BATON ROUGE - City-parish is still adding up the costs from the southern snowstorm two weeks ago, and it's expected to be in the millions of dollars.

Right after the winter weather, WBRZ asked city-parish leaders about its effect on the budget. 

Clay Rives, director of the Mayor’s Office of Homeland Security and Emergency Operations, said Monday that tallying up the city-parish's costs will require going department by department to capture all the expenses related to the storm. Federal aid may be available if the costs exceed a threshold of a little more than $2 million.

For five days, Mayor-President Sid Edwards and other leaders continuously monitored the cold weather and icy conditions.

"A week's worth of emergency protective measures that we did - the shelters, and all the salt and brine that we put out - it's going to add up," Rives said.
Trying to get that federal money means going through 327 pages of guidance from FEMA, dividing up the costs of preparing for the approaching storm, costs of handling it as it was happening and the costs of recovery.

“Being proactive is expensive,” Rives said. “We know that we will most likely meet our threshold.”

Even then, FEMA might not cover the full expense, and in East Baton Rouge, that could be a problem. Last year city-parish leaders were worried about a budget shortfall, and help from FEMA could ease the burden.

“We have a new administration, and they're looking at cost savings,” Rives said. “This is a cost you can't avoid. You can't avoid public safety.”