1,200 Protest Costly Change in Flood Maps

About 1,200 mostly angry residents of Lakewood and other communities turned out to assail federal flood control officials whose new maps mean they will have to pay up to $600 or more to buy flood insurance policies.

Outraged homeowners say that the feds are forcing southeast Los Angeles County residents to pay for floods in Northern California and the Midwest.

But as homeowners left an open house sponsored by the Federal Emergency Management Agency in Lakewood on Wednesday night, they feared they may have no choice but to purchase the costly new policies.

“This is extortion,” said Jerry Cleveland, a Lakewood contractor who added that he has lived in his home 25 years with little threat of flooding.

But new flood zone maps that become official July 6 say otherwise, declaring that Lakewood, Long Beach, Compton, Bellflower and 10 other southeast-area cities over an 86-square-mile region of the county are in a danger zone in the event of a 100-year flood--a flood that has a 1% chance of happening during any given year.

The maps will affect 110,000 homes and businesses and 250,000 residents, meaning lenders with federally regulated mortgages will begin requiring borrowers to carry the policies.

Lakewood Mayor Marc Titel is calling the insurance requirement a “flood tax,” and has estimated that residents could be paying, collectively, as much as $49 million a year. Other estimates are significantly lower because many people won’t be required to carry the insurance if they own their homes outright or have non-federally regulated mortgages. Some homeowners simply refuse to carry the insurance.

Annual premiums will range from $281 per $100,000 of insured value, if purchased before the maps become official, to $590 after July 6. Nearly all the money goes to the federal government to pay for flood damage throughout the nation.

The new flood zone maps will be changed--and the flood insurance requirement lifted--once the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers completes a $240-million levee repair project underway in the Lower Los Angeles River Basin.

Called the Los Angeles County Drainage Area Flood Control Project, levees are being shored up by an average of four feet from the Santa Fe Dam Recreational Area in Irwindale south along the Rio Hondo Channel to the Los Angeles River and on to the ocean.

One sore point with residents is that Congress has been dragging its heels on appropriations for the levee project.

This year, the federal budget contained only $21 million for the project, about half of what was needed, critics say. Next year’s budget contains only $11 million, a figure that Rep. Stephen Horn (R-Long Beach), among others, is fighting to increase.

“If they spend $11 million a year, it will take 20 years to finish the project,” said Donald J. Waldie, a spokesman for the city of Lakewood. “That kind of delay is unconscionable. We could finish this project in four years if Congress would put the money into it. Then the insurance requirement would be lifted.”

Waldie, who helped organize the open house, looked over a roomful of angry residents.

“No one is happy. How could you be?” he said.

“Boo, hiss,” said Sherry Canaday, a longtime Lakewood resident. “You don’t know how mad this makes me.”

Canaday is typical of those living in the working class, blue-collar communities most affected by the flood zone maps. She retired from a production line where she assembled light fixtures. She said her house is on a hill and even though it backs up to a flood control channel, she has never been flooded in the 25 years she has lived there.

“It makes me mad because they are going to get more than $2,000 of my money over 10 years. That’s money I’d rather spend on household improvements,” she said. She vented her anger at FEMA officials but got no satisfaction.

“According to them, there is no getting out of it,” she said. “If the government says you have to do it, you have to do it. I came here because I wanted someone official to yell at, but I don’t think it did any good.”

The FEMA representatives managed to maintain smiles even as they were being rebuked. Residents waved maps at the officials, complaining that although their homes were within the flood hazard area, the homes of neighbors a few doors away were not. They complained that the requirement would make it harder to sell their homes.

“If they want to share frustrations with us, then they should share frustrations with us,” said the unflappable Christina Lopez, who works in FEMA’s Los Angeles office. “At least we can say, as the federal government, we are willing to deal with them face to face and share this information.”

Homeowners were given the brochures “Coping with a Flood--Before, During and After,” “Tips on Handling Your Flood Insurance Claim” and copies of FEMA’s “Flood Zone Bulletin.”

Over and over, residents were told that if they bought their insurance now, through any number of private insurance companies, they could get it for half what they will have to pay later.

But people like Jerry Cleveland weren’t buying it. He said his house is high enough off the ground to be flood-proof. “I will never have a drop of their imaginary flood waters in my house, yet they want to extort insurance out of me,” he said.