Clancy DuBos: ‘Risk Rating 2.0' hides awful truths about flood insurance

Politicians and bureaucrats love slogans and buzzwords. It spares them the trouble of telling the truth. This week, FEMA began rolling out "Risk Rating 2.0" - a bureaucratic scrim for higher flood insurance premiums.

Like most buzzwords, Risk Rating 2.0 hides an awful truth: FEMA, at the direction of Congress, has taken virtually all of the subsidies out of subsidized flood insurance.

As a consequence, just as people across south Louisiana struggle to recover from devastating hurricanes last year and this year, most of them - close to 80%, according to U.S. Sen. Bill Cassidy - saw their flood insurance rates go up on Oct. 1.

Like all seasoned bureaucrats, FEMA touted the 2.0 rollout in benign, almost glowing terms. Consider this introduction from a FEMA website:

"The (2.0) methodology leverages industry best practices and cutting-edge technology to enable FEMA to deliver rates that are actuarily sound, equitable, easier to understand and better reflect a property's flood risk."

I'm not saying that FEMA has lied. It hasn't. It just couched the truth in language that makes the impact of 2.0 less scary. For example, "actuarily sound" and "risk rating" means people who live near the flood-prone coast will get slammed, even with the congressionally mandated annual cap of 18% rate increases. Their rates will go up every year until they pay market rates.

To folks in other areas, that sounds fair, but there are two problems with that line of thinking.

First, Congress created flood insurance in 1968 (after Hurricane Betsy flooded much of New Orleans) as a subsidized program. Property owners bought into it on that basis. Now Congress has decided to eliminate most of the subsidies, largely because they're considered too expensive - especially as storms get more intense and hit coastal areas more frequently.

Second, when people settled in coastal areas, particularly in south Louisiana, their homes were high and dry for generations. Then Congress put levees along the Mississippi River and other waterways, depriving south Louisiana wetlands of their annual replenishment (which built up the land annually). Congress also allowed oil companies to carve up the coast with canals that accelerated land loss - and subsidence. Congress also enacted policies that accelerate climate change, which gave us sea level rise.

Now Congress is punishing people for living in areas that didn't flood nearly as often before Congress made all those flood-friendly decisions.

And FEMA, which still hasn't effectively delivered desperately needed relief to southwest Louisiana more than a year after Hurricane Laura devastated that area, has rolled out Risk Rating 2.0 with Teutonic efficiency and thoroughness.

Here's a truth that no amount of slogans and buzzwords can hide: America subsidizes corporations, major industries and other special interests with grants, subsidies, bailouts, tax breaks and more - to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars every year. Flood insurance helps a lot more people than corporate welfare. Congress needs to save flood insurance, not price it beyond people's reach.

Either that, or make special interests "actuarily sound" instead of dependent on federal subsidies, tax breaks and bailouts.