Addressing Hazards in Sarasota County

A bit more than a month ago, I introduced this blog audience to Planning to Turn the Tide, the film project being undertaken by the APA Hazard Mitigation and Disaster Recovery Planning Division. I noted that we would be rolling out a series of updates as we completed work on new trips around the country, but the first was in Southwest Florida in late June of this year. A week later, we shared the first blog video discussing our progress, focusing on a series of interviews with planners and others at the Tampa Bay Regional Planning Commission. Today, I am sharing the second blog video, which discusses our subsequent work in Sarasota County.

Phillippi Creek in southern Sarasota County

Click here to watch the summary video about the interviews we conducted in Sarasota County.

Those interviews included:

SW Florida, USGS map. Sarasota is midway along the central coast in this section. 

One key point throughout the discussions was that Hurricane Ian at one point had been projected to move through Sarasota County before weather patterns in the Gulf of Mexico pushed it eastward into Lee County and Fort Myers instead. That near-miss still allows Sarasota County officials, like those further north in Tampa Bay, to make the point that preparation for a direct hit in a future storm is the entire region’s best bet.

Except for one unrelated post on July 4, it has been a while until now. David Taylor and I left Chicago on a road trip on July 6 to film in Colorado and Iowa, returning on July 18. The delay since then in putting this series back on track arose from both a short-term illness and a long to-do list of other tasks once I was back home, but here we are. We have much more to share now about Florida, Colorado, and Iowa to keep readers aware of our progress, so please keep tuning in every few days. We’ll be working to keep you updated.

If you wish to support the project, please use the QR code below for an online donation.

Jim Schwab

Knock Me Over

From left: Larry Larson; Maria Cox-Lamm, ASFPM Chair; myself; Ingrid Wadsworth, ASFPM Deputy Director

I confess: I was taken totally by surprise. Most of us, if we have a level head on our shoulders, do not do our work with the thought that we will some day be presented with a major award because of it. Especially those of us in the world of public service and nonprofits, where dedication to the greater good is a primary motive, even though we are not immune to thinking about raises and promotions, which, after all, may enable us to be more effective in what we do.

Consequently, when the Association of State Floodplain Managers (ASFPM) asked me to attend the annual ASFPM conference in Phoenix last week (June 17-21), I naively accepted the rationale that, since they had recently contracted with me as an independent consultant to lead the production of a Planning Advisory Service Report on climate resilience and capital improvements planning, under a Regional Coastal Resilience grant from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), they needed me there to discuss the project. I had helped write the grant three years ago while still leading the Hazards Planning Center at the American Planning Association (APA), which became the major partner to ASFPM in conducting the three-year project. Although I retired from that position a little more than a year ago, there was a great deal of logic in bringing me back to see at least that part of the project to a successful conclusion.

There was only one problem in Phoenix. No one seemed all that concerned about spending time talking to me about the NOAA project. I was certainly learning a great deal by listening to presentations, and I certainly enjoyed networking with colleagues at receptions and in hallways at the Phoenix Convention Center, but the question was bugging me: Why did they really want me out here?

On Thursday morning, June 21, before the morning plenary began in the Ballroom, I approached David Conrad and Larry Larson at a front table after initially parking my belongings at another table further back. David Conrad was once with the National Wildlife Federation and wrote a path-breaking report following the 1993 Midwest floods. Larry is the former executive director of ASFPM and now a policy advisor working with current executive director Chad Berginnis. Both are prominent in the field of floodplain management.

I patted David on the shoulder and with self-effacing humor said, “I used to sit at the front table before I retired from APA, but now I’m nobody anymore.” They chuckled, and ASFPM’s public information officer, Michele Mihalovich, said from across the table, “Jim, you’ll never be nobody.” We all laughed, David invited me to join them, and I moved to the front table for the plenary. All good for a laugh. Afterwards, Larry made a point of asking me to find him at a front table, off to the side, for the awards luncheon at noon. Still clueless, I assumed he was simply being friendly but honored his request when the time came.

Lunch was served, and Doug Plasencia, president of the ASFPM Foundation, and Diane Brown, retiring from her post as outreach and events manager at ASFPM after 35 years of excellent service, introduced award recipients and their achievements one at a time, with images on the screen, and each winner stood with presenters for a photo. Interesting, I thought, in considering the various prizes, but routine. I was happy for the winners, some of whom I knew. Almost every national professional organization does such things. Meanwhile, I ate my salad, the roast beef entrée, and the dessert. In a little while, it would all be over, and we would move on to an afternoon of presentations and discussions in a variety of concurrent sessions. I flipped through the program to see what looked interesting.

Finally, Diane Brown began to describe the winner of the highest honor ASFPM bestows, the Goddard-White Award, described thus on the website:

“The Goddard-White Award is named in honor of the contributions made to floodplain management by Gilbert White (1911- 2006) and Jim Goddard (1906-1994). This award is given by ASFPM to individuals who have had a national impact carrying forward the goals and objectives of floodplain management. It is an indication of the level of esteem the association holds for the two namesakes as well as the recipients and is ASFPM’s highest award. It is not necessarily presented every year.”

I’m not sure because one does not time such things. I believe it took about 30 seconds of Diane’s narration of the story behind this year’s award before it suddenly dawned on me that I was the person they were talking about. I had never spent one minute before that contemplating this specific award or how I might have anything to do with it. The revelation that I was a recipient struck me like a lightning bolt. Larry was looking toward me, and I pointed to myself silently as if so say, “Moi?” He kept his Cheshire cat smile and waited for the emcees to invite me forward. Larry, by the way, was in 1985 the very first recipient of this honor. He had known all along precisely what was coming. Diane invited me to the podium to say a few words. A few tears started to run down my cheeks, so I struggled to get them under control. At the podium, Diane asked, “Are you okay to talk?” I nodded yes.

I cannot repeat verbatim what I said because it was all spontaneous, but I know that I began by saying that we in the hazards world are “supposed to be prepared. I am not. You caught me off guard.” I took the crowd on a two-minute tour of what we had achieved together in the partnership of recent years that I helped construct between ASFPM and APA, and said, “Eventually, you look back and ask, ‘Did we do all that?’” I then explained that it was not just me. I had learned a great deal over the years from many other people, that big achievements require collective effort. And I thanked everyone for this high honor before stepping over to the curtain for a photograph that you see above.

I checked later and found that only 24 people have received this award, including former NOAA Coastal Services Center administrator Margaret Davidson, a truly memorable individual, U.S. Rep. Earl Blumenauer of Oregon, a perennial warrior for better disaster legislation, and French Wetmore, who helped create the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s Community Rating System for the National Flood Insurance Program. All I can say is, Wow. What a band of high achievers and visionaries I have apparently joined.

It is hard to top such an honor, except in one way: It is important not to rest on these laurels, but to continue to contribute, to encourage others to find their passion, and to remain an effective voice for positive change. I hope I am doing that and can remain part of the action for many years to come. Thanks, ASFPM. I hope I can prove you right.

Jim Schwab

FEMA Needs to Think about This One

Flooded property in Lyons, Colorado, after the St. Vrain River flooded in September 2013.

There is that old saying that, if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. To that, one might add that, if you’re thinking about fixing it anyway, you may want to clarify exactly how you wish to improve things and why you think the improvement will be better.

In a February 27 notice in the Federal Register, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) proposed a major change in long-standing hazard mitigation rules regarding grants for acquisitions of flooded properties that made almost no effort to meet that test. I wish I had noticed it earlier because the deadline for comments was April 30. I submitted a brief comment on that date and tried to rally others on Facebook, but the truth is that this one got away from me. I was busy on other fronts. I have subsequently spent a few days gathering background information.

I am very glad that a few national organizations like the Association of State Floodplain Managers (ASFPM), American Rivers, and the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) found time to file substantial objections to FEMA’s notice on Property Acquisitions and Relocation for Open Space (Docket ID: FEMA-2018-0006). Their objections raise profound questions about both the process and the substance of FEMA’s proposed changes. Others have also submitted comments.

Here’s the bottom line: For 30 years since the passage of the Stafford Act, which provides the basic framework of most federal disaster law, federal hazard mitigation grant programs have required that lands being acquired from property owners whose homes have been flooded must be placed into perpetual open space following demolition of the structures. The clear intent is to reduce the ongoing exposure of the federal government and the National Flood Insurance Program to repeated losses by precluding further development in those flood-prone areas. By and large, those grants go through state and local governments, which then maintain those open spaces and must periodically certify to FEMA that the lands remain in that status. Today, those grant programs include not only the Hazard Mitigation Grant Program (HMGP), a sometimes-substantial source of mitigation funding that is available after a presidentially declared disaster; the Pre-Disaster Mitigation (PDM) program, created as part of the Disaster Mitigation Act of 2000, which amended the Stafford Act; and Flood Mitigation Assistance (FMA), part of which deals with Severe Repetitive Loss properties, which make up a disproportionate share of overall flood claims.

In the notice, FEMA has announced a new option to allow owners of flooded properties to retain the underlying land while being paid to demolish the structures, thereby permitting them to eventually rebuild on that same flood-prone land. Because mitigation grants have gone from FEMA through states to local governments, those governments have been responsible for the open space programs that result. This new approach would allow the property owner the option of taking the grant directly from FEMA. In its comments on the proposal, ASFPM noted that, in the 2004 NFIP reform legislation, it supported providing FEMA the option to deal directly with property owners, mostly because some local governments have lacked the capacity to monitor the open space requirements, but it still expected that FEMA would consult with those governments before using that option as a means of maintaining consistency with state and local hazard mitigation policy. The current notice makes no mention of such coordination.

Elevation of flooded properties remains a viable option in many cases.

It is not as if these owners do not have other options for mitigating future flood damage, including elevation of residential structures above the 100-year base flood elevation established on FEMA flood insurance rate maps, or floodproofing the structure. But, the thinking seems to be, some owners will be more willing to demolish if they can retain the land. One possibility for some might be to retain the land, rebuild in due course, and flip the improved property while leaving the NFIP with continued flood loss exposures. How that helps federal taxpayers or other flood insurance rate payers is not especially clear.

The Federal Register announcement does nothing to make that clear. If you follow the link and read the notice, you are likely to experience my reaction, which was that I felt left in the dark regarding the rationale for making this move, which is not explained. Nor does FEMA provide any data to support the idea that this initiative would do anything to reduce flood losses. The opposite could easily prove true.

In an April 26 article in Insurance Journal, former FEMA administrator Craig Fugate offers some support for the new option by noting that placing land in permanent open space through a buyout is often a “hard sell.” That may well be, but it is partly because the solution is meant to be effective and lasting. It is also not as if the approach has lacked success. As NRDC notes in its comments, citing ASFPM case studies, more than 30,000 floodplain properties have been removed from development since 1993, many of them following major cataclysms such as the 1993 and 2008 Midwest floods and various hurricanes.

Perhaps more telling is the question of homeowners’ motivation in making the difficult decision to sell and relocate. The idea that people would necessarily prefer to be able to rebuild in the same location is not as clear or straightforward as some might assume, though there are, no doubt, advocates of property rights who would prefer to create the new option. But this emotional decision contains some factors that should not be ignored. Perhaps straight to the point is this comment from American Rivers:

Our experience working with floodplain managers has taught us that convincing property owners to accept a buyout is an emotional and difficult decision, and many are only willing to accept the buyout offer after they are assured that the property will be preserved as open space for the good of the public. Offering direct grants that allow new construction where a structure was demolished could be at odds with local hazard mitigation plans and efforts to acquire flood prone properties for open space. FEMA should instead be working to support the implementation of open space goals in local and state hazard mitigation grants.

In other words, many of those choosing a buyout, having suffered the damages of severe and repetitive losses from flooding, and aware of the larger issues concerning the public good in these situations, would rather ensure that nothing like this happens again, at least in their community. But what happens to the motivation undergirding their willingness to sell if they become acutely aware that their neighbors now have the option of prolonging the pain by not placing the land in permanent open space? Will they still feel that they are accomplishing anything by pursuing the traditional option? In any event, are these not the people whose choices we most want to honor for the greater good of the community?

City-acquired open space in Cedar Falls, Iowa, near the Cedar River.

The essential reason all this is important is that we have learned much over the years about the natural and beneficial functions of floodplains, which include soil enrichment, wildlife habitat, reduced flood severity, and reductions in erosion and stormwater runoff, to name a few, in addition to the potential recreational functions of waterfront parks and open space. All this is in addition to the fiscal benefits of reducing future floodplain losses in the areas affected. If all that is not reason enough for FEMA to pause, rethink the question, and at least offer some solid scientific and economic documentation of the benefits of the proposed new approach, then I am not sure what is. Otherwise, count me a serious skeptic.

Jim Schwab

Step Forward on Water Hazards Resilience

Satellite photo of Great Lakes and St. Lawrence Seaway. Image from NOAA Great Lakes Environmental Research Laboratory (CC BY-SA 2.0).

It is time to make America resilient. The trends have been moving us in the wrong direction for a long time, but we know how to reverse them.

Planners — and elected officials — have to embrace the science that will inform us best on how to achieve that goal, and we have to develop the political will to decide that public safety in the face of natural hazards is central both to fiscal prudence and the kind of nation we want to be. America will not become great by being short-sighted.

Damage from natural disasters is taking an increasing toll on our society and our economy. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), currently the target for serious budget cuts by the Trump administration, operates the National Centers for Environmental Information (NCEI), a vital national resource center for data. It has long tracked the number and costs of the nation’s weather and climate-related disasters, and the conclusion is unavoidable: The number of billion-dollar disasters is growing and getting worse.

APA’s Hazards Planning Center has long studied and highlighted best planning practices for addressing the vulnerabilities that lead to such disaster losses. However, the uptake into community planning systems varies, and it is often a long process challenged by resource shortages.

In recognition of Water Week, I offer the following recommendations to Congress for ways in which federal partners and planners can work together to create stronger, more resilient communities:

Maintain funding levels

Maintaining the necessary funding support for agencies like NOAA is critical for providing us with the baseline information the nation needs to track data. It’s only through the ongoing coordination, maintence, and strengthening of national data resources that federal partners will truly be able to support local planning efforts. More data — not less — is the key to creating hazards policy that prepares communities for the future.

Translate science into good public policy

It is important to find new and better ways to translate science into good public policy. This is one of the objectives for NOAA’s Regional Coastal Resilience program — just one of the many important grants in danger of being defunded in FY 2018.

Support America’s coastal communities by ensuring that they benefit from projects directing the nation’s scientific and technical ingenuity to solve problems related to coastal hazards. The price tag is a tiny fraction of what the nation spent on recovery from Hurricane Sandy. The program is clearly a wise investment in our coastal future.

Reauthorize the National Flood Insurance Program

The National Flood Insurance Program expires this year. Reauthorization must include continued support for the flood mapping program so communities have essential baseline information on the parameters of their flooding challenges.

Municipalities and counties need accurate and current flood mapping and data in order to make more informed judgments on both how and where to build. Only then will the nation begin to dial back the volume of annual flood damages.

Pass the Digital Coast Act

Passing the Digital Coast Act means authorizing and enabling NOAA to provide the suite of tools, data, and resources under the Digital Coast program that have proved useful to local planners, coastal resource managers, public works departments, and water agencies in better managing coastal zones and the natural systems that keep them healthy.

Through the Digital Coast Partnership, APA has been a strong advocate for formalizing NOAA’s Digital Coast project through legislation and providing adequate federal appropriations for robust funding.

This legislation already has bipartisan support because the program shows government at its best in providing cost-effective support to scientifically informed public policy and decision making.

As APA Past President Carol Rhea, FAICP, has noted, “This legislation will directly improve local disaster response and hazard mitigation planning. This bill will help local communities minimize potential loss of life and damage to infrastructure, private property, and conservation areas. The Digital Coast Act is an important step for effective coastal management.”

Continue funding for the Great Lakes Restoration Initiative

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency was created partly in response to the sorry condition of the Great Lakes and major tributaries like the Cuyahoga and Maumee Rivers. We have come a long way since then. The lakes and rivers are healthier, and the communities around them are, too. Yet the administration’s budget would zero out such programs despite their megaregional and even international impacts.

Recognize the progress we have made and renew America’s commitment to further improve these major bodies of water. Support coastal resilience along the Great Lakes.

These are not dramatic requests. Mostly, they recognize the slow but steady progress — and the persistent creativity — that has resulted from past commitments. They are, however, critical to successful water policy and to our national future as a resilient nation.

Jim Schwab

This post is reprinted from the APA Blog with permission from the American Planning Association, for which it was produced.

Protect What We’ve Gained in Flood Loss Reduction

Flood damage on Staten Island from Hurricane Sandy in 2012.

Flood damage on Staten Island from Hurricane Sandy in 2012.

One of the ongoing, perhaps permanent, struggles in public policy in a democracy like ours involves finding a balance between enabling private sector opportunities and protecting both the public interest and the public purse. Depending on their philosophies and perspectives, people will naturally draw those lines in different places on different issues. But sometimes it is perfectly clear when the public interest is about to suffer a hit. Currently, one of those possibilities involves the fate of the National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP).

On April 28, the U.S. House of Representatives passed HR 2901, a bill that seeks to make it easier for private companies to write private flood insurance policies that can take the place of those provided by the NFIP. The NFIP was created under the National Flood Insurance Act of 1968 to provide insurance that was then largely unavailable on the private market, but it also set in motion the creation of a federal regulatory program that has established standards for floodplain management in more than 22,000 communities nationwide. Many of those communities, particularly smaller ones, have no other meaningful land-use regulations, unlike bigger cities and suburbs and communities in states that mandate planning, which typically have comprehensive plans, zoning ordinances, and subdivision regulations. The reason is that federal flood insurance is made available only in communities that have adopted the minimum standards of the NFIP, which seek to achieve flood loss reduction, thus reducing the damages from flooding and the resultant payouts under flood policies.

It makes perfect sense. There is no good reason for the federal government to insure properties against flood losses without making some attempt to minimize those losses through sensible land-use measures. Private casualty insurers certainly make attempts within their means to reduce losses from other types of accidents and disasters. Why not the federal government?

There is nothing inherently wrong with expanding opportunities for private flood insurance coverage. But there are serious issues with HR 2901, and the Association of State Floodplain Managers (ASFPM), an organization with which I work closely as manager of the Hazards Planning Center at the American Planning Association (APA), has mounted an alert among its members to urge U.S. Senators to take time to examine the bill closely before taking any action this fall. It has also addressed the issue earlier in testimony before the Senate Committee on Small Business and Entrepreneurship. The Senate is in recess until September 6. ASFPM would ideally prefer that Congress defer action until next year, when the NFIP is due for reauthorization in any case, in order to consider the unintended consequences of the House bill in line with the larger objectives of the NFIP. APA is in support of the ASFPM effort in this regard.

The NFIP has evolved for nearly half a century with numerous revisions and reforms over time. Like any such program, it has needed to evolve in response to new lessons and changing circumstances. Some of the most significant lessons of the past came from the 1993 Midwest floods, which spawned reforms a year later. Among numerous changes that year was modification of policies to include Increased Cost of Compliance, which allows policies to pay for building improvements in response to higher local building standards, for example, by requiring elevation of buildings above the Base Flood Elevation, which is basically the height of the 100-year, or one percent chance annual flood, as mapped on the NFIP’s Flood Insurance Rate Maps. It is in the public interest to facilitate the capacity of communities to upgrade such codes over time as new lessons are learned, and to make it financially feasible for policy owners to comply with those new standards when rebuilding after a flood.

To be sure, these maps have never been perfect indicators of flood risk, though they are getting better with current digitization initiatives. Still, only about 1.2 million miles of shoreline and riverfront have been mapped, while more than 2/3 of the miles of the nation’s waterways are not. Most of the latter are small creeks and streams outside developed areas, which clearly have always been the priority. But it also means that development can occur in less developed areas without requirements to meet standards that only apply to mapped floodplains—unless a local jurisdiction is proactive enough to require developers to map such areas before new subdivisions or other development can be considered. Mostly, that is not the case.

So what is at issue with HR 2901? For one thing, NFIP policies include a policy fee that helps underwrite the cost of all this mapping, including updates and corrections over time. It is an ongoing process in part because floodplains are not static geographic entities. They expand or contract with the impact of our development practices, which affect the amount of impervious surface in urbanized areas, which affect how stormwater and other runoff is absorbed into the ground or directed downstream. Further, according the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), about 40 percent of flood-related losses occur outside mapped floodplains. Why? Because not all floodplains are adequately mapped or as yet mapped at all, and because flooding can occur outside and beyond the 100-year floodplain, and often does.  We have Certified Floodplain Managers these days because this is, in fact, a complex and technical subject.

The problem with not including policy fees in the private policies is that the burden of financing this public good of mapping floodplains and maintaining a mountain of data about flood hazards falls to those NFIP policyholders who are paying for it, or to the American taxpayer when Congress allocates money directly for the purpose. The fee also supports flood hazard reduction efforts under FEMA’s Flood Mitigation Assistance program. That creates an inequity in favor of private flood insurance. But that is not all. Although federal financial regulators have had authority to establish policies concerning what provisions in a private policy would make them acceptable as an alternative to an NFIP policy, they have not acted. FEMA legal advisors, for whatever reason, decided in 2013 they did not have the authority to issue guidance. So the House bill assigned this responsibility to state insurance commissioners while prescribing that lenders and federal bank regulators “shall accept” the standards laid out by the states. It would be small surprise to anyone knowledgeable in this field to discover that state regulation in most cases is likely to be minimal and limited. The only required equivalency in the House bill will deal with the coverage amount, which may result in much smaller private premiums with high deductibles that may be superficially attractive—until homeowners with large deductibles find they lack the resources to rebuild and just walk away, quite possibly leaving communities and the federal government holding the bag for addressing the problems of neighborhoods with spotty redevelopment and blighted properties.

All of this, at the very least, deserves some serious debate before the Senate accepts the House version, but proponents have been seeking to fast-track the Senate bill (S 1679) under a process known as Unanimous Consent. However, if enough Senators hear enough complaints, fast-track may become a less attractive option. And, as noted earlier, there are good reasons to delay this discussion and take it up as part of the NFIP reauthorization next year, so that both Senators and the public can begin to understand the full implications of what has been proposed.

In no way would this be a death knell for private flood insurance. One problem the bill deals with in two useful paragraphs is to allow the private policies to be considered “portable” for the purpose of maintaining an unbroken record of coverage for a property if the owner switches between public and private insurance. That has not been the case but is not hard to fix. ASFPM notes that there has been a doubling in the last couple of years of companies offering private insurance. In other words, the expansion of private flood insurance is already happening. There is no reason to create a whole class of private policies that are not truly equivalent to those of the NFIP and, in the process, undermine the public goods produced by the NFIP and quite likely, increase the number of property owners seeking disaster assistance after discovering they are inadequately covered.

Flood insurance policy has already entered a volatile period that began with the Biggert-Waters Flood Insurance Reform Act of 2012, passed just a few months before Hurricane Sandy. While trying to place older, subsidized policies on a path to actuarially justifiable rates, it triggered a political backlash when rates began to soar after the impact of Hurricane Sandy. By 2014, Congress somewhat reversed course but has left unresolved a number of issues concerning how previously subsidized policyholders could afford their now escalating premiums as Congress sought to reconcile affordability with a desire to place the NFIP on a fiscally sound footing. It is a thorny issue at best, and we surely have not heard the end of it.  The simple fact is that large numbers of older, poorly protected properties in or near floodplains are likely to continue to generate flood losses into the future.

We already have a flood insurance program that is $23 billion in debt to the U.S. Treasury because of Hurricanes Katrina and Sandy, which overrode assumptions that the NFIP would largely insure garden-variety disasters. Next year’s reauthorization could sensibly forgive this debt in order to begin to place the NFIP back on a fiscally sound footing, but not with the approaches in HR 2901. We need to strengthen, not weaken, a system that at least drives toward stronger floodplain management and flood mitigation. We need to get this train moving again in the right direction. Congress needs generally to be more productive than it has been in recent years, but it also needs to put more thought into this particular issue and act in less haste. The alternative is to continue to generate a long train of unintended consequences and later ask what happened and why.

Jim Schwab