A Message from Supervisor Neuzil:

 

Like many of the areas throughout our state that have been affected by the natural disasters of the past few months, we saw the worst flooding in Johnson County history.

 

By hitting our community, a disaster of this magnitude has forced us to learn the complexities of County Government quickly. Citizens are looking to us for leadership and confidence in trying to restore some sense of stability. Our first objective was to immediately enact our emergency operations center. From there, we had a plan in place to meet our objectives; first and foremost was saving lives and communicating with all emergency response entities to make sure that our citizens were out of harms way. I am so proud to say: No lives were lost. Throughout the ordeal, I was on call 24-7, attending numerous meetings in the Emergency Operations Center and met directly with Governor Culver, Senators Harkin and Grassley, Congressman Loebsack, representatives from FEMA and most importantly hundreds of residents to learn first hand how your County government could help. I joined my fellow Supervisors in authorizing immediate protection of residents and property by imposing a county curfew. We also had to learn quickly how to shutdown non-essential county government services as we had to close the County Administration Building for more than a week due to the flooding. Our efforts to sandbag the area was wise; we had water in the parking lot up to those bags and carp swimming there as well. Your Board of Supervisors held emergency meetings, one of those was in the lobby at the County Jail. We also authorized hundreds of thousands of dollars to be spent by County staff to assist in flood relief efforts, $75,000 in immediate aid to help those with human service needs, dumpsters for rural residents and we have waived all permit and building fees for those affected. I am proud of the efforts your County government staff dedicated during this dire time in our County's history.

 

With damage this bad, we know that the clean up cannot happen over night. I think for our community, we're looking at two to three years to try to get back to what things were like before the flood; that's a hard thing to try to explain to people. Many people who were affected by this flood back on June 5th are only now getting in their homes to even assess the damages.

 

It's time for us to look forward and learn from this disaster. Hopefully this will remind us of the powers of Mother Nature. I think our county is going to have to consider helping in efforts to buy out some of these homes and businesses affected by this disaster. We need to do a better job of identifying major flood-related risk areas as well and we need to also look closer at existing properties within identified flood plains and find ways to reduce or eliminate future development in those areas. I'm hopeful that we immediately start designing better development standards of restricting building in the flood plain.

 

I would like to thank all the residents of our county for their efforts to help people in need throughout this historic ordeal. I hope you will continue to join me in doing what you can to make our community even stronger.