Point Place residents might have to choose between buying flood insurance or large machinery that removes backyard foliage, homemade docks, patios and swimming pools.

Howard Pinkley, who has lived in Point Place for 82 years, said he and his neighbors cannot afford extra monthly payments and will work hard to contest the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s (FEMA) recent floodplain map, which designated portions of the area in the floodplain. This mandates anyone with a federally backed mortgage to buy insurance.

“I was prepared to tell them, ‘pack your bags and get out of town,’ ” he said about his neighbors.

More than 300 people crammed into the Friendship Park Senior Center on June 24 for a public hearing, which quickly became a shouting match between infuriated Point Place dwellers and Ken Hinterlong, a District 5 FEMA representative and engineer.

In a nationwide project that federal engineers have worked on since 2002, FEMA released a new floodplain map proposal for Lucas County in April. Hinterlong said FEMA representatives alerted the City of Toledo more than a year and a half ago that officials would need to send FEMA documents accrediting the dike at Point Place or engineers would place the area in the floodplain.

But with strict FEMA requirements and the U. S. Army Corps of Engineer’s recent failing of the dike, the City of Toledo hadn’t acted to get the dike accredited until just recently, he said.

The Army Corps of Engineers built the dike in the early 1980s, but gave the city responsibility for maintaining it, said Robert Remmers, chief of the operations and technical support section at the corps’s Buffalo district.

In 2008, the corps failed the dike because it did not meet four major standards, making Point Place ineligible for federal funding in case of a natural disaster. This also reflects on FEMA’s decision whether to accredit the dike or not, Remmers said. The dike is one of seven that the corps failed last year — out of 44 flood control projects in the district.

“I have grave concerns that instead of the city paying money to recertify the dikes, they are going to pass it off to the citizens to pay the flood insurance,” said Michelle Glanville, a property owner in Point Place.

Toledo City Council passed an ordinance June 23 that allocates $63,000 for city engineers to work with a consulting firm to assess what they’ll have to change on the dike, and how much that will cost, said Dale Rupert, an engineer with the city’s division of streets, bridges and harbor.

But with the Jan. 25, 2010 deadline approaching, Councilwoman Lindsay Webb said the city needs more time and money.

“We’re not going to force insurance on you in January of 2010,” Hinterlong said, adding that after the deadline, FEMA won’t have official maps completed for at least 12 more months. The maps will have to be publically reviewed, go through a 90-day appeals process and other local procedures.

Major problems include a lot of foliage growing out of the dike, numerous patios and stairs that residents built into it and some areas where the dike has settled and is not high enough for standards, he said.

The Army Corps of Engineers cited these as reasons for failing the dike in 2008, along with the failure of the city to provide the corps with a videotaped record of all the pipes running through the structure, Remmers said. He added the city shouldn’t have allowed people to build structures on the dike.

“The regulations have not changed, but the enforcement of those regulations has,” Webb said.

Webb said the people who live in Point Place have had trees and structures built into the flood control system for almost as long as the dike has existed.

Webb called on everyone at the meeting to write letters to Ohio’s senators and representatives to request federal grants to help.

“Requiring this many homes to require flood insurance would be the death knell,” Webb said. “This neighborhood has already been designated  as a tipping point.”

Some residents could face rates as high as $700 a year. Resident Janice Fletcher said even if she “grandfathers” in to buy flood insurance, by basing rates on the current map, she’d have to pay $400 a year.

“I don’t think we’re going to ever flood,” she said. “We’ve never had a problem, and I don’t want the extra costs.”

Resident Eric Lacourse said if he’s forced to pay flood insurance, he and his neighbors “will become another foreclosure instance in Ohio.”

Many of Point Place’s residents are on fixed income like Social Security or have lost their jobs recently, Webb said.

The new floodplain map let about 4,200 addresses out of the floodplain and put 3,700 in throughout Lucas County, according to an April report.

This entry was posted on Thursday, June 25th, 2009 at 6:26 pm and is filed under Community.
You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.