Recovery meeting slated for this week
By Steve Herring
Published in News on March 27, 2017 9:57 AM
The second in a series of three public meetings on the Hurricane Matthew Resilient Redevelopment Planning program will be held from 7 to 9 p.m. Thursday, March 30, in room 101 of the Walnut Building on the Wayne Community College campus.
The meeting will focus on construction, review and feedback on the first drafts of resilient strategies.
The third, and yet-to-be schedule meeting, will focus on the refinement, feedback and finalization of the strategies.
The plan will be delivered to the General Assembly by May 1.
The first meeting held March 16 was to introduce the community to the program and to get residents' input on damages from the hurricane and what is necessary to rebuild.
More than 50 people attended that meeting co-hosted by Wayne County and N.C. Emergency Management held at Wayne Community College.
The meetings are being conducted by AECOM, a global infrastructure firm, the state contracted with to manage the process for N.C. Emergency Management.
The legislature authorized the Disaster Recovery Act of 2016 that include some funding to go into the 50 most-impacted counties, and to try to come up with resilient development plans.
AECOM has been assigned to the 25 most-impacted counties which include Wayne County.
"The real purpose of this activity is to take a look at all of the traditional funding sources we have with our FEMA partners, other state programs, other federal programs, and see which of our needs that we can cover with these programs, and then see what has fallen through the cracks," Chris Crew of N.C. Emergency Management said during the March 16 meeting.
"Once we have looked through all of these sources and tried to match up needs, we are fairly confident there are going to be some unmet needs. Our agency has been charged with going back to the legislature at the first of May and try to put a number on that unmet need so we can see if we need to design some new or different programs or provide additional funding to try and meet some of those needs."
The plan looks at four areas -- housing, economic development, infrastructure and environment.
For more information, contact Bel Marquez at 919-415-2729 or Maribel.Marquez@ncdps.gov.
Christine Graziano, who is the lead AECOM planner for the county, can be reached at 703-682-9133 or christine.graziano@aecom.com.