Lake County appeals to lawmakers regarding flood insurance premium discounts

Administrative issues in Washington are threatening better flood insurance premium discounts for Lake County property owners, and the county commission is asking its federal legislators for help.

Administration of the National Flood Insurance Program's Community Rating System, or CRS, has been paused, just as Lake County is set to receive a rating upgrade that would increase local premium discounts to 20%, from 15%, for participating property owners, according to Carl Bursa, the county's floodplain administrator and operations manager of water resources.

At Bursa's urging, commissioners voted unanimously April 14 to send letters to Rep. Daniel Webster and senators Rick Scott and Ashley Moody, asking them to restore funding for CRS. A fourth letter is addressed to Karen Evans, acting administrator of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, or FEMA, which operates the national program, or NFIP.

Bursa said the contract to administer CRS "has been rendered inactive," resulting in a nationwide pause. Lake County's rating improvement, due Oct. 1, "has been put on hold … until whatever action they're going to take on the contract gets done," he added.

The NFIP provides flood insurance for federally backed mortgages. It requires participating communities to follow federal floodplain regulations. The CRS program provides discounts on flood insurance premiums for communities that exceed minimum NFIP standards. Lake County is one of 244 participating communities in Florida.

Why the contract to administer CRS has been paused is not clear.

In early March, the Association of State Floodplain Managers, a scientific and educational nonprofit organization dedicated to reducing flood loss across the nation, said FEMA had cancelled the contract to administer CRS, putting annual recertifications, cycle verification visits, re-evaluations to increase rank, and entry into the program on hold. It also noted a contract covering risk management, quality assurance and mitigation planning was set to expire at the end of that month.

In a March 26 news release, FEMA said it has no plans to pause the program. It accused an unidentified vendor of "convey[ing] false information and unnecessarily confus[ing] state and local community leaders," about the program's status. It said it was "exploring ways to streamline" the CRS process but did not directly address concerns about the contracts' status.

According to the Congressional Research Service, the NFIP program is $22.5 billion in debt with only about $8 billion of authority remaining to borrow from the U.S. Treasury.