Sun Sentinel Palm Beach Edition
FEMA’s flood maps not yet open for review
Officials facing Oct. 5 deadline
After four years of revisions, Palm Beach County’s new flood insurance rate maps have been finalized.
That’s what the Federal Emergency Management Agency told the county and its cities in a letter on April 5, triggering a six-month window for their elected officials to formally adopt the maps. There’s just one problem. Seven weeks after FEMA started that clock, the county and its cities are still waiting for the agency to make the flood hazard maps available for public inspection.
Ken Todd, Palm Beach County’s water resources manager, said FEMA told them in early April that they would release the maps to the public within “four to six weeks.”
On Tuesday, FEMA spokesman Danon Lucas said the maps won’t be available to the public for another one to two months. Yet, local governments still face an Oct. 5 deadline to formally adopt the maps, along with flood management plans, if they want property owners to remain eligible for coverage by the National Flood Insurance Program.
Todd said, “What makes this difficult for everybody is how do you adopt maps you haven’t received yet? That’s the boat we’re all in.”
Only a handful of county and city officials have glimpsed the long-awaited maps. And those are .pdf image versions, meaning they can’t easily search for properties or tally how many properties have been added to or removed from mandatory flood insurance zones compared with the current map versions, which have been in use since the 1980s.
FEMA reluctantly sent those image files to Doug Wise, the county’s flood plain administrator and building official, who told the agency he needed them for long-range planning, Todd said. FEMA asked Wise not to release them to the public because they are still undergoing a quality control check, Todd added.
And while Wise will allow anyone a glimpse at his
.pdf versions of the maps, he’s honoring FEMA’s request that he not release his copies to the public.
What FEMA hasn’t provided anyone yet is the more comprehensive and detailed Geographical Information System version that can be uploaded to websites. GIS maps are easily searchable, enabling property owners to see whether they’ll be placed in flood risk zones requiring costly flood insurance if they have a federally backed mortgage. Other property owners currently in highrisk zones could be removed, dropping the price of their coverage and giving them the option to drop flood insurance altogether.
Christine Benkly, the county’s GIS coordinator, says it will take about two weeks after FEMA releases the maps to get a searchable version onto the county’s website. Lucas said FEMA will post a version to its Map Service Center at msc.fema.gov/portal when they are ready for release.
Public interest in the new maps figures to be high. In 2013, the county and numerous cities in the central region of the county protested when FEMA released a preliminary map that would have shifted tens of thousands of parcels not currently required to buy flood insurance into high-risk flood zones.
Local and state officials appealed to FEMA, saying the proposed maps failed to account for storm water engineering by the county and private developers over the past 30 years.
FEMA agreed to incorporate flood elevation data developed by the South Florida Water Management District of properties affected by a canal that runs between Lake Okeechobee and the Lake Worth Lagoon.
Hundreds of residents showed up to inspect FEMA’s next set of revisions in four public workshops held in August 2014. Since then, even more revisions have been submitted to FEMA, and FEMA’s projected completion date has been moved up numerous times.
On Tuesday, Todd said members of the public had heard the maps were finalized and want to see them. Because the new maps are not publicly available, the county uploaded the preliminary map from 2013 to its website so residents whose properties weren’t subject to the appeals can search “and get a pretty good feel for how the changes are going to affect them,” Todd said.
But residents in the central region whose designations are likely to be different from the 2013 version should probably wait until the upcoming FEMA release, he said.
“Personally, I tell them not to even look,” Todd said.