![]() For the overwhelming majority of properties, the rates are reasonable, and for those who opt to elevate their properties, the savings are significant. But it is a reflection that opting to live four feet below the flood line is a significant risk, and it is simply not good policy - either insurance policy or public policy - to subsidize property owners that choose to take that risk. Now, it’s true that $10,723 is not exactly a “cheap” policy. For elevated risk “AE” zones - that is, properties within a 100-year floodplain that face the risk of flooding up to a given base flood elevation, or BFE - FEMA is now offering sample annual rates of $533 a year for properties that are four feet above the BFE, $1,815 for properties that are at the BFE and $10,723 for properties that are four feet below the BFE.įEMA will be publishing more extensive rates for insurance agents in the coming weeks, and rates for the highest-risk “VE” zones - coastal zones that also face the risk of wave action from storm surge - are expected later this summer. But FEMA, thankfully, is now providing clearer guidance on what updated rates will look like, and the reality doesn’t exactly match the alarmist rhetoric. In making the case for delay, Landrieu and company have been throwing around those inflated claims of $30,000 flood insurance premiums to anyone who will listen. Landrieu’s likely opponent in the 2014 Senate race - earlier succeeded in getting a similar delay attached to the House version of the legislation. Having tried and failed to get a five-year delay of Biggert-Waters implementation attached to water resources and agriculture bills earlier this year, Landrieu succeeded this week in getting a one-year delay attached to the committee version of a Homeland Security appropriations bill. ![]() Treasury $24 billion as of May and that hasn’t repaid any principal on its loans since 2010. Tammany parishes.Īlas, Landrieu has continued to push ahead with efforts to stall or repeal reforms to a troubled program that owed the U.S. More recently, FEMA announced it is addressing the oversight with a pilot program that will certify local levees in, in this case, Louisiana’s Plaquemines, Lafourche, Terrebone and St. ![]() The result is that a number of communities, particularly those in Landrieu’s Louisiana, would receive no credit for their local levees, and would be asked to pay huge flood insurance premiums as a result. Unfortunately, stripping the provision also inadvertantly stripped language that called on FEMA to certify the protection afforded by levees built with state or local funds. Gulf Coast senators fought back against the proposal and eventually had it stripped from the final law. As originally conceived, Biggert-Waters proposed including those who live behind flood levees in the National Flood Insurance Program’s mandatory coverage requirements, but charging them rates that reflected the reduced “residual” risk they faced. In their barnstorming tour to fend off flood reform, Landrieu and her ilk have had have one reasonable complaint, although it is something that was the inadvertant result of her and her colleagues’ own legislative grandstanding. Of course, the “appropriate” premium for such a policy should be zero dollars, because no responsible agency should insure a property that is almost certain to be a total loss. In online materials, FEMA, which runs the National Flood Insurance Program, has stoked policyholders’ worst fears by pointing to rare cases where properties in very high-risk flood zones that are constructed far (five to ten feet) below the base flood elevation, where the appropriate premium might be as high as $30,000 a year. These claims are almost entirely bunk, but they have been allowed to persist, in part, because of unclear and misleading guidance from the Federal Emergency Management Agency. in concert with some of their colleagues from Sandy-hit New York and New Jersey have been doing their darnedest to scare their constituents with tales of massive ( 5,000 percent!) hikes in federal flood insurance rates that will be coming, unless Congress acts to stall or repeal the reforms called for in last year’s Biggert-Waters Act. In recent months, a group of lawmakers from the Gulf Coast - led by Sen.
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