BOULDER COUNTY — Next year’s flood recovery expenses are expected to have a major effect on Boulder County government’s annual budget.
Ongoing or in-the-pipeline projects could cost as much as $76.8 million in 2016.
Most of these projects are aimed at repairing the 2013 floods’ damages to county roads, bridges, parks, open space areas — as well as services and programs to assist Boulder County residents and property owners still recovering from the floods.
That estimate, from a recent county staff report to the Board of Commissioners, would be on top of more than two years of flood recovery spending that’s expected to have totaled nearly $97.9 million by the end of this year.
And 2016 won’t be the final year that county officials expect to devote a major portion of their spending on flood recovery.
The county staff is sticking by its late 2013 estimates that flood recovery projects and services will have a total cost of more than $217 million by the time they are completed, so an additional $43.2 million might be needed beyond 2016.
When it comes to the flood’s share of the county’s overall annual spending, “we’re not doing all flood all of the time, but we’re doing a lot of flood a lot of the time,” Commissioner Elise Jones said during a Thursday budget work session.
Jones and Commissioners Deb Gardner and Cindy Domenico tentatively approved including almost $28.3 million in the 2016 budget toward helping cover next year’s projected flood-related expenses, including the ongoing expense of continuing to fill temporary specialized staff positions to plan, oversee, administer and monitor the disaster recovery.
County officials have said some of those staffers were put in place to make sure the county complies with federal and state rules, regulations and requirements about disaster-recovery projects to qualify for and get the hundreds of millions county officials said are needed for recovery costs.
