Are buyouts best solution for battling rising seas?

It finally happened. Monroe County has admitted what many have long known: local government will not be able to save all places and properties from losses due to rising seas.

Based on the projected costs of raising roads in the Florida Keys, Monroe County recognized that the price tag would be too high. The estimated cost to keep one threemile stretch of road dry from expected 2060 flooding is over $60 million per mile.

But which roads — and the properties that depend on them — will be saved? And who pays? The private property owners? The county’s taxpayers? The State of Florida (again, taxpayers)?

One possible approach is buyouts. While buyouts are increasingly discussed as a method of promoting “managed relocation” away from rising seas, buyouts present serious challenges as a long-term policy. First, the concept of buyouts originally developed as way to address problems in the National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP), not as a response to rising seas. Buyouts were developed to address the fact that about 1 percent of the properties insured by the NFIP represented over 30 percent of the payouts.

This led to the argument that it would be cheaper for the federal government to buy properties that repeatedly flood rather than continue to pay insurance losses on those properties. But sea-level rise and the challenges of the NFIP are different. Buying out properties with elevated buildings that do not flood but are unlivable because they are not accessible does not, ultimately, save taxpayers money. Second, buyouts are expensive. There is not enough money to buy out all of the properties that are or will be at risk from sea-level rise.

Third, recent research indicates that while wealthier and more highly populated counties conduct more buyouts, the buyouts occur disproportionately in areas of greater social vulnerability. This leads to a fourth challenge. The notion will grow that, “If that property being swallowed by the sea got a buyout at a good price, then I don’t need to worry about the future since when my property is at risk or lost, I’ll get a good price for my property as well.” As more property owners begin to think of the government as the insurer of their property, political and legal pressure to fulfill these expectations will grow. This conflicts with the knowledge that there is not enough money to buy out all of the properties at risk.

This dynamic highlights a fifth risk of buyouts as a general policy: they represent a potentially massive redistribution of wealth from taxpayers to property owners, essentially making government the insurers of properties that may be lost to rising seas.

As Florida Keys Mayor Heather Carruthers told the New York Times: “[W]e’ll probably face some lawsuits.”

Yes, that is almost guaranteed. But it will not usually be the poor hiring lawyers; it will be the wealthier landowners.

But courts are seldom the best way to make good public policy. Rather than waiting for lawsuits, governments should engage citizens in discussions about how to address the losses that sea-level rise will cause.

Local and state government need to develop policies that save what can be saved, prolong the quality of life where it can reasonably be prolonged, and accept the loss of what cannot be saved without bankrupting governments.

The complexity of developing such policies is not the job of courts. It is the responsibility of legislative bodies.

And they have options for policy development, though none will be easy. One basic policy that many have advocated is better notice to property owners and purchasers of potential impacts on properties.

Currently only a few states provide potential purchasers notice of flood risk.

However, providing notice of the current and expected impacts due to sea-level rise is not being done. Providing such information would allow potential purchasers to make more informed decisions. Providing this type of information could have other benefits: it would help people understand that government cannot, and is not legally obligated to, serve as an insurer that property owners do not experience loss; it would promote the property market integrating the costs of potential risk into the pricing; and it could serve as a point in time where we say that taxpayers are not liable to pay for the costs of risks knowingly undertaken by property purchasers. Sea-level rise is going to cause extensive loss of property and money. Legislative bodies need to develop defensible policies that seek not only to “protect” areas from sea-level rise but also to help guide what happens and who shoulders the burden when the inevitable occurs.

Attorney Thomas Ruppert is Coastal Planning Specialist at the Florida Sea Grant College Program.

“The Invading Sea” is the opinion arm of the Florida Climate Reporting Network.

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