Florida flood insurance put at risk | Jon Coats Law Blog

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?The Florida Legislature?s attempt to speed building permits and kickstart construction has inadvertently put the state?s homeowners in jeopardy of being booted out of the National Flood Insurance Program.

Without flood insurance, you can?t get a mortgage in much of Florida. The impact on housing, construction and the state?s fragile real estate market would be devastating.

But state officials have a fix in the works. They say Florida simply cannot afford to be excluded from national flood coverage.

?Florida is a low-lying peninsula with a lot of land at or below sea level. It?s got to have flood insurance,? said Eli Lehrer, an expert on flood insurance at The Heartland Institute, a free-market think tank in Washington and Tallahassee. ?And right now, the National Flood Insurance Program is the only game in town. It?s not realistic to think that Florida could withdraw from NFIP tomorrow.?

The problem stems from a bill passed by the Legislature last month with little sign of controversy.

Since then, the Federal Emergency Management Agency has warned Gov. Rick Scott that the bill contains a provision that could make the state ineligible for federally subsidized national flood insurance. Scott plans to review the bill before deciding whether to sign it, a spokeswoman said this week.

The provision says that Florida communities are no longer required to get approval by any federal or state agency before issuing building permits. But FEMA says it cannot provide flood insurance to communities that do not meet certain conditions. Those include observing federal flood-plain management rules that exclude development in some flood-prone zones and require buildings to be elevated on higher ground or foundations in other risky places.

The new Florida legislation could impede enforcement of such requirements ?and may jeopardize the state?s voluntary participation in the NFIP,? FEMA regional administrator Major P. May told Scott in a letter last month.

May noted that Florida is especially dependent on the program. ?There are 459 communities participating in the NFIP in Florida,? he wrote, ?and there are 2,059,371 flood insurance policies in the state with just over $471 billion in flood coverage.?"

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