DiGennaro: Let us out of inspection program

Monroe County Commissioner Mario DiGennaro believes local residents have been under the thumb of the Federal Emergency Management Agency long enough.

So Wednesday he’s going to try and garner support from at least two other county commissioners to approve a resolution asking FEMA to end the flood insurance inspection program.

The county had to implement the program in 2002 after FEMA came to town in the late 1990s and told county officials they hadn’t done enough over the years to prevent the proliferation of non-compliant enclosed space below base flood elevation.

After a couple of false starts where some of the then-seated commissioners tried to get FEMA not to force compliance, the county leaders put the insurance inspection in place, as well as the inspection on sale program and the building permit application inspection program.

In the seven-plus years the programs have been in place, county leaders and property owners have complained that some portions of the program caused more problems than they rectified.

FEMA officials recently tossed out a county request to modify the terms of the downstairs enclosure inspection program.

That proposal would have stopped all inspections and granted amnesty from the federal mandates to non-conforming lower-level enclosures until the homes were sold. At sale, inspections would be done and non-conforming uses rectified.

FEMA officials told county leaders they couldn’t grant amnesty from federal flood plain regulations, and rejected the proposal.

County officials have implemented the enclosure inspection programs over the years because FEMA has threatened to suspend property owners here from the National Flood Insurance Program if the inspections weren’t carried out.

But DiGennaro believes that threat is no longer valid because the county is in substantial compliance with FEMA mandates.

“Asking FEMA to end the insurance inspection program is the right thing to do for a number of reasons,” said DiGennaro. “Our people have been doing this long enough. This program has had all kinds of consequences for our homeowners, our construction industry, our home sales, our housing situation and it’s time we ask for it to stop.”

Any attempts to modify downstairs enclosure inspection programs in the past have met with a lukewarm reception at best from a majority of the county commission.

“I think once I explain that this will not in any way jeopardize our participation in the NFIP, my fellow commissioners will see that it’s the right thing to do,” said DiGennaro.

According to reports from John November, a law fellow with the grass roots group Citizens Not Serfs, FEMA can’t suspend the county from the NFIP if it votes to ask for termination of the inspection program.

The flood insurance renewal inspection program was a pilot, one-of-a-kind program instituted between the county and FEMA after the federal agency chastised leadership for failing to adequately enforce existing flood-plain management regulations.

November says that if the pilot program is lifted, it puts Monroe County back under the thumb of FEMA rules which govern every other flood-prone community in the United States.

But that’s not what the county commission would be voting to do Wednesday. They would be voting to approve a resolution requesting FEMA terminate the pilot program.

“Even though some members of the community have incorrectly stated otherwise, there is simply no legal justification as to why Monroe County respectfully requesting FEMA to terminate the pilot program would result in probation or suspension from the NFIP,” wrote November.

The vote wouldn’t change the parameters of the existing inspection programs. It just asks FEMA to eliminate the insurance renewal inspection program. And it would erase Monroe County’s name from the Code of Federal Regulations as the only community named non-compliant of the approximately 22,000 NFIP-eligible communities.

November says Citizens Not Serfs stance is that by being the only named community, Monroe County will be looked at by Congressional leaders as severely non-compliant in flood plain management.

That will probably translate to much higher flood insurance premiums for everyone in the county in the coming years.

Congressional leaders have begun the process of reviewing flood insurance through the NFIP. The general consensus is that premiums will go up as subsidies are phased out.

The first subsidies to go will be those homes currently listed as pre-FIRM, or built before the date FEMA was created, January 1, 1975.

And the rates, opines November, will be higher for those communities deemed non-compliant. Right now, that is only Monroe County by virtue of its status as a named non-compliant community in the federal codes.

But that status is not correct, according to the CNS report.

Monroe County has completed more than 75 percent of the inspections required under the pilot program, and more than 85 percent of those inspected are either in compliance or have come into compliance.

There are only a few hundred homes still remaining to be inspected, with less than that expected to be non-compliant.

CNS officials believe those numbers equate to Monroe County being in substantial compliance with FEMA mandates, which means the pilot program can come to an end.

“The pilot program has exacerbated all the problems our current government wishes to remedy,” said CNS Founder Phil Shannon.

He says that construction crews aren’t getting work because property owners won’t undergo sometimes unneeded inspections under the flood-plain regulations, which cuts back on jobs. In some cases, the enclosures provided an extra income for the low-to-moderate income homeowner so they could afford to keep the property, but are forced to move away, with their workforce skills, when they can no longer derive that income.

Still others are forced to sell out and leave because they can’t afford the financial hit that can reach well into the tens of thousands of dollars to bring non-conforming enclosures into compliance with today’s codes.

The program is also costing the taxpayer loads of money, says Shannon, because the few people who can afford to fight enclosure violations force the county to spend legal fees to defend what he calls an indefensible program.

DiGennaro said that Monroe County has proven its willingness to adhere to FEMA flood-plain management regulations.

“We’ve been doing this long enough. It’s time to let us be just like everyone else in the country,” he said.

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