A Mapping Error Sent St. Petersburg's $173 Million in Hurricane Aid to the Wrong Place - for Nearly Two Years
St. Petersburg says its Sunrise St. Pete recovery money is finally arriving: a geocoding error assigned the $173 million to Pinellas County instead of the city, and Hurricane Milton survivors waited while Washington found a way to fix it.
ST. PETERSBURG - The money existed. It was just filed under the wrong map pin. St. Petersburg says $173 million in federal hurricane recovery funding for its Sunrise St. Pete program is finally arriving, nearly two years after a mapping error assigned the funding to Pinellas County rather than to the city whose residents were supposed to receive it, according to reporting by Tampa Bay 28 carried in a report read in full by this desk.
City representative Amy Foster said the delay was not the city's doing: correcting the geocoding error required legislative tools that the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development did not have. 'The reason it's taken us almost two years is because HUD has never had this experience before, and they didn't have the legislative tools they needed to correct this issue,' Foster said, according to Tampa Bay 28.
The wait had a human cost. Davida Wheeler lost her home to Hurricane Milton and said the missing assistance helped push a return out of reach: 'It wasn't there, and we can't rewind the clock. It caused me to leave the city that I lived in for 15 years,' she said, according to Tampa Bay 28. The city now plans to put $126 million toward housing recovery and $47 million toward projects that reduce flooding and improve resilience, and says it will contact previous Sunrise St. Pete applicants to reassess their requests; whether the program reopens to new applicants has not been confirmed.
