Harrison County supervisors acknowledged receipt of a FEMA determination on repairs tied to Hurricane Zeta and spent substantial time discussing next steps after FEMA said the county’s mitigation proposal was not cost-effective in light of higher bid prices.

Matt Stratton, the county’s emergency management director, told the board that FEMA issued a determination after bids for mitigation came in far higher than the county’s earlier approved mitigation plan. “We have an approved scope of work that they’re not going to fund,” Stratton said during the discussion, summarizing the agency’s position.

Stratton outlined three possible paths forward: rebuild the pier in wood (a lower-cost but less-resilient option that would likely require future repairs after storms); proceed with the more resilient mitigation design (which FEMA would only partially fund under the agency’s capped mitigation contribution); or remove the pier and use available FEMA funds to pay for demolition or an alternate resilience or recreation project on the beach.

Board members pressed staff on why the county engineering estimate was so low compared with construction bids. Stratton and others said they could not fully explain the discrepancy from the 2020 estimate and offered to investigate the engineers’ assumptions.

Several supervisors recommended consulting with municipalities that used “flow-through” decking on wooden piers after storms. A board member who had overseen pier rebuilding in Orange Beach said wooden pilings with flow-through decking there survived storms better than solid-deck designs, and urged staff to explore a mitigation design that uses flow-through decking as a lower-cost option.

The board directed staff to consult further with the engineer (Trey) and to send questions to the state and FEMA about whether a flow-through decking design could meet mitigation caps (FEMA’s mitigation cap was discussed in the meeting as approximately 15% of the original structure cost). Stratton said he would pursue those questions and report back.

The board took a ministerial vote to acknowledge the FEMA determination memo before continuing discussion; no final decision to reconstruct, demolish, or accept an alternate project was made at the meeting.