Thanks for tuning in today where I'm going to have the pleasure of speaking with two women who are part of the city team managing the recovery of housing and business development in the city of St. Petersburg. I'm Karen Carmichael. Joining me today are Jess Riedel, senior Operations Analyst with the Housing and Neighborhood Services Administration, and Dr.

Avery Sker. The Director of Housing and Community Development for the City of St. Pete. We will be speaking about how the city will be dispersing funds from the We are St. Pete Fund, which is managed by the Pinellas Community Foundation. We'll delve into the opportunities for recovery. Their department is announcing soon to address housing challenges and business challenges created by the two unprecedented back-to-back storms that impacted the area.

We'll discuss the grants and loans the city will be managing, and ways residents and business owners can apply for these supports. Thank you Jess Avery for joining me today. We're excited to hear about the opportunities offered through the We Are St. Pete Fund and your insight into what continues to be an area of concern for our community.

So Jess let's dive right in. What's the backstory of the We are St. Pete Fund.

So in the immediate aftermath of Hurricane Helene back in September, we saw right away that the impacts in our city were devastating.

People needed help, but people also wanted to help and wanted to donate. And so the We are St. Pete Fund was born from there, and partnership with Pinellas Community Foundation to raise funds for disaster relief for St. Pete residents. Small business owners and city employees impacted by the storms. Those were our three kind of buckets that we put out there from the beginning as who the intended recipients of the fund would be.

So Hurricane Helene made landfall on September 26th. As we know, the fund launched on October 2nd, and then Hurricane Milton made landfall on October 9th. So a lot happened in that two week period. You know, facing recovery from two major hurricanes within two weeks. The need for help and also the need, , to want to support.

Residents who were impacted grew even further, , with the two storms back to back. Uh, so we're extremely grateful to pins, community Foundation for stepping up. When we asked them, we turned this around extremely quickly and they did not hesitate to say yes when, when we asked. So thank you to PCF for that partnership.

I. We've raised about a million dollars so far, about 1.03 million, , which is incredible. And so big thank you to everyone who has donated, , to the fund and , is helping our residents who need help still to this day after months of trying to recover and trying to piece that together. Has any of the money been dispersed to date?

So, so far, , back in December we launched, , we set aside a hundred thousand dollars for rapid resolution needs. And so we had street outreach teams going door to door after the storms, who were able to identify needs in real time. You know, oh, you needed a moving truck , to move to a new place where you could stay, but you just couldn't afford the truck.

You needed, security deposit,

toilets, application fee, , money, maybe groceries?

Yes. Air mattresses. Mm-hmm. So you could sleep at your grandmother's house comfortably? Mm-hmm. Because you were packing multiple households into one home

ice. Yep. Some people still were without electric in some things, or they were missing their appliances, so they just needed ice.

Keep their medicines Yes. Safe to use. So , we had some rapid resolution funds able to be dispersed right then, , to kind of immediately. Prevent homelessness or, or

any kind of stress that goes along with losing your home. Exactly right.

So that was like a stop gap in the middle. , but best practices of disaster philanthropy dictate that, , these kinds of funds be at the end of the funnel, right?

Like you, you apply to your insurance, you apply to fema, you apply to other resources that come down, and then whatever gaps are left after that at this point, right? We're months out from the storms. How do we fill those gaps now with , the kind of smaller local level dollars that we have? So we launched the Housing Disaster Assistance Program last

Monday.

Last Monday. Last

Monday we went live,

so that one's out there on the street now, and then the small business program launches on April 2nd. So we have different phases of these dollars that have gone out.

, Avery, you wanna speak to the Housing Disaster Assistance Program? Well,

it's live. The application is open and we will keep it open until the funds run out.

Really, that's how we're gonna structure the program. So it aims to help those that are low to moderate income households with storm damage, repairs, insurance, deductibles, rent, or utility. That's in heirs, and this assistance is. Available to households. That could be a grant or it could be a loan. It just depends on what the assistance is that they need.

So our eligible activities are that we have storm damage repairs, and this comes in tree removal. It is home structure repairs or interim repairs, and those are going to be the loans and they're at a $30,000 limit. They are zero interest loans and the payback for those loans. It depends upon how much you need.

If it's 5,000 or less, they're forgiven in five years. A hundred percent just forgiven in five years. If it is $5,001 up to the 30,010 years forgiven loan, all forgiven.

So explain that a little bit more.

That means there's no paying the loan back

ever.

There are some. Instances where loans do have to be paid back, but that is when we would negotiate it, and that's when you would be selling the home.

If we've gone in and done a repair and now you're looking to sell the home, we would need to sit down and negotiate that loan and see is it still able to be forgiven?

I see. Yes. Okay, so what, so how does insurance impact this?

The insurance is for the insurance deductibles, and it's a $5,000 limit. Now, what's interesting with the insurance deductibles is that this is gonna go to the contractor.

This is gonna pay for those repairs that you just couldn't get done because you couldn't afford that deductible. So we are applying $5,000 towards that deductible. So the work has to be undone or your contractor was okay waiting on that insurance deductible. And really what we cannot do is we cannot reimburse for full work that's just done.

Mm-hmm. We can't. So this has to be work that you have not done yet, and we will pay that contractor that 5,000 to help you out with that deductible.

, we have currently 305 pending applications in the system. Oh, wow.

And this just opened up.

Last Monday.

Last Monday. Holy cow.

Yes. So,

so if someone is, uh, in arrears with their rent or their utilities, what, how can they take advantage?

This is gonna be a limit of three months payments, or $10,000, whichever is gonna be less, and it has to be for rent. That was after the September 26th date. , these are grants also.

Okay. And if somebody wants to apply, , what are the requirements that they have?

Really, it's the, it is the income,

that we're looking at. A majority of our funds are for that 80% area, medium income or below. What we're looking for is. Those that income eligibility. Now, if it is for the insurance deductibles or the rent and the utility heirs, we have what's called a self certified process. So it is part of the application that they're gonna go through and fill out a lot of little questions about their income.

For those that are applying for the loans, what we would need is we need two concurrent pay stubs. The most recent or, and one. Most recent banking statement, banking and checking statement, and that's all we need for backup right now.

Mm-hmm.

That's it.

Yeah. Well, thank goodness, because a lot of people don't have any, any backup.

They lost everything. Right? Exactly. Yeah,

exactly. And if they have lost it, we just need to talk about that. Mm-hmm. How can we get that? What can we get? Mm-hmm. To show that? Because we can do some self certification for these loans. Mm-hmm. But we would need to reach out to the employer, maybe get a letter from them.

If it's social security mm-hmm. We can call Social Security on their behalf and try to get a letter for them.

Mm-hmm. Okay. So

there's different things that we'll work with. Now, the other additional thing that's really important here is that the purchase price of the home, the purchase price of the home cannot be over $510,939.

That is a state limit that we have to work within.

And that's a current appraisal value.

That is, that is a current, and we look that up.

Mm-hmm.

You're homeowner, you don't need to know that.

Sure.

That's something that we can go and we can do the lookup for that. Okay. And we can get that information.

So, Jess, what about the small businesses?

You know, we've, we have. We won't try to shop local and support our small businesses here in St. Pete. So what's going on for them?

Yeah, so the Small Business Disaster Systems program is designed to provide critical support to eligible spawn businesses in St. Pete who have been impacted by the storms. And this application's not open yet, but it does open at 10:00 AM on April 2nd.

So eligible businesses will be businesses, of course, based in St. Pete. , it could be a nonprofit, a brick and mortar, a home-based business or businesses operating at a shared , commercial spaces. They must be independently owned and operated with no more than 50 full-time or part-time employees.

So really trying to get at that small local business, , population. They have to be an operation since September 15th, 2024 or longer. So in operation, prior to the storm hitting right. Uh, provide proof of eligible losses from those hurricanes and expect it to reopen or resume full operation. And what we mean there is that, you know, we know that businesses tried to open as quickly as possible, cobbled together what they could, and maybe they were operating.

You know, at 50%, but they need a little bit more inventory or equipment or repair to get back up to full operations. , and there are four different funding categories under the Small Business Disaster Assistance program. And something to note is that these are all grants. None of these are loans. So that's a little bit different from the housing program.

So the first tier is equipment and inventory damage for those shared commercial space or home-based businesses. , so that's $2,500 limit on that tier. Then we have equipment and inventory damage for brick and mortar businesses. That's $5,000. We have structural damage, tier for brick and mortar businesses, which is a $10,000 limit.

And then kind of the last tier is a combination for brick and mortar businesses. So if you're brick and mortar, you had equipment, inventory, and structural damage losses from the storms, and that's a $15,000, , cap on that tier. So more details in the link to apply can be found at st pete.org/recovery fund for both the housing program and small business program.

, and again, the small business program opens on April 2nd, and the housing program is open now.

So is there anything else that we've missed?

I think one thing that's unique about the housing program, especially for the repairs, is that if you have been working with a contractor, as long as your contractor is insured and registered with the state, you can use your own contractor.

And that's different from any of our other rehabilitation programs. So that's very important for people to know that if they've been working with somebody, they really like that person, it's okay. You can still maintain that relationship.

And I did wanna note too, that the Housing Disaster Assistance program is funded by a variety of funding sources so that we are St.

Pete funds contributing to that pot, but it's also has state and federal uh, dollars in that pot too. So we're always trying to leverage and combine dollars where we can for maximum impact for residents. So we're not just launching a bunch of different programs with smaller amounts, like how can we combine and.

You know, serve as many residents as possible under the same program.

And I think that that speaks to that income eligibility piece so much because lots of people say, why? Why is that part of that? And that is the restriction of the funding that we're we're put under. So that's that 80% area meeting and income that we have to meet.

Are those state and federal regulations that are on us.

And then for the loans, we were able to go up to one 40% a MI, and that's using the, we are St. Pete fund dollars. So all of that is backend processing by the housing team. No one needs to worry about that when you're applying. You do not. But we're trying to be as flexible as possible given , the restrictions from the funding sources.

, and that's a plus of pooling together too, is we can be a little bit more flexible using some versus others. So,

so is some of that also related to FEMA funding that you're. Doing or, or are we done with FEMA at this point?

No. No. No. Right now housing, what we work with with FEMA is that we work with the homeowner in regards to that because we do need to have proof that you did apply to fema.

Okay. Or that you, and that you applied to your insurance company. Mm-hmm. Now, those are two requirements that we do need, especially for those repairs. Mm-hmm. You can have a denial letter, you can be pending, and that's okay. Mm-hmm. We just need to see that you did the application for that and those that are struggling maybe with fema.

Okay. They haven't heard. They're on a wait list. They don't know where they're at. It's okay. Go ahead and apply and let us know those things because we will try and help you through that if we can.

Okay. Any estimate on how many small businesses were affected?

Again. Gosh. Yeah.

A lot.

A lot. And I mean, you know, something that has come up is that people, you know, they've, they've just cobbled together how to reopen, right?

Right. Mm-hmm. And so that speaks to the resilience of our community. Mm-hmm. But there's definitely still a lot of need out there in the small business community, and we wanna support that as best as we can, you know, using the, the limited dollars that we do have. Sure. Exactly.

Sure. All right. , I think we've hit on all the topics for relief from the.

Hurricanes , that the city is providing. And, , we appreciate you joining us today. , so thanks, , to Jess Rydel and Avery slicker from the city of St. Petersburg, who joined me today to talk about the we are St. Pete Fund and some other funding sources that are available for, housing disaster assistance and small business disaster assistance.

I'm Karen Carmichael.