Minot Awarded $74.3 Million in HUD’s National Disaster Resilience Competition

Senator Pushed City’s Cause with Department of Housing and Urban Development

WASHINGTON – January 20, 2015 – (RealEstateRama) — Senator John Hoeven, a member of the Senate Appropriations Committee, today announced that the city of Minot has been awarded $74.3 million in the National Disaster Resilience Competition (NDRC), which made $1 billion available on a competitive basis to increase the safety and security of communities that have experienced natural disasters. The senator notified Minot Mayor Chuck Barney of the award this afternoon.

Minot was one of 13 communities selected from 40 applications to receive an award. The applicants included both cities and states, like New York, Chicago and New Orleans. The funds will help Minot both recover from the previous disaster and make plans, decisions, and investments that make them more resilient to the next disaster.

“This is certainly good news for the community of Minot, which has demonstrated its resilience in so many ways since the historic flooding of 2011,” Hoeven said. “The city has worked earnestly to recover and address the community’s vital needs, including increasing the size of its workforce, boosting the supply of affordable housing, broadening its economic base and providing rigorous protection against future flooding.”

Hoeven met with Minot city and Ward County officials to brief them about the NDRC and last year wrote a letter of support for the city’s application to the national competition. The NDRC was created as part of the Department of Housing and Urban Development’s Community Development Block Grant Disaster Recovery (CDBG-DR) Program, and Hoeven worked to ensure Minot would be eligible for the program.

Approximately $180 million is set aside specifically for the Hurricane Sandy region and $820 million was made available on a competitive basis. All states and local governments that experienced a presidentially-declared major disaster in 2011, 2012, or 2013 were eligible to compete. Applicants needed to show how their proposed action relates to the disaster from which they are recovering. HUD worked to ensure that geographic diversity was considered in the selection of participating communities.