CAPE ELIZABETH – Residents of Cape Elizabeth who want to fight the placement of their homes within federal flood zones will have to go it alone. According to Town Manager Michael McGovern, the town will not appeal new maps set for release this fall by the Federal Emergency Management Agency.
“It’s fairly significant for the property owners, because it has major implications for insurance costs,” McGovern said at the July 8 Town Council meeting. “But at what point does the town involve itself in [what is] essentially an issue between citizens and the federal government?”
According to McGovern, preliminary maps made available to town officials by FEMA show 45 Cape homes will be newly designated as flood risks, including six on Lawson Road, five near Alewife Cove Road and eight in the area of Peables Cove. The rest, he said, are “spread across town.”
Bob O’Brien, vice president of Noyes, Hall & Allen, an independent insurance agency located in South Portland, said Monday it can be “pretty much impossible” for homeowners to appeal a FEMA flood zone designation without municipal backing.
“A bunch of the them can try and work together, but you just have more clout if the town is behind you,” he said.
A lot depends on the various coding zones used by FEMA and the National Flood Insurance Program, said O’Brien. However, if a home that was not previously in a special hazard zone ended up placed in Zone A, meaning it was in danger of experiencing a so-called 100-year flood more correctly described as an area with a 1 percent chance of experiencing a catastrophic flood in any given year and if it also was coded for being subject to high wind velocity, the results could mean a heavy hit to homeowner pocketbooks.
“Your rates could pretty much double,” said O’Brien.
Those rates are said to be up 8 to 10 percent anyway given losses from monster hurricane damage in recent years. Meanwhile, this year the federal flood insurance program began to phase out subsidies on homes built before FEMA’s first flood risk maps were adopted in the 1970s. The Biggert-Waters Flood Insurance Reform Act of 2012 also aims to end subsidies on homes that suffer repeated damages, and ones that are not primary residences.
“What they are trying to get away from is you and me subsidizing vacation homes that get flooded every season,” said O’Brien.
Cape Elizabeth Code Enforcement Officer Ben McDougal said Friday that letters are slated to go in the mail next week to owners of all 250 Cape homes located in the federal flood zone, including the 45 whose status is set to change.
“This is an important topic that deserves some publicity,” he said.
In 2010, Bob Gerber of Ransom Environmental Consultants successfully lobbied FEMA to amend its work as it tried to update flood maps along the Maine coast that have been unchanged since the 1980s, when less sophisticated technology was available for the task.
Gerber got FEMA consultants to recalculate the potential vertical rise of storm waters, and since then has worked on behalf of a dozen coastal communities, including Cape Elizabeth, South Portland and Scarborough, to correct wave run-up, or how far a wave may travel vertically.
Wave run-up is a particularly sensitive issue in the area of Scarborough Marsh, where Town Manager Tom Hall has said as many as 1,000 properties could end up in the new flood zone, 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.”
McGovern says his town also has had a hard time with the agency over the newest flood maps, saying, “It’s amazing the way FEMA has gone back and forth on this issue. It claims they’re going to do things and then hasn’t done them.”
Twice since 2010, most recently in May, FEMA has released preliminary flood maps, then announced a delay in the official versions.
In May, David Mendelsohn, community coordination officer for FEMA’s Region 1 office in Boston, said the latest pullback was not prompted by Gerber’s concerns. Instead, he said, it was an internal issue, and the agency works to refine discrepancies where the maps, created with a program called Risk MAP, meet up with inland flood zones delineated in 2009 using a different program, called Flood Map Modernization.
In February, when FEMA unveiled the new maps to local communities in a meeting held at the South Portland Planning and Development Office, it instructed attendees not to disseminate that information to the public, according to many in attendance at the time. However, after FEMA announced a delay in final maps, Gerber began work to digitize the paper maps FEMA distributed, so towns could compare them to their current flood zones. The primary concern, Gerber said at that time, was that many of the most affected homes belong to people who live out of state in the winter, and so won’t be around when FEMA finally puts out the official maps, starting a 90-day window on appeals.
Cape Elizabeth was the first town Gerber converted, saying he worked from the “easiest to hardest.” On Friday, Chace said Scarborough was still awaiting its version.
Cape residents who wish to appeal FEMA’s new flood maps will not have the town’s help. According to McGovern, Cape has paid Gerber “about $10,000 over the last three years” to dog FEMA and keep the town informed as new maps have been issues and re-issued.
McGovern said that the July 8 council meeting that Gerber’s fee to work up the modeling necessary to rebut FEMA’s latest flood zone revision would cost more than $17,000 and that’s just for the homes located in the Peables Cove, Alewife Cove and Lawson Road areas.
“And then how could we address the other approximately 25 homes that aren’t in those area?” McGovern asked the council, rhetorically.
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