Shelter in Place?

During last week's meeting of the Board of County Commissioners, chairman Billy Traylor took issue with an e-mail that had publicly circulated sufficiently to come to commissioners' attention.

Traylor labeled the e-mail "just about criminal in my mind," as it stated essentially that the Honeyville Storm Shelter was not FEMA approved and worthless to the county.

The worthless language might have gone overboard a bit.

After all, in a county in which there is roughly one park for every 526 residents, any addition in the form of a community center is akin to adding a salad fork to the dinner table.

Aesthetically nice; leave the necessity discussion for others.

But a bit of history helps shed some light on this project and what it will mean when any kind of major storm is looming in the Gulf of Mexico.

It is important to distinguish between funding and approval or certification.

The Honeyville Storm Shelter was in large measure a product of the Development of Regional Impact (DRI) process that The St. Joe Company was forced to undertake to construct WindMark Beach Phase II.

As part of its agreement with the county, St. Joe agreed to pony up $250,000 for the shelter and if gauged by discussions at the time, the shelter was to be the county's first certified hurricane shelter.

At a later point, the City of Port St. Joe chipped in with another $200,000 or so as part of the agreement in which the county allowed the city to annex the WindMark development.

The county was going to marry those funds with those from the county, ostensibly from grants.

However, more than two hurricane seasons went by between the DRI discussions and the beginning of construction on the shelter, which came after still another park was constructed between Hwy. 71 and the site of the shelter in Honeyville.

As proposed by Commissioner Carmen McLemore, inmate labor was originally to construct the shelter but discussions during county meetings swayed Mr. McLemore that maybe that wasn't exactly the proper route for building a genuine storm shelter.

Architect drawings were completed and the contract let, but as any resident who cares to peruse the board agenda packet each meeting would discover there were slip-ups along the way.

First, the grants, particularly from FEMA.

The unfortunate part of that was that with building already underway prior to any kind of FEMA review or okay of an application - which reached the agency incomplete for starters - for grant funds, FEMA declined to fund the project.

The agency would not even consider funding to retrofit the building to meet FEMA specifications - re: someone was asking for a mulligan on the construction, questioning whether it was a true storm shelter - since it does not approve or fund shelters already under construction.

So, the federal grant funding, totaling $337,000 and change, was lost and placed squarely on the shoulders of county taxpayers because commissioners decided that if the grant money was not forthcoming, they would seek a loan to make up those funds.

And the grant funds were not forthcoming because the Board of County Commissioners essentially ignored state and federal dictates in place since at least 2001.

As was rightly pointed out last week, the American Red Cross is the agency charged with approving storm shelters in Florida, the only hiccup in this case being, again found in the board packet, that the Red Cross's requirements and FEMA's were in conflict.

Meanwhile, with construction already underway, both the county building department and emergency management became involved, noting deficiencies in what was on paper and forcing the contractor to redo some work as well as alter the scope of the job on the fly.

This while said contractor was being publicly hammered during Commission meetings.

While indeed the shelter ended up being built to the more up-to-date Red Cross standards, now close, but not entirely up to the same level as FEMA requirements, the fact is it was built to stand wind loads no higher than those experienced at the upper end of a Category 3 storm.

Therefore, should a major hurricane, a storm above Category 2, say an Ivan or an Opal, bear down on Gulf County, protection in the Honeyville Storm Shelter would be roughly that found in many recently-built homes in the area.

Actually, some of those more recently-constructed homes might have been built to higher standards.

In sum, county taxpayers are on the hook for at least $337,000 - the figure, when everything is totaled, is likely to be higher - for what amounts to be a community center.

Some may want to call it a storm shelter, but is not even close to the shelter envisioned and discussed during the DRI process of two-plus years ago.

There is some agreement here with Mr. Traylor's comment about the e-mail.

This is why this page has long urged State Attorney Steve Meadows to follow up on his campaign promise of four years ago to convene a grand jury in every county in the circuit.

It is way past time for such a panel to closely examine, independently and without intimidation, the operations of the county.

A tale of a storm shelter that really isn't seems a fine place to start.