FEMA funding has helped rebuild city
CITY HALL —Taxpayers are still feeling the pain of the Northridge Earthquake even a decade after the natural disaster wreaked havoc on the city.
While the estimated damage to the city was $250 million, hundreds of millions more have been spent rebuilding. The city of Santa Monica has received about $100 million in public assistance and nearly $78 million of that has gone to ongoing sewer repair work. The rest has gone to repairing and replacing city-owned buildings, including eight downtown parking garages, the municipal swimming pool, the historic Miles Playhouse and the recently opened Public Safety Facility.
At Santa Monica College, about $45 million was given in FEMA funds to replace buildings — $20 million for the science building, $3 million for a new parking structure, $2.8 million for the library and $3 million for the liberal arts building.
Tens of millions dollars in FEMA funds also went to the hospitals, which are still rebuilding their facilities and expect to be finished by 2008, when they are required to have their facilities meet seismic standards. Combined, Santa Monica-UCLA Medical Center and Saint John’s Health Care Center will spend nearly $600 million in new facilities.
But the money from the federal government has trickled in slowly — something Santa Monica officials anticipated just days after the quake.
“The city really took the initiative to assist in the recovery process and not wait for FEMA,” said Paul Weinberg, emergency management coordinator for the city. “The importance of getting recovery up and running was recognized by the City Council right away.
“It was a unique disaster and a unique response,” he added.
The Santa Monica City Council almost immediately created funding for a “Redevelopment Agency,” which assesses properties to pay for public infrastructure in what is called the “Earthquake Recovery Redevelopment Project Area.” The area includes most of the city, and the tax partially funds city-owned buildings and the liberal arts building at SMC.
“It took several years to get it into the positive,” said Jeff Mathieu, director of resource management for the city. The agency was created in 1994 and by 1996, several million dollars had been generated through a portion of local taxes. And although 20 percent must be dedicated to repairing or rebuilding residential complexes, 47 percent has been used toward that end, Mathieu said.
“In Santa Monica, there is always a higher quality of public service,” he said.
Although it’s unknown how much money the agency has collected, last year $6.5 million was generated for housing and $20 million was taken in to retrofit the downtown parking structures and help rebuild SMC’s $19 million liberal arts building, said Tina Rodriguez, the Redevelopment Agency’s administrator. The year prior, $5.1 million was set aside for housing and $15.5 million was put toward community projects, Rodriguez said.
Officials expect to collect hundreds of millions more because the tax increases as assessment valuations go up. The tax is set to expire in 2039.
The city also applied for and received $33 million in a federal block grant — $25 million devoted to community development and $8 million to what’s called a “home presidential supplemental program,” Mathieu said.
Another source of funding, the “Disaster Recovery Center” also directly helped residents through 15 state and federal agencies by helping homeowners and renters acquire low-cost loans, interest rates and grants to repair and rebuild their properties, Mathieu said.
At SMC, FEMA funding wasn’t nearly enough to pay for the damage. The college has relied on the city through the Redevelopment Agency, which helped fund the swimming pool, the new parking garage and now the liberal arts building. SMC also has used funds generated through its own revenue sources like Proposition T, which was a bond measure passed in 1992 dedicated to school facilities, as well as Measure U, passed in 2002. SMC even received private donations — $250,000 was given by the John Paul Getty Foundation to replace books and supplies for the art department, said SMC spokesman Bruce Smith.
Although most agree that the quake was a devastating experience for the entire city, it did pump millions into aging buildings that would have been replaced eventually.
“FEMA has really helped SMC get new facilities; the face of the college has changed,” Smith said. “But we are still working to get more because we feel we deserve more.”
Science building: Completed in 1999. Cost: $30 million. FEMA funding: $20 million.
Parking garage: Completed in 2002. Cost: $5.2 million. FEMA funding: $3 million.
Library: Completed in 2003. Cost: $23.6 million. FEMAfunding: $2.8 million.
Liberal arts building: Construction to begin in spring of 2004. Cost: $19 million. FEMA: $3 million.
Originally published in the Santa Monica Daily Press print edition on January 17, 2004. Read the original PDF.