Starke County Highway Superintendent Rik Ritzler told the county commissioners last week that he’s planning to ask the county council members next week to approve some additional appropriations.
“Over 2018 we spent a lot of funds that might be reimbursable. That includes the money we spent for the flooding, the transmission line installation that NIPSCO did – we had to repair those roads, the work we did for the park board trail group and other things. The total is about $174,000. We’ve been given that money back, but it’s in our cash account. We have to move it into line items to replace the money we spent. Before, we had to move around the vehicle replacement plan to get some of that money in there. Now that we get some of this money back we don’t have to transfer that money from the vehicle account and we can put it into our vehicle replacement program. We can buy that one truck that we were going to buy this year,” said Ritzler.
Ritzler added that the county has submitted the finalized application to FEMA for possible reimbursements from the flooding event earlier this year. Ritzler is not sure when that decision will be delivered.
