Overtime for workers processing a deluge of food-stamp applications. A satellite dish to bring Internet access to a summer-camp-turned-shelter. New textbooks and teachers. Dialysis. Chemotherapy. Security deposits for rented apartments.
As they plan budgets for 2006, officials in Texas, Georgia, Arkansas and elsewhere are first calculating the costs of providing for hundreds of thousands of people displaced by Hurricane Katrina.
They've come up with some daunting numbers -- and questions.
Although they expect reimbursement from the federal government for many expenses, officials say they aren't sure how much they will receive or when the money will arrive.
More vexing for budget planners is uncertainty about the evacuees: How many will stay in their adoptive states, how many will find work and become self-sufficient, how many will continue to need public aid -- and for how long?
Georgia legislators recently warned that medical and education costs could rise $100 million next fiscal year if the 44,000 evacuees in the state decided to stay.
Texas officials say the evacuee population of 400,000 could cost the state as much as $550 million next fiscal year. They're hoping the federal government will step up reimbursement.
"We're not being mercenary about this, but we want to bring it to the attention of Congress and the administration," said Texas Homeland Security Director Steven McCraw. "We want to provide first-class care to our neighbors. On the other hand, we don't want to be disproportionately penalized because we opened our arms....
"We never envisioned, nor had we planned on, taking nearly half a million people into our state virtually overnight," McCraw said.
Even states that have taken in fewer Katrina survivors face challenges, especially with ongoing healthcare needs.
In Nebraska, for instance, the lead agency helping 166 evacuees airlifted from New Orleans to Omaha spent $200,000 to help settle them in motels and to take care of urgent medical problems as diverse as snakebites and depression. The Federal Emergency Management Agency will cover many of those expenditures.
But FEMA will not cover the types of calls Beverly Griffith still gets daily -- from evacuees who don't qualify for state Medicaid insurance but need a cab ride to a doctor's appointment, or pain pills for an aching back, or an X-ray on a swollen arm.
