LYONS — Marilyn Sims knows when she’d like to see the private bridge necessary to reach her home outside Lyons replaced.
“Yesterday,” she said.
It wasn’t, and the chances of it happening soon are slim.
And Sims, 82, is just one of almost two dozen Boulder County homeowners with pending applications for flood-relief funds to pay for new private bridges or culverts that the county is working to process.
The rules for accessing that money — Community Development Block Grant-Disaster Recovery funds coming from the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development, by way of the state Department of Local Affairs — are not simple. Nor are they always understandable.
“I would love to see some more flexibility from DOLA and HUD, because right now we have a lot of displaced and vulnerable residents that we would love to be able to help. And our hands are tied, effectively,” said Kate Williams, flood-recovery planner with Boulder County’s Department of Transportation.
Williams is the home-access coordinator for the county’s disaster-relief program, working with families displaced by the September 2013 floods.
“To overcome these barriers, we are advocating directly to DOLA and others at the state,” she said, “and we are making whatever program changes we have available to us here at the county to help residents get the assistance they need.”
The are 22 applications before the county for the CDBG-DR funds toward bridge or culvert repair. None has been approved.
In fact, it appears that 17 of them are ineligible, under HUD rules, or “on hold, until we receive some way to become more flexible” from state or federal authorities, Williams said.
Williams said those applications come from property owners on the North St. Vrain and South St. Vrain rivers, James Canyon North, Riverside Drive, Longmont Dam Road and Fourmile Canyon, and in Jamestown.
The situation in which Sims finds herself is emblematic of the complexities faced by some people who lost their private-access bridges. The home in which she and her husband, Alan, lived — he passed away in 2005 — is one of four parcels on her property in the 16400 block of N. St. Vrain Drive.
Of the remaining three parcels, one is a vacant lot adjacent to Sims’ home, and the other two feature residences used by her two sons’ families. One son owns his home outright, but the other son’s family is under what the county terms a rent-to-own agreement.
Rules for the federal dollars for private bridge replacement count each property served by that bridge, then divide the bridge’s cost by the parcels, but will only fund the properties that were owner-occupied — in Sims’ case, just two of the four.
Therefore, although the estimates to replace Sims’ bridge range from $120,000 to $160,000, the HUD dollars will pay for only half the cost. Sims, who lives on a fixed income, would have to find the sizable balance elsewhere.
