A group of Bastrop County residents this week rallied together to ask commissioners to repair a decaying pedestrian bridge connecting Utley to Elgin over Wilbarger Creek that was left impassable after a flood over Memorial Day weekend last year.

Estimated to cost nearly $500,000 to repair, the Lower Elgin Road Bridge does not qualify for Federal Emergency Management Agency funding since it was closed to vehicle traffic years ago. It was replaced by a newer bridge and left to stand as nothing more than a landmark.

Because of that, Bastrop County commissioners struggled to find justification to spend money on repairs when hundreds of roads and bridges have been damaged by four floods in the past year.

"That’s not the only bridge in Bastrop County like that," Precinct 3 Commissioner John Klaus said. "I don’t see how we can afford to do anything with any of them."

Bastrop County Emergency Management Coordinator Mike Fisher said there are about 600 damaged sites across the county, including bridges, resulting from the four major floods that struck on Memorial Day weekend and Halloween in 2015 and Tax Day and Memorial Day weekend this year.

It’s been hard for officials to determine which storm caused what damage as county infrastructure has been hard hit by flood after flood.

Residents have become restless waiting for repairs. Many have complained on social media, asking where their tax dollars are going.

Fisher said most of the damage is concentrated in Precinct 2 in western Bastrop County, since it’s the largest of the county’s four precincts and has the most roads. However, the destruction, otherwise, is pretty evenly distributed across the region.

Road crews in each precinct tackle repairs one at a time using money from their individual road and bridge budgets, officials said, and wait to be reimbursed for 75 percent of the costs of repairs by FEMA.

"There is not a day goes by they don’t make some progress on some of those repairs," Fisher said. "Given four flooding disasters, they don’t do much of anything except work on those projects. It severely interrupted their normal work."

But a lot of projects are stalled as the county consults with FEMA to ensure that costs are reimbursed.

"Most of the damage is like a day’s worth of work, two at the most," Fisher said. "But it takes several weeks to get ready to do it and a couple weeks to get the money back. It’s not a quick, expedient process."

First, the county and FEMA visit each damaged site to do an inspection. The county fills out a project worksheet, sends it through the federal agency and waits for approval. Then, road and bridge crews begin the repair work. They track the cost of time and materials and send that information back to FEMA and await reimbursement.

The entire process has only been completed for damage caused by the Memorial Day 2015 flood. FEMA sent $987,000 in reimbursements, County Auditor Lisa Smith said. The county is still waiting for about $400,000.

But there is still about $4 million in estimated cumulative damages from the remaining three storms, which are still being assessed.

"The choice is to do it totally on our cost or go through the process and get reimbursed," Fisher said. And that means time.

However, Precinct 2 Commissioner Clara Beckett said the work begins long before the money comes in, starting with initial emergency repairs, then priority projects. Repairs for much of the damage caused by the Memorial Day 2015 and Tax Day 2016 storms have been completed, Fisher said, as well as part of the work from the 2015 Halloween flood.

But many of those repairs that were completed or partially finished were damaged again when another round of storms rolled through in May. Fisher called the 2016 Memorial Day weekend flood the "worst across the board."

"It was a more disastrous and damaging flood than any of the rest of them," he said.

The cost to repair the damaged sites from the May flood could exceed the cost of all three previous floods combined. And the day those fixes are completed is a long way off, Fisher said.

"If we could get through a year without anything bad happening, hopefully we could get caught up," Beckett said.

Despite the mountainous task before the county, the fund balance for each precincts’ road and bridge budget is healthy, Smith says — each with an excess of $1 million, not including additional revenues expected this fiscal year.

After the 2011 Bastrop County Complex Fire, which burned 34,000 acres, destroyed 1,600 homes and left two people dead, officials set up a county disaster fund. The first deposit was a $5 million check from the Lower Colorado River Authority. Along the way, several large reimbursements from FEMA were added to the fund, then millions more from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, as well as state appropriations, which have been used for disaster mitigation projects.

Most disaster related funds the county receives are deposited into the disaster account, Smith said, then the money is redistributed. And it will likely carry a balance far into the future.

"It’s a regular way of life for us," Smith said. "Since the Complex Fire, our watersheds have changed. It’s altered our landscape of the county. I expect next time it rains, we’ll probably flood again."

That’s little solace to the families that live adjacent to the Lower Elgin Road Bridge, a site that’s being considered by the National Parks Service as a historic landmark but was drastically damaged by floodwaters that topped Wilbarger Creek.

Yet, it’s hard to sell repairs to commissioners in light of all the other damage countywide. Roads and bridges that still carry vehicle traffic and have been torn up or washed out, flood after flood.

"I don’t know whether we can fix it," Bastrop County Judge Paul Pape said. "I don’t know if we can find the funds to take it down or remove it."

But we can’t do nothing, he said.

For now, officials will put up signs and barricades warning people to stay off the bridge — much like the ones marking many damaged and washed out roadways in the county — and wait out time and Mother Nature for a solution.