SCARBOROUGH – For the second time in less than a year, the Federal Emergency Management Agency has withdrawn new flood insurance maps proposed for coastal Cumberland and York counties.

The maps, for which preliminary copies were distributed to towns in February, were due for release this month. They will not be out now until “sometime this fall,” according to David Mendelsohn, community coordination officer for FEMA’s Region 1 office in Boston.

“That’s as close as I can get at this time,” said Mendelsohn on Tuesday, laying the blame on an unforeseen need to compare elevations on new coastal maps where they border older inland maps prepared on a different type of program.

“These changes require new contracting in order to pay for all this,” said Mendelsohn, who said he was unable to provide any information on how much the federal government has spent on new flood maps since October 2010, when FEMA pulled its first attempt to redraw the flood zones.

Meanwhile, some communities are wondering what the financial impact of the new maps will be, when they finally come out.

In Scarborough, Town Manager Tom Hall has said as many as 1,000 properties could be in the new flood zone around the marsh, dramatically affecting insurance rates and, thus, property values.

“In the maps we saw in February, they show wave run-up going all the way to Route 1,” said Hall. “That would have a very profound affect on a lot of properties.

“In the end at least 1,000 properties could be within the flood zone,” said Scarborough’s assistant town planner, Jay Chace, “but we really don’t have a good sense as to how many properties will change from the existing condition because they have refused to give us the digital maps.”

In addition to insurance and property values, homeowners around the marsh could be hit by a new Scarborough ordinance once the maps become final. Scarborough requires a 1-foot freeboard for buildings in the flood plain. In other words, the building must be built so that the bottom floor is at least 1 foot above the high-water mark of a so-called 100-year flood.

But early in 2012, the planning office proposed rising the freeboard to 3 feet, due to expected sea level rise. That new rule would be triggered for new construction or any time more than 50 percent of a building undergoes renovation. However, the ordinance was pulled when it became clear FEMA’s new maps would not be ready as expected.

“What’s particularly maddening about this is that they backtracked over a year ago when we raised concerns, this time they have been quite specific in saying they are not going to change and we will have to go through the very rigid federal appeals process,” said Hall.

Because Scarborough Marsh presents such a unique set of variables, Hall said, the town’s consultant, Bob Gerber of Ransom Environmental Consultants, will need up to the 11th hour of FEMA’s 90-day appeal process. The wave modeling work needed to challenge FEMA’s flood maps could cost as much as $30,000, said Hall.

Meanwhile, Gerber, who also consults for Cape Elizabeth and South Portland on flood zone issues, said he’s concerned that the new maps will not be out until after many shorefront property owners most affected by the changes have left Maine for the season.

“That concerns me because they are the ones who are going to be impacted the most and they aren’t going to see it,” said Gerber on Tuesday. “For some reason, people at FEMA didn’t wake up to the fact until two weeks before the maps were supposed to come out that they had additional requirements in the new software. It baffles me.”

“Some of it was known some of it was not known,” said Mendelsohn, of the issues between FEMA’s new Risk MAP program and one called Flood Map Modernization, used for the inland maps in 2009.

“It just seemed to make sense to do more quality checking than less,” said Mendelsohn. “That just seemed like a good decision.”

Following issuance of preliminary flood maps in 2010, Gerber was hired by several communities to dispute the new flood zones. FEMA was using Risk MAPS then in an attempt to update the coast risk zones, many of which have not been reassessed since the 1980s, using much less sophisticated technology.

However, there was a huge public outcry over the new maps.

In just one example, David Wakelin, of Bay Road in South Portland, pointed out at the time that his home, built in 1906, was “40 to 50 feet” above the flood zone before the new maps, and under it after.

“There were some very significant issue identified with their modeling and that sent FEMA back to the drawing board for a few years,” said Chace. “Though their modeling came back better on the ocean side of things, that is, along the primary shoreline, the modeling of marsh we had some concerns with. It seemed like they were using a lot of engineering judgment.”

According to Gerber, while FEMA had its own consultants recalculate the potential vertical rise of storm waters, it did not correct wave run-up, or how far a wave may travel vertically. That’s particularly important in Scarborough Marsh, he said, because the low, murky bottom will interact with the wave action, sapping the storm surge of much of its strength.

“It’s not as simple as just drawing a horizontal line from the top point of the high-water mark,” said Gerber.

Although he bemoaned the lack of funding, and then said he could not provide details on FEMA’s mapping budget for Cumberland County, “because I’m not very familiar with that,” Mendelsohn denied Gerber’s claim that it has not performed any actual computer modeling to measure marsh flooding, instead relying on the work of a contracted engineer.

In order to try and get information out about the potential impact of the FEMA maps to local residents, Gerber said, he is in the process of digitizing the maps FEMA handed out in February. At that time, FEMA provided paper copies only of the new maps with instructions not to disseminate the information to the public, according to those who were at the unveiling held at the South Portland Planning and Development Office. However, Gerber said he will overlay his digitized version on existing flood maps to make sure each town knows how many properties will be impacted.

Working from easiest to hardest, Gerber said Cape Elizabeth is already done, while Scarborough will come further down the line.

“What I’m doing is because I’m concerned with the towns losing momentum in all of this,” said Gerber. “So far, they’ve invited the towns to comment on their maps, but they have done nothing with the new concerns I raised.

“Those concerns have been brought to out attention and we are communicating back and forth quite a bit,” said Mendelsohn, “but some issues may have to be resolved when we get to the appeal period. That’s the due process part of it and where it’s designed to be appealed.”

FEMA first launched its project to remap Southern Maine flood zones in 1996. If there are no further delays in the full release of preliminary maps, final implementation of the new federal flood zones still would not become official until early 2015.

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