National flood insurance program faces Friday expiration

Nov. 27--Flood insurance agencies and policy holders are just four days away from the expiration of the National Flood Insurance Program, and local experts say there is little certainty about what's to come.

"We are coming back from the Thanksgiving break with no bill, no plan and four days left until the end of the National Flood Insurance Program," Joe Rossi, chairman of the Massachusetts Coastal Coalition, said Tuesday.

Congress granted the program a saving-grace extension just hours before the program was set to expire this July. The short-term extension saved insurance policies from lapsing, but the program is set to expire again on Friday and Rossi says it's hard to guess at what's going to happen to the program which covers thousands of coastal homeowners on the South Shore.

"From what I gathered on a legislative call this afternoon, we are at a point where there has been no movement on extending the National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP)," he said. "There are a lot of moving parts with only three or four days left."

Rossi said there are two things that could realistically happen when the deadline hits Friday: the program could be extended for six more months, or it could get a seven-day extension that would line it up with the Dec. 7 government spending bill deadline facing Congress.

The program was separated from the larger government spending bill earlier this year. The separation kept the program alive through hurricane season while leaders in Washington fought over other, more partisan parts of the appropriations bill. Re-linking the program to a general spending bill would be a major step back, Rossi said.

"There is already talk of a government shutdown for funding for things like the wall and immigration matters," he said. "If that happens, and the program is caught up in it, we could see a real lapse in flood insurance. The idea of extending it through Nov. 30 was to get past hurricane season, but in many parts of the country, storm season is just beginning."

The extension approved by the Senate this July funds the program through Friday, but is a far cry from a larger bill that was being pushed by Rossi and other coastal groups. Their bill included what Rossi called "necessary reforms," but it was rejected by the House of Representatives. Since then, Congress has done little to work on reforms for the program, but some legislators now say they won't vote for extending the program into 2019 without them.

"There is not enough time to put together any time of significant reforms at this point, so there could be a stalemate," Rossi said. "Ideally we will get a six-month extension that would keep the NFIP from lapsing during a government shutdown. "The general idea is that in the next six months we will be able to get some serious reforms together."

Rossi said he is cautiously optimistic about a six-month extension, but that he is preparing for a lapse and encourages coastal homeowners to do the same. He recommends that anyone with a policy set to expire in the next 120 days asks their insurance agency to generate a renewal notice, which would protect them in the case of a lapse.

The program lapsed for a few days this January, and for just six hours this March. They were the first lapses since 2010. The July extension was the seventh granted to the program since it first expired in October 2017.

The flood insurance program, started in 1956, became a hot-button issue on the South Shore in 2013 when FEMA released new flood maps for Marshfield, Scituate and Duxbury that help set the rates and determine which owners must buy flood insurance. Later, maps for other South Shore communities, including Quincy, also caused an uproar.

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