(Radio Iowa) – Temporary housing for flood victims is now available on the Clay County fairgrounds in Spencer. Kevin Robinson, the deputy city manager in Spencer, says R-Vs have been set up in the camping area of the fairgrounds. “There’s one complete row of trailers in there right now — RV trailers,” Robinson says, “and then once all of those fill up, there’s room to put another row to the east of that.”

In mid-July, federal officials approved Iowa’s request for FEMA’s Temporary Housing Program, which can provide assistance to residents in Iowa counties that have been declared presidential disaster areas. Some of those property owners may be waiting to see if their home might be part of a buy-out program. FEMA provides 75 percent of the money to buy homes and businesses in floodplain areas — and the state and city must provide the rest.

“The city will go through a process of determining which areas make sense to acquire from a maintenance standpoint, from an adjacency standpoint to the river,” Robinson says. “There’s lots of different variables.” The program has been used in several other Iowa cities in the past 30 years. Officials in Cedar Rapids approved the first batch of 28 property buyouts 18 months after flooding in 2008 wrecked many areas of Cedar Rapids. Ultimately 14-hundred properties in Cedar Rapids that were flooded in 2008 were voluntarily sold, cleared and cannot be redeveloped.