Villa Rica has closed out its claims with the Federal Emergency Management Agency for damage caused by the September floods, but city officials are still awaiting coverage decisions with its insurance carrier.

The city’s original damage estimates totaled slightly more than $425,000. But the city’s final reimbursement will be about $254,000, including funds recovered from FEMA and its estimates of what will be received from insurance coverage with the Georgia Municipal Association.

“Most of that is from FEMA, not insurance,” City Manager Larry Wood said.

FEMA approved an additional $30,000 for two mitigation projects, which involves trying to improve the infrastructure to avoid damage in the future. Those mitigation projects include raising the vents that filled up the tank at the city’s water plant and upgrading some of the water plant’s doors to keep water from entering the building in the future.

The city’s insurance will pay to replace most of the damaged equipment at the city’s two wastewater facilities.

“FEMA took a look at our insurance coverage and made us file a claim with our insurance carrier so we could get a letter stating they either will or will not cover something before they’ll actually consider covering it,” Wood said.

One of the main differences in the city’s original estimates and the final tally from FEMA was the city’s $100,000 proposal for mitigation of the Lake Fashion Dam. But FEMA officials approved less than $2,000 for repairs to the dam.

“There just wasn’t enough damage over there,” Wood said.

The city did receive reimbursement for a police vehicle that was damaged, as well as a fleet truck that is used at the wastewater plants. Funds were also received for the manpower used for debris clean-up and security at the plants.

City officials were hoping to recover about $25,000 spent to purchase water from the Carroll County Water Authority for about two weeks while its water plant was shut down. The city was able to do so through a contract signed with CCWA to purchase water.

“We couldn’t even pump water for a week, but we relied on Carroll County to supply us that water,” Wood said. “We’re still hoping the insurance company is going to help us with that. So, we haven’t dropped that claim, but we’ve looked back on some case studies that shows where they’ve always denied that and called it an operating cost.”

While on a given day the city typically purchases 200,000-300,000 gallons of water from CCWA, during the period immediately following the flooding the city was buying as much as 1.7 million gallons of water from Carroll County.

“It’s a good thing we have both contracts and we weren’t just depending on Carroll or Douglas because next time Carroll County may lose their water system and we’d have to rely on buying it from Douglas County,” Wood said.

The city also didn’t recover funds it expected for hauling dirt to repair some of its roads. It did receive funds to recover the cost of equipment and manpower used, but not for the dirt itself.

“FEMA was excellent to work with,” Wood said. “We didn’t get everything we wanted, but we were very pleased with their response. They bent over backwards helping us.”