CITY LISTING DISASTER FUND PRIORITIES

Cape Girardeau's Project Impact grant application will be submitted to the Federal Emergency Management Agency by the end of November.

But first the city must decide what projects should take priority in making the city disaster-resistant and how much those projects will cost.

The city could receive a federal grant of up to $500,000 -- including the city's 25 percent match -- for work to reduce the risk of loss of lives and property damage from natural disasters.

"Now you need to get consensus on what your community thinks are priorities for you to do," Jennifer East of FEMA said Wednesday.

The Project Impact steering committee met Wednesday at the Osage Community Centre with representatives from FEMA and the State Emergency Management Agency to talk about the Project Impact grant application.

Walter Denton, who is coordinating the city's Project Impact efforts, has drawn up a draft of possible projects for which the city may seek federal funding. Among the proposals:

-- A standby runway power generator for the Cape Girardeau Regional Airport at an estimated cost of $47,000.

-- Construction of a seismic demonstration home to include office space for SEMA and the Center for Earthquake Studies at Southeast Missouri State University at an estimated cost of $300,000.

-- Seismic retrofitting of emergency shelters and school structures;

-- Seismic protection for the city's water tanks with an estimated cost of $1.3 million.

-- An emergency standby power generator for the wastewater treatment plant.

-- Completion of the flood buyout to include commercial structures.

Several other items, including updating community land-use policies and flood-plain mapping, studying the city's stormwater drainage and detention and establishing an emergency water system connection between Jackson and Cape Girardeau, are also included in the draft.

None of those items has been set as a priority project, Denton said, adding the steering committee's subcommittees will need to review the proposals and decide what projects should be pursued or add other proposals to the list.

The committee members will also need to get cost estimates and look for funding sources for projects, he said.

"There are more projects on here than there is money to do them," Denton said.

City and FEMA staff are also working on setting up a signing ceremony for the memorandum of agreement on Project Impact participation with FEMA director James Lee Witt. The signing ceremony had been scheduled for November, but a new date has to be set because Witt will be visiting areas recently struck by hurricanes.

Denton said much of the city's disaster-preparedness work is going on behind the scenes.

"A lot of it's invisible," he said. "The CSO (combined sewer overflow) project is disaster planning. We're separating the storm sewers and the wastewater so the lines don't back up into people's basements. That's disaster planning. The whole flood-control project out along Cape La Croix Creek we have going on, that's all hazard mitigation. So we've been doing this all along."

Cape Girardeau was named Missouri's first Disaster-Resistant Community in April and received the Project Impact community designation from FEMA in June.