ST. PETE, Fla. — After months of delays that have left homeowners frustrated and projects stalled, a Florida top official now says the state's Elevate Florida program is finally beginning to move.
The update offers a measure of hope for applicants like Elisa Villa, whose Dunedin home flooded during Hurricane Helene and has remained vulnerable ever since.
“My home remains entirely vulnerable,” Villa told Tampa Bay 28. “If there is flooding, I’m going to be back to square one or even behind square one.
Villa is currently living in Connecticut while she waits for the State of Florida to elevate her home through the Elevate Florida program, which was designed to help homeowners raise flood-prone houses using federal funding. The program will cover up to 75-percent of a project's cost.
When she was accepted into the program, she believed the process would move quickly.
“I was pretty grateful and pretty excited, and thought, ‘Oh, this is great that I’ll be back in my house in a matter of months, maybe,’” she said. “I was pretty naive, I guess.”
Instead, she joined hundreds of other homeowners caught in months of delays.
Over the past several months, Tampa Bay 28 has documented those delays, speaking with homeowners living in RVs while they wait, contractors left without work, and families wondering when the program would finally move forward.
Now, the head of the Florida Division of Emergency Management says there are signs of progress.
On Wednesday, Executive Director Kevin Guthrie told Tampa Bay 28 that approximately 20 homeowner projects have received approvals over the last six to eight weeks.
“We’re starting to see a slow drip come out of the faucet,” he said.
Guthrie said many of the delays stemmed from bottlenecks in Washington, D.C.
“Good, bad, or indifferent, a lot of things were held up at the federal government over the last 16-17 months,” he said.
He specifically thanked new Department of Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin for helping move projects forward.
“Secretary Mullin, I want to just say thank you, secretary,” Guthrie said. “Things are moving. We’re getting things out the door now.”
Even so, he acknowledged there is still a substantial backlog.
“We have over about 1,300-ish projects that are in a, for lack of a better term, a backlog at FEMA,” Guthrie said.
He said both the secretary and FEMA leadership are committed to working through that backlog.
Ultimately, Guthrie said the state hopes between 1,000 and 1,300 applicants will receive assistance through the program.
For Villa, Guthrie’s update provides some encouragement, but not certainty.
“It does give me some hope, and I’m glad he is giving you some specific information to report back to the public,” Villa said. “But then again, I’m not holding my breath.”
Her application remains under FEMA review.
“How much longer I’m going to hang on, I don’t know,” she said.
With another hurricane season underway and her home still waiting to be elevated, Villa says she is watching closely to see whether the recent progress continues.
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