As businesses on Broad Street begin to reopen and visions of catastrophic flooding fade to memory, the recovery effort by the City of Globe and its residents is still in its infancy.
While much of the hard work is happening as quickly as possible, the road to normalcy will take time, patience, and focused effort.
“We're going into long-term recovery: We need to build back, better and safer, and we can't just make it up as we go,” says Melissa Steele, Economic Development Manager for the City of Globe. “That includes the City; that includes residents; that includes business owners. We have to work together to make a safer community moving forward.”
Building back with an eye to reducing the impact of future disasters will also require adhering to municipal standards enshrined in codes and ordinances that have been developed through decades of study of similar events in cities throughout the country.
“These standards are not just engineering attributes, but are derived from loss history around the country,” says Tony Manfredi, Deputy Building Official for the City of Globe. “Codes help to minimize that loss, with a goal to completely stop it if possible. But Mother Nature doesn't always play fair, so we can only do what we can do.”
Manfredi says there are many factors that lead to the events on September 26, and it was not just the amount of rain that fell. Past wildfires and flooding, leaving burn scars and debris in their wake, were partially to blame and set the Globe-Miami region up for what eventually happened.
“We're seeing these changes to the environment from past flooding or past fires, and all these elements add up to cause further issues,” he says. “We just can't go backwards anymore. We have to move forward, make the environment better. That's why we have code, and that's why we have policy, and that's why we have inspections, to minimize all these elements that hit us in this last disaster.”
Manfredi has spent the past three years focused on bringing Globe's outdated codes up to modern standards and streamlining the permitting process for businesses and residential uses.
Additionally, City Council and administrators have focused on bringing all of Globe's government functions into the 21st century, developing relationships with outside agencies and non-profits that can be of service during times of crisis.
A proven track record of receiving and maintaining grants and loans for infrastructure projects puts Globe in a good position to pursue the millions of dollars in funding it will take to repair vital infrastructure, although it might take years to see the fruits of administrative labor.
The City has a $3 million fund balance in reserve for situations such as this, but that is a drop in the bucket for what will be needed in the long run. Fixing the sewer system alone is expected to cost in the neighborhood of over $30 million, so receiving outside funding — and hitting hard deadlines — will be a must.
According to Assistant City Manager Linda Oddonetto, Globe and Gila County have 220 days once the Federal Emergency Declaration is signed to get temporary fixes in place through the NRCS Program.
“We have to fix the system, and then it could be years, not months, before we see any reimbursement for any of those costs,” Oddonetto says. “We have to move forward with that in mind. There are a lot of plates in the air, but this is a priority. These are our core services we must continue to provide.”
Along the way, the City must be meticulous in its project management and documentation and be open to audits of municipal policy and practices as well.
Possible funding sources are the Natural Resources Conservation Service through the U.S. Department of Agriculture; the Environmental Protection Agency's Combined Sewer Overflows (CSO) program, as well as FEMA and the Department of Emergency and Military Affairs (DEMA), a state agency.
“If we don't adhere to floodplain/floodway policies that FEMA has in place, why would they fund us?” Manfredi says. “If we're not upholding those federal standards, they'll drop us like a hot rock.”
Fortunately, Globe City Council and its administration is filled with professionals that have decades' worth of experience with disaster preparedness and response, as well as longtime service to the City.
Manfredi is a retired Phoenix firefighter who spent his career managing disaster response, while Mayor Al Gameros had a 35-year career with the Globe Fire Department. Councilman Freddy Rios has a decades-long career with Arizona Water Service, and Councilman Mike Stapleton retired from law enforcement before opening a restaurant in downtown Globe.
Both Councilmen Fernando Shipley and former Gila County Supervisor Mike Pastor have served on City Council for multiple terms in various capacities. And although Jesse Leetham is the youngest person ever to be elected to Council, he is a local businessman and is serving his second term.
“I'm really impressed with our Council, before we even got into this disaster,” says Councilman Mariano Gonzalez, who served 26 years in emergency management in Arizona, as Director of Emergency Operations for Gila County and then 10 years as the State Emergency Response and Recovery Plan Coordinator at the Arizona Department of Emergency and Military Affairs’ Division of Emergency Management.
“We have the right mix of higher level retirees or managers, and they all have a real good sense of how government works,” Gonzalez says. “When we got into this mess with the flood, we just looked at each other and said it's time to step up. We're looking at long-term recovery and building back sensibly to try to minimize the chances of this happening again.”
Gonzalez hears the frustration of citizens who think the city is slowing down progress by enforcing codes or requiring permits, or the assumption the City is profiting off of fees that only cover about 60 percent of the cost to enforce. Some are frustrated by the layers of bureaucracy and jurisdictional mazes that sometimes seem to contradict themselves.
“They sometimes don't believe us when we try to explain what we have to deal with,” he says. “We have a fund balance of about $3 million and have to make sure we have that much going into every budget year, which sounds like a lot of money, but when you start paying for contractors to clear sewer lines and do other emergency response work, it starts to add up.”
As to long-range efforts to reduce the chances of future floods, Steele would like to see solutions such as the concerted efforts of Flagstaff and Coconino County, which had a summer of flooding in 2022 that was similar to what happened in Globe, only far, far worse.
“I was really inspired by Coconino and Flagstaff and how they have done their recovery from post-fire flooding,” Steele says. “The same situation, but 100 times worse and it really was a team effort between everyone from homeowners to the City and County.”
Coconino County was able to secure $132 million in outside funding for its post-flood recovery in the wake of the Pipeline (2022, 26,000 acres) and Schultz (2010, 15,000 acres) fires that officials blamed for the severity of repeated flooding.
Earlier this year, Coconino County completed a $100 million mitigation project that rebuilt nine watersheds, removed tons of debris from surrounding forests, and installed new drainage systems to channel water to “detention basins” through miles of 10-foot pipes.
But the mitigation efforts were not confined to large-scale construction projects. The City of Flagstaff worked with its citizens to find solutions and build flood resistance down to a neighborhood level.
“They experienced extreme flooding to the point where people had cement roadblocks and sandbags in front of their homes and buildings, because every time it rained, it flooded,” Steele says. “They've been able to overcome that because people have been working together to overcome the red tape, but they got their permits to make it safer. It's a good place to start the long-term recovery conversation. Don't just do whatever you want to, let's do it safely.”
As to the groundwork that still needs to be done within the boundaries of the City of Globe, Manfredi has a strong belief in the systems the City has in place, and will depend on the integrity of local governance for the coming reconstruction efforts.
“We still have a lot of old infrastructure we have to tend to, and we need to understand it takes millions of dollars and lots of manpower to deal with these things,” he says. “That's why those grants and federal monies are so important for us. We would cheat ourselves out of all those possibilities if we didn't follow these guidelines: They won't lend to us, they won't grant to us, they'll just nod their heads at us and nobody would win here.”
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