As our friends, families and colleagues recover from the recent flooding disaster in Coastal Louisiana, it continues to be apparent the need for accurate flood maps and effective and affordable flood insurance for all citizens along the Gulf Coast.
Coastal Alabama Partnership (CAP) continues to work with regional and national partners on these issues and has recently received updates from two of our leading partners that are crucial to our communities in Coastal Alabama and beyond.
Flood Mapping
FEMA and the Alabama Office of Water Resources (OWR) have updated the expected release dates for the flood mapping projects in Mobile and Baldwin counties:
The OWR has facilitated discussions of the work maps with Baldwin County leaders prior to preliminary issuance and will facilitate similar discussions with Mobile County this fall.For further information on the flood mapping process, please contact Leslie Durham at 334-242-5506 or Leslie.Durham@adeca.alabama.gov. Ms. Durham is the Floodplain Management Branch Chief at OWR.
National Flood Insurance Program
The Coalition for Sustainable Flood Insurance (CSFI) is continuing to work towards making the National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP) sustainable and worthwhile for our region and the nation. Currently, CSFI is working with Scott Canady, Principal at Tambala Strategies, to produce white papers on key topics that need to be addressed in the reauthorization of the NFIP in 2017. These topics include affordability and rate structure, mapping and mitigation and consumer protections. The white papers will serve as the basis of the policy recommendations that the coalition will propose to Congress and will be released on a rolling basis, beginning on September 30th, 2016.
In addition, CSFI plans to develop a summary handout, based on the results from the white papers, to share the coalition’s position effectively with the public. This information will be available on the coalition’s website at http://csfi.info/. For those interested in diving deeper into the information collected, the white papers will also be made available on the coalition website once they are released. The goal of these documents are to help bring a broad group of constituents on to the same platform about flood insurance reform. For more information, please contact Lacy Strohschein at 504-527-6900 or lstrohschein@gnoinc.org, Senior Policy and Development Associate at Greater New Orleans, Inc.
