Sonoma County will get $5.5 million from the Federal Emergency Management Agency for road repairs it paid for after the January 2017 winter storms, the county said Monday, Oct. 5.
The county spent more than $7.3 million rebuilding roads, replacing culverts and repairing eroded embankments after the storms, according to a county news release. The FEMA money covers 75% of that cost.
Mudslides during the storms wiped out portions of Mill Creek Road west of Healdsburg and Hot Springs Road in Cloverdale, the county said.
The release did not say why the approval came more than nine years after the storms.
The county credited Sens. Alex Padilla and Adam Schiff and Reps. Mike Thompson and Jared Huffman with lobbying FEMA for the money.
“Sonoma County has experienced more than its fair share of costly natural disasters in the past decade,” Supervisor Rebecca Hermosillo, who chairs the Board of Supervisors, said in the release. “When these occur, we rely on our federal partners to help make us whole.”
Thompson said in the release that the money lets the county “continue with other critical disaster resiliency work.”
KSRO reported the reimbursement earlier Monday.
What FEMA’s records show
The storms hit from Jan. 3 to Jan. 12, 2017, and were declared a federal disaster that Feb. 14, according to FEMA’s disaster records.
FEMA’s public database of disaster aid projects lists 25 Sonoma County government projects from those storms. FEMA puts their combined cost at about $10.8 million and the federal share at about $7.8 million.
For five of them, all road repairs, the records show FEMA last committed money on Sept. 25, 2026. The agency first committed money to four of the five in March 2018 and to the fifth in April 2020, the records show.
- Hot Springs Road: $2.76 million project, $2.07 million federal share
- Mill Creek Road: $2.06 million project, $1.55 million federal share
- Cazadero Highway, postmile 12.94: $1.45 million project, $1.09 million federal share
- Cazadero Highway, postmile 13.27: $1.3 million project, $972,047 federal share
- Geysers Road, postmile 29.79: $1.08 million project, $813,613 federal share
The federal shares on those five projects add up to about $6.5 million, more than the $5.5 million the county announced. The county’s release named only Mill Creek and Hot Springs roads and did not list which projects the approval covers.