With a Cape Coral City Council consensus in hand, city staff will dive deeper into creating a Commercial Structure Resilience Grant program.

Emergency Management & Resilience Director Ryan Lamb said during Wednesday’s Council workship they are very much in the “dough phase” of the grant. They are looking at how to become tougher as a city, as storms are becoming stronger and more frequent.

“How do we get stronger as storms impact our area? How do we break this cycle that is more sustainable and tougher,” Lamb said.

The workshop touched upon the different threats from a hurricane — wind, rain, surge, tornados, loss of power, and impact of fires. Structures can suffer from wind and flooding damage, as well as a fire and loss of products that are perishable, as well as productivity among businesses.

“We are looking at strengthening the commercial structures,” Lamb said, as they want to break out of the cycle of repair and damage.

He said as soon as they can get grocers and hardware stores open it takes a burden off the government to provide that resource, the life-sustaining measures.

They are looking to partner with an engineer firm and four local businesses, the Cape Coral Chamber of Commerce, food service, hardware store and local nonprofit.

The idea is to do a cost-benefit analysis to see how protection against wind, flood, fire, and power can impact their insurance benefits.

“We can’t stop the rain from falling. What can we do to protect the businesses, so as soon as we get debris out of the street, they can get back to work,” he said.

City Manager Mike Ilczyszyn said the idea is to understand what it will cost to do flood proofing, auxiliary power.

“If you all like this idea — a consensus to move forward — we will hire an engineer to work with businesses and get real costs,” he said.

Councilmember Jennifer Nelson-Lastra said she thought the grant idea was fantastic, as it is a proactive approach.

“I think this is excellent,” she said, adding that she would also like to consider new builds — incentivize them to take a resiliency approach.

Ilczyszyn said they are looking at regulations for new construction that would require them to be more resilient, such as having auxiliary power with their site plan.

“The key is communication — working with our partners, communication with the business community,” Lastra said. “It’s all about getting up and running a lot quicker. I highly support this and think this is excellent.”

Councilmember Bill Steinke also thought the program was awesome, and said he fully supports it, but would suggested that the city consider generator power as fuel sources, and propane, become an issue after hurricanes. He said they do not want businesses that have generator capacity without the resources available.

Councilmember Laurie Lehmann said there also is a solar possibility to look into.

“All of these details need to be looked at, so we can have power and get businesses back up and not having the great losses,” she said, adding that older businesses need to be up to code and resilient after a disaster.

There was discussion of piloting the grant program in the CRA.