid from FEMA the city immediatly put the money to good use.

” In looking at how the city of Louisville handled that money. So you have a conduit of federal dollars come through the state to be able to rebuild. What we’ve done here is … we’ve done exactly what we set out to do and that’s rebuild an industrial site and put people to work. Winston Plywood is a result of that. This Audit was done in mid-stream of this project. Many things were handled in a corrective measure it was based upon procurement. However, they both have been handled accordingly and FEMA does have the opportunity to allow based on a case by case basis,”said Hill.

Louisville Mayor Will Hill says they welcomed the audit and were able to correct any issues that were discovered.

“Audits are to be there to assist us and help us and we were delighted to have an audit early on to find that it was only three findings and our hope and anticipation that they be strictly administration findings because corrective measures were taken, although there was nothing that we the city, the state or i think the federal government. Because this is such a unique project. Building this plywood facility this industrial facility has been really the cattlist for our recovery… is instrumental in our recovery. So everything has been done accordingly but now to just pull little tidbits and say is this allowed, it’s subjective to saying the city is going to have to pay 23 or 24 million dollars whenever we have used the money to the best abilities to put people back to work and recover our community,”said Hill.

Mayor Hill says the city is not completely back to normal after the storm but the assistance from the federal government has created the fastest path to the way thing were.

The City completed it’s exit audit 2 months ago.
Mayor Hill says the city came up 12 million dollars under budget.

For a complete look at the audit and the FEMA response you can go to our ebsite at WCBI.com