WASHINGTON—Gulf Coast officials looking for help rebuilding areas pounded by Hurricane Ike came to Capitol Hill on Tuesday seeking some quick help, urging lawmakers to provide billions of dollars for repairs without the usual layers of bureaucracy.

Texas is looking at a $11.4 billion price tag for Ike’s damages, including $16 million in damage to Houston, Texas Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst said. That doesn’t include costs for devastated Galveston, which the city’s mayor said suffered more than $2 billion in damages.

“You might call that a down payment, a first wave of requests, because it’s going to be some time still before we have the type of assessments that we really need to know what the dollar amount is going to come to,” Gov. Rick Perry said during a visit to a shelter for Ike evacuees in Richmond, Texas, southwest of Houston.

Louisiana is looking at $1 billion in damages from Ike as well as Gustav, Lt. Gov. Mitch Landrieu said. New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin also told House lawmakers the $40 million cost of evacuating for Hurricane Gustav has led to hiring freezes and a halt of new expenditures.

Houston Mayor Bill White raised concerns that the hurricane relief needs will get caught up in the financial crisis on Wall Street. He asked that money be sent directly to the city instead of the typical reimbursement processes in place for most recovery programs.

“We cannot afford to do the float for FEMA,” he said in a Senate subcommittee hearing.

White asked that the Federal Emergency Management Agency administrator be allowed to come up with flexible recovery programs that would relieve the burden of the eight layers of federal review and second-guessing. For instance, after hurricanes Katrina and Rita, the federal government would not reimburse the city for all debris removal, “because we couldn’t prove that each log came from the storm,” White said.

Just more than a week ago, Hurricane Ike battered Galveston with 110 mph winds and a 12-foot storm surge and has been blamed for 61 deaths, including 26 in Texas. More than 1 million people evacuated the Texas coast, and about 45,000 residents fled Galveston Island, about 50 miles southeast of Houston.

Galveston Mayor Lyda Ann Thomas praised FEMA for its performance during Ike.

“Had it not been for FEMA, the city would not have recovered as well as it has,” she said.

Still, she said Galveston needs lots of help as she pleaded for nearly $2.5 billion in emergency funds. She was accompanied by officials from the Port of Galveston and the University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston—the only hospital on the island city of about 57,000. Residents were being allowed to return Wednesday to a town still missing many basic services.