State disaster assistance will help rebuild public infrastructure damaged in wildfires that burned in St. Louis County in May.
In a news release Tuesday, Gov. Tim Walz said he authorized the emergency assistance and that the total amount of funding will be determined when damage assessments are complete.
“The fires that spread across Northern Minnesota earlier this year caused severe damage and major loss,” Walz said in the news release. “I’m grateful for Minnesota’s emergency management team as they work closely with St. Louis County to assess the damage and help communities recover.”
Josh Brinkman, emergency management coordinator for the St. Louis County Sheriff’s Office, explained that the state offers a 75% reimbursement for public safety costs and to rebuild roadways, bridges and power cooperative infrastructure.
But it doesn’t offer much help to the owners of more than 140 structures and over 30 year-round homes that burned in the Camp House and Jenkins Creek fires.
“At a state-declared disaster, what we really don’t get a whole lot of is what we would term ‘individual assistance,’ and that would be individual assistance direct to the homeowner,” Brinkman said.
Federal assistance would offer that; however, both the county and state need to reach certain monetary thresholds to unlock federal funds, and those were not met, Brinkman said. That’s because so many of the fires burned on federal land, and federal incident management teams were brought in to lead the response. Federal funds spent on the ground to battle the blaze can’t be put toward that threshold.
“We can’t match the federal dollars with federal dollars … Because so many federal dollars were spent on the response side, it kind of hurt us a little bit, or hampers the ability to get federal dollars for the recovery side,” Brinkman said.
The Trump administration has said it wants to eliminate the Federal Emergency Management Agency, and FEMA has canceled some grants and delayed opening grant applications for others.
But Brinkman said none of that came into play since the damage threshold had not been met.
“None of the changes at the federal level impacted whether or not we would get that assistance,” Brinkman said.
The St. Louis County Assessor’s Department has started visiting properties damaged by the Camp House and Jenkins Creek wildfires.
Property owners may be eligible for property tax relief if their property sustained damage that resulted in a value loss of 50% or more. Owners of homesteaded residences potentially also could qualify for relief with even less-substantial losses. That relief may include property tax abatements in the year of the disaster, and property tax credits for taxes payable in the following year.
The Camp House and Jenkins Creek fires burned across more than 12,000 and 16,000 acres, respectively. At the same time, the Munger Shaw fire burned more than 1,200 acres.
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