me rating system for our insurance what we'd like to do through the course of this meeting is really try to keep the questions focus strictly on what they are explaining for clarity i know we all have a lot of questions would like to ask them all i was much as anyone but we want to trying to make this an informative section or a session about that and f i p in the c r s tonight hopefully if things go smoothly and quickly we have some time towards the end of the issues things are changing right now in the try to see if this will work from the side here so i have a few slides a little bit about the national flood insurance program about some of the changes that are underway right now that you may know of through the bigger waters act of last summer and then we're also going to be talking about statewide efforts to help communities become more flood resilient and also programs that might be of interest to the community such as the community rating system which is an opportunity that communities can qualify for some discounts on the cost of the flood insurance as well so we'll talk about all those people all those pieces what's going on if i could ask it's nice to have such a large group come out the see evening how many people here live or work in the floodplain ok so most people in the audience could how many people here have flood insurance so what i see is about two thirds of the group here ok good in there is a handout several handouts in the back please help yourself one of the things that we did know is that in richmond  of the one hundred plus structures that are privately owned in this special flood hazard area about sixteen percent of them have flood insurance right now so that the majority the vast majority of structures that are in the hazard zone are currently uninsured for any flood damage that's that's a special group that came out tonight since very good very important all right so richmond water and flooding historically looking across the community we can see the new ski river flowing northward and west toward the lake and this special flood has a here is shown on this map from recent data and you can see the red clusters are indicating buildings structures in the special flood has a theory around the community so you can see certain places in the village and jones bird jonesville and also up by the interest section at the interstate where there are higher concentrations of structures in the flood has an area actually if i go back there you'll see also that  a number of those structures vast majority of them are are single family structures mobile homes multifamily structures so a lot of these really represent families so that the key messages i want to talk with you tonight about really are about the flood insurance and what the community can do and so for flood insurance the key message tonight is that the flood insurance rates have risen significantly to meet the actual cost losses that are happening to structures in the flood hazard area the premiums on current insurance policies how many people again have a policy right now that's current and how many people have prefer my structure an alder structure so older structures by half so an older structure something that was built before the seventy's or let's say in the early seventy's so if you haven't a structure of an older character built before the maps are available it's considered a pre flood insurance rate map structure it wasn't built in formed by the risk and so that's the structure that is being is the kind of structure that's being impacted by the changes of last year if you have a structure that's been built under a permit since the one nine hundred seventy s you've probably not going to see a whole lot of change in your current situation so that's the big difference that happened with the reform last year if you're one of these an owner of an older structure you're going to see some big impacts and one of the options really important things to do is to talk to your flood insurance agent the agent who is probably the person carries your homeowners in auto insurance and can also try to help you get information about the flood insurance situation as of october one of this year in a month or less all structures that are getting renewed  so be next summer really will be required to have an elevation certificate so we'll talk about that and i'll talk about what the specific risks are at that structure and really it's going to bring a lot of people to attention about what the risk situations are at their structure and making it clear that whatever you can do to make your structure safer will also help reduce the risk of damage and the cost of the insurance the other key messages i want to talk about are what the community can do as a whole and so this is where it's very important to to get him to use the available hazard area data so right now you may know that richmond is in the process of having submitted data to fema about the flood hazards along the way new ski river main stem and that's still in process i didn't disappear seeing a map even last week with the preliminary revised  but i haven't so unless somebody in the community the town has seen something that's still in process but that if it's showing up any moment now which is probable we're probably going to see something like a new official map next spring maybe in may we also want to make sure as a community that we're not losing the conditions that allow for the river to move and accommodate the kinds of energy coming down the when you ski and down the huntington river so we're trying to prevent loss of this ability of rivers to accommodate energy and sediment the river corridors and to retain or floodplain functions if we lose the floodplain functions upstream of us on the dog river on the little river on the stevens branch the water's going to show up here a lot faster and the same thing in other communities such in richmond how we treat the floodplain will affect people downstream so we want those flood plains to function so that doesn't all come here at once we want to be identifying priorities for municipal investments bridges and roads and culverts and buildings public safety and how to be mitigating and repairing and elevating and making other private structures as well as public structures safer going forward what are we planning for a future flooding without misery we should be able to have a large flood come through a flood prone community on them when you ski without having it blow school or be a day that we all lose work our structures and have financial crises we want to also making sure in this process that we're supporting our ability to access flood insurance as best we can and that's a big issue tonight and continuing over time to be reducing the current risk of the community to unexpected losses from predictable flooding  i will talk about that as we go along but a flood plain is basically the area that gets under water when the river rises when at certain the river is always different types of water coming down the river and  periodically it's so much water that it over banks it comes out of the channel that's the find most of the time it's in that channel and carving that channel and moving its water and sediment energy through the landscape sometimes it's too much and it spills out  when it spills out it spreads out with silt and it slows down and that that creates special conditions that in part mean that the water had someplace to go and the floodplain  function has both shaped the landscape that we're in and will continue to shape that landscape described and very technically and scientifically described as an area that gets underwater with a one percent annual chance every year and so the maps that are in process right now are trying to describe that using the best available information at the time the process started which is best available landscape information and water volume information but you're right the maps that are coming maybe tomorrow will not talk about flooding in two thousand and eleven or this year it it didn't it wasn't informed by that part of history yet times in a row you could win twice in a hundred years you could win four times or you could miss out so but it's a one percent annual chance each year so this is a quick sketch of the history of the national flood insurance program one hundred twenty seven is a good place for me to start because it's it's something we know in vermont as having been a significant event in november in which you know eighty six people died in vermont and close to a billion dollars in damage were expressed across the state  that same year for better and for worse there was a more even larger flood that affected the mississippi river valley and that led to really a national crisis in a budgetary crisis but that did provide some money for mine in the relief to that event and from which we built a lot of bridges one hundred twenty nine private insurance industry stops issuing flood insurance and so now when you get homeowner's insurance it doesn't cover flood there's little fine print in there if there's a flood we have nothing to pay out because it's beyond our abilities to handle and so basically nine hundred thirty eight thousand nine hundred thirty six big events that happened in vermont there was no insurance for the people that were washed away and damaged in those situations one hundred sixty eight congress has been hit up over and over again to bail out states and counties and towns and individuals and is exhausted by the constant fact that there's always some place that's flooding around this country and so if the congress creates the national flood insurance program which really intends to provide an alternative source of finances for private individuals private structures that get destroyed during flooding then otherwise have nothing to fall back on and so over time to be guiding structures away from flood hazard areas and to be making anything that's in that area at risk say for overtime or anything that's new is safer need it they didn't think they needed it they didn't have history of flooding individually and so basically it wasn't available in their town so congress in one hundred seventy three creates the flood disaster protection act and it basically requires banks anything that's insured by the federal taxpayers so that doesn't go bust that if they have a bunch of mortgages sitting out in the flood hazard area that are at risk that they have to make sure those mortgages are insured for the risk  and that's a legal requirement on lenders so that starts nine hundred seventy three the next year vermont gets into the act and says ok let's work together state in towns so that towns can qualify for the program so that's essentially where the program begins in hundred four congress made a reforming creating a a mitigation program to find ways of funding ways to help structures that are really costing a lot of money and trying to make them stronger and safer and the community rating system that rebecca pfeiffer will talk about as well map program get starts getting modernized two thousand and three two thousand and eleven we have irene sandy and then this last year a major change the bigger waters flood insurance reform act which will talk about so why flood insurance it's not covered on your homeowners with insurance you can insure residential building up to two hundred fifty thousand dollars in a non residential building up to half a million dollars the contents can be insured as well if you so chose up to one hundred thousand dollars and that's something that's available to renters as well as owners of buildings it could pay out if two or more buildings are affected in the flood event doesn't have to be a federally declared disaster so it's a lot more assessable there's no payback because it's an insurance program so basically that's it and until recently the average policy in vermont for somebody in the flood has a period was running a thousand to fourteen hundred dollars a year for about one hundred seventy thousand dollars in coverage but that's changing so in during the course of a thirty year mortgage if you have a full house and a flood house here you have about a one in four chance of being affected by a flood across the the course of that mortgage that has a big impact on your community on your lender on the portfolio for the lender and on the  state in the nation but less than a one in ten chance of damage by fire but we all have fire insurance built into our homeowners and the average claim that was being paid through two thousand and six was about forty six thousand dollars so that's probably gone up we can run the numbers on that again so why not just wait for disaster relief after disaster fema shows up and does all these assessments and doles out the money and you may know that it's a very difficult process very protracted unreliable and a lot of levels but federal disaster declarations are only allowed for about half of the different requests that are made individual assistance is usually not available but it has been available in a couple of recent events including irene when it is available it's not going to cover anything that could have been or should have been covered by insurance it's only other things health issues displacement tee well septic but not the stuff that could have been insured in the maximum grant that came out from individual systems during the irene period was about thirty thousand two hundred dollars an average grant was about six or seven thousand dollars so not a lot of money really showed up for people so insurance is a very different way of going about that there also are loans available to the small business administration which would be available to anybody as well so currently the map in richmond like in most of them are looks like this is a white background with these kind of sketchy roads and and streams you can even see the channel of the when you ski or maybe you can down there and it shows these gray areas which are the extent of the special flood hazard but it's of a very awkward map to use if you want to know which side the line you're on you know if you can clearly tell you're on the other side the railroad tracks are safe but if you're on the same side as the river it becomes project to go you have to measure it from an intersection so far down the road and so far off the road to the lowest point to try to get a sense of that the new maps coming which will be our digital maps they'll come on a panel but they'll also be available on line and you can make a variety of different kinds of products out of them so they'll be paper as well as on cd and much more assessable over all the maps will also be served on the fema map service center and on the vermont natural resource atlas so these will become a lot more available there's a handout that has links to these when they're available right now you can find the white background map online at the fema site but these maps don't show all the risks all around town they don't show the worst case or the probable maximum flood that's going to come through town that's not what's being shown it's the it's the flood with a one percent annual chance not the larger events and that's not what the map is set up around  it does show a slightly larger flood called the five hundred year flood as well on the main stem of the when you ski and maybe on the huntington river i think it doesn't show anything about a dam breach impact areas or ice jams  whether a culvert blows out what happens downstream and it doesn't deal with the fact that the stream channels and positions are changing every day these things are not carried on that map so it has some of the useful information but not all of the pertinent important information for the community so you can see over time as little river and stuff so tracing it out over time from aerial photographs you can see that even though looks about the same it also keeps shifting position of the meanders over time and here's the third branch of the window of the white river in randolph and again the same thing the meanders about the same level of energy but they keep moving in position and so we're trying to do is find a way to kind of describe this is area where we can expect this behavior and try to help communities steer new encroachments away from those places for the safety of those structures but also because we don't want to have to be as taxpayers at town state and federal level you know coming in here come somebody build right in here where they have a beautiful view of the wraparound river and then the river comes and claims the house and and they want our money to help protect from a place that anybody could see it coming so we're trying to find a way to describe these river corridors where we can see this kind of behavior so the mad rivers an example of that here is where the the channel was of the mad river that's where the house was before the flood and then the channel continued to move over lining up for the next trucks years downstream so this is a a natural process on a river and completely avoidable if we have some tools to know about that so both special put hazard area and this river a corridor or kind of work together to kind of inform what's going on around the river and stream so we can stay out of the way of those dynamics and here's another example showing the basically a special flood hazard your you can see oxbows where the channel used to move and then inside of that these figure lines are trying to show the area of the record or within which the the movement of the channel over time can be accommodated without causing to to change character it's a stable equilibrium condition and then you can see the special flood hazard area that extends in various ways in a slightly different shape but mostly they're the same not entirely floodplains are are dangerous places to try to put your house in your family but they are also places of value there are places that store flood water so it doesn't all come here at once and it also provides a predictable place for flood water to move through the community so we can stay out of the way they're also associated with a very productive agriculture and forestry and by functioning they allow water power to work downstream without terrible changes in blowing up the dam there are often places with the ground water recharge where the aquifers are being recharged an asset that's important to the community now and probably for decades if not hundreds or thousands of years these are places important for water quality protection because the nasty mucky water that spills out spreads out over the landscape and basically leaving the sediments and their phosphorous and nature gin not in the lake not down stream and part of the landscape again so it's an important part of trapping those sediments developing soil becoming a rich place for a habitat biodiversity along rivers and streams everywhere and often rivers are places of very great importance to communities for recreation beauty inspiration all by themselves the reason why we want to live someplace and a point to that effect is really the story of the otter creek watershed which dorset and then runs northward the only the longest continuous water body in vermont and goes past middlebury up to lake champlain and during irene you can see there was a fair amount of water that fell in the upper portion of the otter creek although that really wasn't heavily impacted on a large scale parts of it were well devastated other parts hardly touched but that water all showed up at center rutland at the at the gauge in a big spike so you can see the huge amount of water that showed up from irene and center rutland at the same time in middlebury from the same storm not so much water showed up the red line here so that was a little bit quieter and but then this water from center roan kept working its way to middlebury and so you can see that a few days later there was a second spike where the rutland water showed up but it was considerably diminished because it took so long to get there it was spread out through this large floodplain forest area and agricultural lands of the aga creek watershed so that's an example of how this functions to the advantage of situations downstream that the need for flood plains and how they benefit us so the maps are all about that we're talking about tonight in that bear on the insurance program use this term the special flood has a period because there's different types of flood plains and different types of floods the special flood plain flood has an area is the legal term of the area the community has to take responsibility for to begin the insurance program and it also is known by several other names it's known on the map again about a one in four over a mortgage period it's also known as the base flood because it's the basis for the insurance program and it's also known in the newspaper as the hundred year flood but we don't like to use that because it gives this impression that the next one will come a century from now and we don't know when it's going to show  up the basic idea of the program for the insurance program roof focuses on this area the extent that gets wet in that special flood has an area and how high will the water come what is the elevation of the base flood during that event and that's the key measure that's used for the program so here's a structure and the key ideas to know what is the base flood elevation at this point and to be sure that the structure is at least a foot or more or above the base flood elevation and the standard that's recommended by the state is at least a foot in the higher the better every whole foot higher above the base flood elevation considerably lower cost or less risk and a lower cost of insurance but the basic idea is that the the flood comes the car won't start the lawn mower will never work again the trash is washed away but after it's gone the whole place looks like discuss thing silt but you can walk into that house and flush the toilet and use the water to turn on the electricity in the house won't go up in flames that it's in such a situation that there's no claim to be made against insurance program because it's built safely and high enough and that's that's the idea of the insurance program so in the key way to know that is to build it according to the information on the map and then to document it with an elevation certificate that a surveyor w stamp and say this is the condition of the house and then the risk can be known and the insurance can be determined but when you walk up to an older house and try to figure out so what is the situation here what is the base flood elevation and how do we know this is an older structure built before the map so it's a pretty firm structure so we're trying to figure that out but even if we were able to determine how high the water comes it may be irrelevant because it may not be how high it comes in maybe the kinds of changes it makes t channel and the landscape as it arrives so sometimes insurance program can be very helpful and sometimes it doesn't capture the actual risk of what's going on so any number of places here you know whether you're in the floo an area or just out of it you can get flood insurance and you just you know it just costs more if you're in a high risk area so how can we avoid losses due to flooding so this is a picture of a house in new york and  the question is what can we do with a family we can make a plan for an emergency and we can have water put aside and canned goods we can have a list of phone numbers no we're going to meet each other if we get displaced we can update in practice our plan we can get homeowners insurance fire insurance flood insurance we can get our finances in order because the flood insurance is not going to cover a lot of the damage and cost in the family we can elevate the structure to make it higher or we could relocate the structure but making it higher or relocating it is not easy not cheap it's not going to happen by next week it's hard to know when it has to be done and so it's very hard for a family living there to know what to do next as a community we can adopt regulations which we do through our by laws to avoid known hazard areas and not be aggravating the risk to structures that are already parked there and sitting in harm's way so we want to protect the families and assets that are already in the hazard area and we want to be taking steps over time to reducing the risk of those structures and to be improving our ability to respond to emergency circumstances and at the state and federal level we should be helping to develop data areas provide regulation models and helping incentivize and support communities that are trying to do the right thing so the insurance program over time in vermont you can see when it started very few people have signed up and there were very few claims being made but over time more people signed up and you can see that those wet years and dry years sometimes nothing's happening who needs flood insurance other times we have a flood event and a lot of people make claims even though the numbers of policies are probably still pretty low but over time it changes like that so the history for making seventy eight through two thousand and ten about eight million dollars in claims were made against the insurance program from the people participating in it and then two thousand and eleven with the three events we had from the insurance policy holders over fifty million dollars in claims from that one a vent that just as you can tell goes a bit off the top of the chart in a way which is kind of hard to anticipate based on past history there was damage in richmond and bolton during irene but you can see from irene most of the damage actually happened in the windsor wyndham washington and rutland chickening county wasn't one of the big sites that was really impacted but that varies quite a bit around the state looking at the maps you know if you see a flood happen is fascinating to walk up to it and look at the flood happening and i've seen people out there moping their grass you know with a flood happening because their house is outside the flood event and they're not being affected by it but you know it's kind of like that if you're if you're up here on the side of the hill you can be like in that house there outside of the speckled blue of the special  you could be paying up wind low risk moderate risk zone x you get a preferred risk policy and you could be paying about five hundred dollars a year for contents and building inch insurance and there will be larger floods that affect this area on the other hand if you are in a structure that's just inside the special flood has an area until recently your insurance rate would be on the level of fourteen hundred dollars a year because you're inside the high risk area so that's those are some of the differences of being on one side of the other of a line like that trying to predict where the water's going to be looking at the history of the national flood insurance program you can see over time that sometimes the a lot of outlays and there's more and more debt and sometimes congress comes along and fixes things and then more recently we've had events like katrina and rita and i and we went basically twenty billion dollars in  and congress has not been willing to pay it off and so that's what leads us to last summer and the bigger waters act to basically say congress is not going to pay that bill and so congress is asking the people in the program to pay their own costs so since then of course we've had irene and sandy as well so this debt in the program and the structural inability to pay its way has only gotten worse so last summer two thousand and twelve congress adopted a national flood insurance reform act which mostly just dealt with the insurance part of the program and it basically said that the insurance program has to pay its own cost congress is not going to b  it out and so any subsidies that exist out there should be eliminated and the only place that really the primary place that subsidies exist are from these older structures these prefer structures that have always had a lower rate and have never been allowed to cut fema has not been allowed to raise the rates on the preferred structures to keep up with costs and so over time there's been a bigger and bigger difference between the prefer rates and the actual losses so what we have now is to make the program solvent congress says the the program has cover its cost rates on currently held policies are going to be raising rising twenty five percent a year if you have well twenty to twenty five percent a year if you have a new policy if you buy a house today on an older structure that's never had a flood insurance policy where you get one because you haven't had one right now like most people in richmond when you buy the policy you're going to pay full cost for a prefer me structure so that's kind of the full actuarial cost now and if you have an existing policy it's going to be rising and cost over the next few years so that's going to rising at twenty twenty five percent a year twenty percent a year for existing residential policy on a preferred structure in a hazard area of the grandfather you know which actually doesn't bear on richmond i'm afraid so grandfathering has to do with when there's a map change and there was a map change coming and so now come back we'll talk more about map changes when that happens but if you're in an area like right now if if you're in an area that seems to be out and then the map changes and it shows up it's actually at a high risk area then there's there's certain options that you can take for a short term benefit but basically the answer is you could buy a policy now and it would be as if you're in the upland zone x and you can also get a preferred risk policy because you're in a such a safe place and it's very cheap  and then when the map changes the new rules allow you to keep the preferred risk policy for three years i think and then after that it's going to start rising to full cost said until may when they become effective but so people at the edge are all need to be attentive to that but they'll be that short term benefit which will give you a very inexpensive rate for a couple three years and then it'll come up to full cost figuring this out as they fly but basically a quick description here if you bought a new policy on a preform structure last year and  the structure was about one hundred fifty eight thousand and vermont you'd be paying about fifteen hundred dollars that that that was that was not actually that was the rate that they were projecting maybe a slight use be updated  that's close to the average in vermont and then given bigger waters in two thousand and twelve we're probably looking at a new policy on one of these older structures it's likely to be on the order of over three thousand dollars on average for about the same value about one hundred fifty thousand over time what we're going to have is a very expensive flood insurance rate that we're going to be facing on average it's going to vary by structure but as a community what we need to be thinking about is how are we going to deal with this over time and part of it by relocating or elevating structures where we can and then there's options such as the community rating system and rebecca will speak of working together as a community to get some sort of education out there working together on what issues and getting at least some slight benefit in terms of rate looking across the country from us as a lot of older structures and in new england vermont as the height of the existing policies we have the winner we have fifty three percent of the existing policies are our prefer my policies so they're going to be affected most dramatically by this change of rates and looking across the country remote comes in number four after west virginia indiana michigan so we have a high percentage of older structures that are in the middle of the effects others looking at the wrong numbers of structures that are in the hazard area again we're looking at something on the order of over one hundred  probably one hundred sixty is what i had from the previous map of structures that are in the white house here the numbers could be a little bit on either side of that and we have the new map be able to run those numbers again yeah paying their actuarial risk so there will be you know if the map changes to go up or down that should affect your your rate the next time you renew but those changes will probably be a lot less structure and then in terms of making claims it's usually best to have insurance on at least eighty percent of the value of that structure if you're going to get it to pay out in an adequate way so there's a lot of subtle pieces that you can go over  that time this is a demographic but just trying to show that you know the numbers again i don't know how much to put on but there are approximately right if you had the same structure and the lowest floor that is being rated on it's four feet under water four feet below be a fee you're probably going to be paying over nine thousand dollars a year for insurance on that structure if you brought it up to be and the like a lot of communities dollars a year and if you built it hung up you know relative to the actual risk so in this case three fifty above the of the you paying under five hundred dollars so the policy changes based on the risks to the structure in that location and the value of the structure so what can be done to lower cost talk to your insurance agent about some of the options there is a web site flood smart dot gov you can use that to some degree  there is a choice about some levels of deductibles that may be useful there is a way under bigger waters to tie this into your mortgage or pay other than once a year again after  an elevation certificate will be required for all structures up to now all the structures preferred structures have been needed in elevation certificate no matter how deep or how shallow they all qualified as prefer and basically got this general rate but after october one everybody's supposed to have an elevation certificate on renewals after october one and so i think that's going to inform people going forward you know the twenty percent a year toward actuarial this will be the actuarial level that gets determined based on that so at that point suddenly instead of being you'll be you'll have an option of being a pretty firm structure and preferred structures as a class w start rising twenty percent a year you'll also have an elevation certificate and you can say is it cheaper if i do it rated based on my elevation certificate because i'm only a little bit into the flood has an area and you can look at that if it's cheaper you could take it that way based on the actual risk the truth is that if you get insurance based on your your shallowness and your own visions certificate you say it's cheaper that way the people that are left in the pool are going to be more costly structures me it's a form that female has developed for the insurance agents to use for the reading purposes and it typically needs to be stamped by a surveyor and as a homeowner if you have a newer structure then if you have a structure that was built under permit you would have to have an elevation certificate to get sure but if you have the most older structures a preferred structure chances are you haven't had that and a lot of people haven't chosen to do that because it wasn't required this is what b if he is that what's going to happen probably is they're going to accept that and they're going to say there's a lot of stuff here that's not clear enough to read this well and so you're probably the structure would get read it at the worst case scenario rather than a more benign interpretation of facts so maybe important to get a surveyor stamp on that nonetheless to get the correct rating the best  so if you're renewals coming up after october one that will be required you can do it now and missed that but i would hate to see across new england and minnesota and so court a whole bunch of people trying to get elevation certificates in the middle of two feet of snow in february you know so there's going to be problems getting access to serve there's i think there's a real opportunity for neighbors to work together to get a surveyor to come in to do three or four houses in a summary of map effects on those letters accounts watch for that when that map comes out but if it was affected then the data that went into the application would also be able to inform your own basis for to get the same survey wor present situation and then other what things they can do to to deal with let me just finish this not come back you know in terms of cost again considering elevation or relocation these are you know big  things but these are things that are possible one thing that is traditional in new england is a basement every structure has to have a basement and so the basements the bottom of the basement that's the lowest floor and you'll be rated on that lowest floor so one option is simply to not have a beast and so that basically means you would fill in the basement with gravel you would have it modified so the water would flow into the basement and out of the basement without crushing the foundation it's basically flood event and suddenly your lowest floor would have gone up four or five feet or something like this you have a crawl space instead of a piece that's basically one model and then the other model is to basically raise the remaining floor to a point that makes sense in terms of flood insurance so those are both kinds of physical changes made to a structure talking to local officials and planning commission select for the community talk about with each other about this idea of community rating system will hear about it from rebecca in a moment in what you can do as undersea arrests to get higher levels of a discount on the flood insurance and then work together to help because there's going to be structures that are very deep and structures that are very shallow in the community may want to find ways of raising money and grants to help with the structures that are really deep into the hazard to help address these issues yeah has an area to simply be out of it and that suddenly removes any obligation flood insurance or the cost there out there are places that absolutely shouldn't be there and that's absolutely the right response to where they should be used to relocate other places may choose to again elevate the lowest floor make it one two three feet or more above the base but elevation to a more affordable level but stay in the same neighborhood and in the basement again is if there was no cross space or no basement you know i think it may be rated a little bit higher but i don't it's not like having a basement but that's where i think speaking with your insurance agent would probably help to clarify if there is a difference because it may not be a difference to be the private companies they make their business decisions and one of the things that they're very concerned about is screwing it up and then you're going to come back and live at least demand that you pay at that rate that you said even though it's different and one of the things is the different basement conditions the crawl space with a cover that they're the pattern you see and you see all those things change and so insurance agents are afraid of what they call errors and omissions and so it's a little it's very awkward  i would you know talk with each other and if you find an agency that's willing to help pass the word on who's actually being useful and give them your business because if they're not going to be useful it's not go really don't have a we don't have a list of people who we could recommend right now but i think it is something that people can share information on the town may be able to help people share information about that it's awkward to be able to do that and we water to go under and out elevating utilities and that will help with people that have preferred structures and basements you can elevate utilities and you will get some credit but i wouldn't expect a lot of help from that but that is another option so you know it doesn't take a lot actually on a structure just a couple inches in the lowest floor to do tens of thousands of dollars of damage and that's that's what drives a lot of the us so we talk about lomas before and lomas letters a map amendment may be relevant particularly if you're close to the edge of a zone that's labeled so it's worth looking at but that really is where the map is in error at the scale of your structure and so with the surveyor and getting elevation certificate if it turns out that the the lowest part of the landscape touching the house is above the mark elevation or mapped elevation of the flood you can get along just that easy you can use the same document as part of that submission but it will require a surveyor sometimes an engineer if you're in a zone a without a lot of detail so something to do  primary residences that have policies like right now prefer policies intact right now you're going to continue with this status of being prefer man and you what will people keep that until you make repeated claims against the program and then you go into a repeat loss program or a severe repeated head of loss program with a special rate or if you let your policy lapse when you buy it again you'll buy a full fare at that time or if you go to make a sale the new policy for the buyer is going to be a full fare different from what you're paying at the moment and then again if there's substantial damage or substantial improvement that would change the status of make your structure essentially a new structure and read it as such the premiums on these prefer my structures as a group will continue to rise at twenty percent a year until as a group they get actuarial and people  be peeling off because they'll how they'll vacation certificates along the way so as a planning commission as a community as a select board there are things that are important and one has to look at your municipal plan where you're going as a community what you want to be doing you should be looking for a record or information record or study there is some work that's been happening in richmond be looking at your hazard area regulations to be sure that they're helping to support good practice going forward for portable structures and avoiding exacerbating the conditions there's a local hazard mitigation plan i believe richmond has one right now is that right kathleen which identifies big issues in the community and issues with colbert's and structures and buildings that the community wants to whittle away at and there's some money for that from fema but other sources as well to keep moving along on that and there's a grant program to help with that an emergency operations plan one thing also the state has been concerned about the legislature adopted act one thirty eight two thousand and eleven basically encouraging communities to try to become flood resilient and to create in our has been tasked with working with other agencies to come up with incentives for for towns to do the work of avoiding making the situation worse and in fact become more resilient over time one of the outcomes of that is this piece called the emergency relief  assistance fund to iraq and next fall that kicks in and that's basically going to set up a set of standards for communities that in the event of a county wide disaster and municipality comes for help with cover and bridges and roads and buildings that the state is going to provide more funds to communities that are trying to avoid making the situation worse and the communities that are not paying attention and are not trying to deal with the issues are going to get less funds and they'll pick up more of the cost because they're going to be having those costs over and over again going forward so if the community takes a series of steps such as adopting current road and culverts set  twelve and a half percent of the total bill being carried by the state and if the community adopts a record horse and protects those areas from encroachment or join c r s as part of a program along with the kinds of standards that richmond has the community would be entitled to a higher level of reimbursement when those kinds of disasters happen so the iraq program is another incentive part of it resilient communities program question structure only for municipal typically this is only for public assistance funds to the east after a disaster that's right which includes really structures that are owned by the municipality or the county or the state with you on that afterwards perhaps i might be best now so looking at the u s thing for the municipality after a disaster if you're being written if you're getting a basically because you exist in the state of vermont and nothing else you know hundred thousand dollar damage the community will be picking up on the level of seventeen thousand dollars if the community is qualified on those four basic standards of being in the program having a hazard mitigation plan adopting current road standards be paying more like twelve thousand dollars and if the community is you know basically adopting recorders and taking other steps like that community might be paying on the level of seven thousand dollars one hundred thousand dollars of damage so it's trying to create an incentive structure for communities to think about the kinds of damages that communities experience so about eight thousand structures in the flood has an area in vermont right now about two thirds of them don't have flood insurance in richmond more like eighty percent or eighty five percent don't have flood insurance so a lot of people are going to be buying in full cost mediately as the banks notice them  and most of the people in the flood has an area are single family structures so it makes a big difference as to what side line you're on and how the what the effects are but again of all the damage in vermont from two thousand and three two thousand and eight and that sample anyway of all the damage flood insurance claims made up about five percent of the costs and most of the actual costs were public assistance costs roads and culverts and bridges the vast majority of the kind of damage that's affected are coming out of our municipal pockets or state pockets in our federal pockets and then this spring the legislature adopted and was signed into law by the governor  element for planning commissions in terms of the next time the top of the municipal plan comes up for renewal is to create a portion in that that skilling with there's section deals with energy and economy and affordable housing and  many of the goals one of those is to deal with flood resilience as a community and so it sets up a series of goals and elements that should be in a plan the next time it comes up for work and the intention really is to find ways the goals on a statewide level is that new development in have identified flood hazard flugel roshan and recorder protection areas should be avoided and if new development is the built in such areas it should not exacerbate flooding or  religion and the protection and restoration of flood plains upland forested areas that slow down the water attenuate moderate flooding and food erosion should be encouraged flood emergency preparedness and response planning should be encouraged to go back and look at the mercy operations plan work with the first responders and make it better next time so those are the key things assess the hazards of void aggravating the situation in the future reduce the current risk prepare for the emergency and and be sure that there's access to insurance for the residual risk all right so rates are rising and the community has a series of options rebecca if you want to go ahead and start the piece on community rating system  a policy might run about two thousand dollars appends on the value of the structure now be an average for that prefer my status but as i said what they're intending to do is figure out what the risk is to all the structure so some of those if that's an average figure it's going to go to four thousand let's say which is very as an average value but some of the structures we're going to go much higher and some of the structures may be less so you're going to find out the real situation what ability of your insurance premium one of the things that that's being looked at right now and there's been nothing passed but there have been proposals made in congress to look at affordability because there's people there's kind of two different issues there's i don't want to pay and there is i can't pay and so what they're trying to assess is what is that a film affordability piece because this has major impacts to people on foot plane areas and it happens over a relatively short amount of time so it's very hard to adjust your budgets so nothing's been passed yet there has been discussions about potentially looking at that aspect but it's all changing it's like everything every single week it seems like there's a new change to what maybe poser who's talking to whom in congress so probably recommend just trying to keep your eyes and ears open to see if that piece does go through and if it does i would have outreach to let people know that there may be this other piece that's coming along very substantially higher rate in no time at all or you may have phased in over time but either way they are you know how do we then look at affordability who can afford to pay have they show that you know what is the difference in their nothing there making you do it theme is not going to make you buy flood insurance but your bank might if you have a mortgage and they figure it out so that that's exactly right and so the obligation is not on the individual the obligation actually on the lender so if you own it outright and you have all the risk you're entitled to take all that risk but if you go to sell it later on the buyer is going to have that cost that they need a mortgage to buy your place so it's something keep in mind and why you might way and equitability an access congress has lurched toward pay your way and so suddenly the grandfathering is also slated for being removed beginning next year so if anybody had a grandfathered policy that will start rising at twenty percent a year toward actuarial invested in them along time ago and now their insurance rate might suddenly go up from a clue to the point that if they choose to sell their place it's going to be very hard to find a buyer and therefore their place is going to be to lose an extreme amount of that so i guess it's to promote the park question is there any public policy it's perhaps a result of the activities of all of us in this country and beyond and so the people who just happen to be unlucky that their own home happens to be fairly close to the river i'm not going to be think of building a new today proposed by team of proposed by the town don't deal with two thousand and eleven don't deal with the future and so there's a whole lot of ways in which we deny our risk and our risk going forward and we're still stumbling over our self as we do that participating in the c r s and reducing insurance rates for the community would have a real effect in reducing the costs that lawrence referring to that everybody's going to be  and part of why we were asked to be here somebody might be why are they talking about things that have to do with the town and not with individual insurance policies and so we have been asked to just talk about what is happening and what can be done what actions can be done because a lot of times you probably feel pretty perilous when something like this happens and you're just told you should have to pay more and you know really have a lot of understanding of why that is or what can we do to change that so one of the steps that the community can do is look at joining most community rating system or see your ass so called cirrus or the presentation but sanford if you miss community rating system and essentially the community rating system is one way that the town could help to reduce individual insurance premiums  to make people think all of a sudden your insurance premiums are going to be split in half but there is some steps of the town can take that can help to knock off a few percentages of that premium so one of the things that we've been talking about to again planning for flooding and so planning for flooding in i don't know why have you one of the things that we've seen in the northeast is that we have had greater precipitation and those kind of like the worst storm of the year those storms  means exactly what you were talking about before as a society we've been seeing a lot of these impacts and so just keeping that in mind you know many i think went over this again just wanted to make sure that this again but this is the park ride right here the day after irene and you can see that there is a lot of flooding that can occur in richmond there's also smaller floods of can occur in richmond doesn't always have to be this kind of flood for it to impact your home so different people may have different risk even though you're kind of in the zone or out of the zone there are still differences within that zone even though fema doesn't acknowledge it i think personally in your own mind when you think about should i be buying flood insurance keep in mind that not everyone in the zone or out of  fema the national flood insurance program has recognized is the fact that there are other flood hazards and there's also ways that we can do more things than just have flood regulations to help reduce our risk from flooding and so when we look at  insurance policies in the town only twenty one policies are for people who are in the map flood hazard area so there's a lot of structures that are not insured there's a lot of risk that exists out there and that risk is borne by that individual homeowner on those occur so the minimum floods the minimum standards that the national flood insurance program promulgated to everyone and says this is what you have to adopt and regulate to make flood insurance available in your community it's not really going to end flood risk and it's not really going to reduce this and it's created the community rating system to say we recognize that if you adopt these minimum regulations that female requires we're not really reducing risk all we're doing is setting a standard for what will ensure surance programs are not talking about how do we reduce risk over time and so the community rating system is really meant to acknowledge actions that a town does and looks at activities that do help to reduce risk over time and because of that then the community sees benefit in the insurance premiums that citizens pay so the iraqi emergency relief assistance fund that it spoke about is kind of the community piece what the community can do to reduce their costs to flooding so your ass is a step that the community can do that can help reduce the premiums that individuals pay on their flood insurance so what is the community have to do to be part of the community which is community  and it's not very much basically designated community coordinator there is there is a need a community quarter coordinator cooperate with fema as specialists who look at your policies on every year there's a recertify cation to make sure that you're doing what you said your doing advising fema and the insurance specialist program specialist when you're changing something so that can mean that you're doing something better or maybe you've changed what your regulations are so it's kind of like a recalibration on this is something that's somewhat relevant after the changes to the flood insurance program keeping elevation certificates on file so any time a  person has to file an elevation certificate with the town the town has that on file and maintains those and they keep all flood insurance studies old information that's provided to them where is my winter here  keeping the records you know until the reviewed ensuring that the projects that come into the town are compliant with regulations so that there's not a lot of community responsibilities above what the town may already be doing through its normal permit ing and record keeping activities the big thing about community rating system is really the changes that a town makes or the decisions out of town makes and what it's flood policy is and what activities they do reduction in your house so right now those are my communities are out of line that means that they get a five percent reduction on their policies it's not very that it's not really that big a lot of those communities though are doing other st where if they took that effort to read document all the changes they've made they probably could jump to the next category and so a lot of it depends on what the town decides to do you know obviously the more points the community gets it means that the more the community is doing to be able to get those points so a lot of it is focused around the policy that the town decides to adopt and follow and i'm going to talk a little bit about well what are those activities and what does it mean so i just it is is one piece this is not going to solve the issue of affordability of flood insurance but it's one piece that the town can do to help reduce the individual cost of flood insurance but then also as a whole the community as a whole saves quite a bit of money so your bill may not be changed by a lot but as a pool the entire community saves a bunch one of the things that we also i know about the community rating system is that when a town is a class one and gets a forty five percent discount on flood insurance policies in their community that money doesn't just disappear so that money is borne by everyone else in the flood insurance pool who is not in the community rating system who was not getting the forty five percent discount so  as more communities join this program those difference in costs are going to be borne by the people who aren't in the program and so that's why this may not be an answer for everyone in vermont but towns who do have the ability to participate in the program the more they get in on the ground floor and start doing that those activities and documenting it will start to pick up some discounts which will offset changes in rate basically a lot of the activities that are giving credits are reducing risk as a community so it's not necessarily going to you and saying you will elevate your house you have to do these things ought of innes at we're not going to allow new structures in our flood hazard area because we don't want to add new people to be at risk and we don't want to increase the risk to people who are already there so those are the activities so that's how you're looking at reducing the risk over the long term there are credits for actually removing structures from what done this will reduce risk in your community it's basically your getting the discount now as soon as the town joins the program although the reduction in risk may not be realized for fifteen years twenty years thirty years so it is a little bit of shifting the cost other communities in the immediate here and now but over time the idea is that these practices will help to lead to reducing risk in the community exposure you  putting sprinklers in it's not necessarily i'm choosing individually to arrange my home it's more like how we manage development in floodplains that may take twenty years to realize those benefits  shifted there is a savings to that community and that's why they're giving you a discount but that there may be a reduction of that payout to those structures in that community over time but the cost is shifted to other communities administrative time that and basically understanding that you have an administrator available or a planner who could help to keep track of all these different requirements and so a town that has a volunteer zoning administrator who works ten hours a week is probably going to have a lot of no and that's and that's why this is something that is a piece of trying to reduce fun sure and scream is this is not by no means going to solve people's premiums that may be doubling or big by going up by quite a office to be able to handle the requirements again a lot of it is that a lot of it is the policy that the town sets up and then the implementation of the program is kind of done in the same way that you do your normal zoning and planning know so there's basically four carriers so this is going again to what those activities are and this kind of gets at what you're talking about well what are the types of things that are reducing risk and so a lot of it is public information activities reaching out to people to let them know about risks and let them know about the type of hazards that exist in the town the town already does that that's part of why you're here tonight that's part of irish speaking to the board mapping in regulations so looking at do we want to map other hazards that may exist that are related to flooding what kind of regulations do we have in the town the next one is flood damage reduction so how do we actually start to reduce risk and this is typically a category that not as many towns take advantage of because they tend to be more difficult things to do and more expensive more time consuming their big projects typically and then last one is warning in response ye their floodplain the town you know the volunteers green is a large area that's an open floodplain area on the other t n c owns a lot of areas along the new ski river that provides for natural flood plain function this is an activity that i think that the town of richmond would definitely be able to get large credit for and that's where a lot of the bulk of the points now are they're focused on avoidance of new hazards in the floodplain restricted you continue to get credit for it if a piece of property is bought out then that is something that again gets acknowledged over time another activity that the town can get credit for not spoke about this before so i won't go into it too much and belabor the point a reporter maps where we look at areas where streams have the potential to move i mean it's not a predictor of stream movement but it's basically allowing room for that stream movement to occur when towns adopt this their knowledge and that there's other hazards that are related to flooding and then therefore the community rating system gives communities quite a bit of points for acknowledging mapping and regulating these areas other flood hazards so again it's kind of recognizing where the community where insurance program doesn't capture all risk and they're trying to acknowledge towns that do acknowledge that mapping assistance or just basic things like someone comes into the town and says am i in the flood plain where can i get flood maps the town gets credit for that so if it's something where someone comes in and asks when how do i get my flood map or ask hefley where do i get my five map then she can say well you can go to the famous a you can pull out the maps right here we can go on the natural resource atlas we can pull all that stuff up and let's show you where you are what your risk is and then this is again one of those other pieces reducing exposure to hazards and this is this is probably getting a lot more to your point where you actually start to reduce the risk in the community by having higher regulatory standards so this is an example after irene a person who is substantially damaged who had raised their house that's helping to reduce risk to that house over the long term and so the standards that acknowledge that would be that the minimum fema standards aren't enough to help protect the investments in the existing infrastructure in town that gets quite a bit of credit involvement on property acquisition and structure this is again an activity that gets credit for being able to provide information to people on your website about flood hazards about where you get maps information about flood insurance claims information on flood insurance etc etc so what is the town already doing so one of the preservation of open spaces spoke about that and maintaining natural floodplain functions on the prohibition of fill and storage in flood hazard areas that's something that receives a lot of credit on to the community rating system again it's acknowledging that we don't want to make flooding worse to people who are already there for it by allowing for new development so basically you can put your new development in and then adversely affect other people who are already there who may be at risk and increase their risk at the same time appropriation of new protection of critical facilities the town already does this compensatory storage flood water so again we're not able to fill the floodplain we want to provide storage where we're able to elevating structures above the base f hundred year flood height cumulative substantial improvement we're looking at how people make improvements to their buildings over time that's something that receives credit acquisition of flippant structures so there's a few things that the town can also do on the adoption of recorders develop a floodplain management plan looking at other higher regulatory standards do they make sense for the town of richmond there's some that are suggested by the program the town can also look at their own that maybe are already acknowledged from public information and outreach flood information website drainage system maintenance i mean these are some of the activities a lot of towns get credit for the other thing i would encourage the town to do is to review your existing regulations to see if small changes need to be made in order to qualify for some of these activities if there is interest in joining the program and so how does richmond benefiting i said before that iraq is kind of a benefit to the town the community rating system is kind of a benefit benefit to individual policyholders and they really align the community rating system activities aligned quite a bit with the iraq incentives for the towns of the towns doing activities to try and qualify for a higher cost share under erath they're also they're going to be doing activities that could also benefit them under the community rating system if the town chooses to go that direction so the next steps you know i would think that it's basically  it's hard to say and i don't mean to kind of give a general answer the reason is because within each activity it's quite an accounting activity it's part of your pounding system to see what your points are so sometimes you may get credit for open space preservation and with the way the new man was you can count that it's also providing for the main function and it's also a natural wild area that supports other biological benefits and then sometimes that's adjusted because that's  only in ten percent of your floodplain so you really have to sit down and look at it we use the do you guys give support we're to figure out for the town of richmond what we're doing where we've evolved to even see we would be able to do is help you go through that i think the biggest thing though is having that coming from the town to say we want to explore this we actually want to start working on this so i won't necessarily sit there and figure out everything for you but i will definitely come to the meetings and sit down with the with the committee or the planning board and we can together go through that and figure out those numbers who does that then ultimately who makes a final decision when we say yes here we are do we present you with all the calculations of square footage of open space or what we do that somebody else come in from d c and do all that but what we do is we do there's kind of an initial assessment that we start with and that's where you start to say ok let's look at all the different activities that take credit are we doing this you know if we are doing it do we need it do we need to change something at that point that's when we would contact our regional fim office and they would price and someone there is someone  basically do that on their own time i mean that's part of what their job is to help all communities and our future regional office i imagine would probably provide some assistance as well i just wouldn't want to if some folks over forty five  premiums and that's not necessarily going to be the message that we want people to go home with this is one very small step that may be part of a bigger bunch of options at the town to look in what's going to me female doesn't have zoning regulations they have that minimum standard in the federal bylaw basically the federal regulations our office our program helps provide our suggested best practices for floodplain  management we have modeled bylaws on mine where we have different options of what we recommend to communities for consider and for playing development whether or not a town adopt some is up to that town what we do and what fema does is they actually go through a line by line of your byelaw and says does what the town is adopted and meet what our minimum standards are for participation the different elements in there that aren't potter role models are models have not changed since two thousand and nine they were originally done two thousand and eight and that's what we have still today we may be in the next year or two looking to change those and update those with some of the different state legislation that's been passed but right now our state models are the same as they have been since two thousand zero one of our models says for towns that adopt river corridors and perhaps it's development in that river corridor or we will say maybe we allow some structures outside of the river corridor in the very edges of the floodplain it's kind of like a compromise so potentially i think that the look at looking at how many points you get for regulating that river corridor area you know verses maybe allowing some develop on the outside you're probably not going to get as many points so it's all a trade off you know it's kind of an accounting  of those points things i think the biggest pieces like a hazard mitigation plan may recognize some of the structures our program the river imagine program looks at phased assessments of rivers and so part of that is taking an inventory of structures are they are restrictions to flood flow are there issues here alignment issues is there scour is the bridge likely to fail things like that another piece of it for the some of the larger infrastructure like a railroad bridge of the trans bridge you know they usually have a schedule of replacement or they don't get replaced until they fail and so some of the railroad bridges tend to be more on the line of they don't get replaced until they fail  because of the railroad companies have no requirement to change them until they do fail so usually the the point that we have the greatest influence on trying to rebuild the infrastructure around you know bridges and  and things like that it's usually after a large flood event one that structures failed and that's the opportunity we have so this the state has a stream alteration program stream alteration permits program where river engineers would go out and assess that structure and they would say if you're rebuilding this bridge i don't care what it looks like before this is what you're required to put in now we're looking at today's current conditions we're looking at what may potentially happen in the future who are trying to better size and better install our infrastructure typically there's not something that looks like that you know i think that right now what the states policy is is that we're trying to create big bigger structures so that we don't have as much restriction behind them ponding and cooling water on which leads to more failures tom said typically the state's policy is to have larger structures go litter sized yet to make them larger not so much oversize them but right size them for the type of flood events that they see so they're less likely to fail much there isn't a really good mechanism to require that i think that if it's federal if it's federal money that's being spent there is some ability to say we don't want to spend federal money on a project that may increase flooding hazards or may not reduce flooding hazards if we have an opportunity when it's a privately owned bridge like a railroad bridge that's privately owned or then we don't have that ability to require it to go back in and that's why failure is typically the point where you can say we're going to go back and make you do it because they don't pay flood insurance on the coal you know on the bridge or the culvert to there's nothing there's no hook basically to require that until the failure point but i think that that's something that you should share with your ten percent so i would say off the top of my head that probably most communities fall somewhere in the seven range to class seven which would be a fifteen percent reduction but again that's going to be dependent upon the pond what falls out but the more  the community keeps in its bylaws or other things that the town says we're going to you know we're going to help people find maps we're already doing that we're going to get credit for that and so the more activities that we can also identify on the front end that you're already doing probably the receiving any points for regular regulatory standards the thing is that a lot of the points are focused on open space natural floodplain function maintenance and they also focus on higher regulatory standards and you have six but there are really only three different models and we did but it will be reading system manual was substantially changed this past year where all the points were completely rearranged and some activities were got no you know they took out and existing manual with our existing models and we could probably have something you know this this fall or something the bigger longer term answer is that we are in the process of creating a state floodplain perm which we may then use to help change and update our existing models that's something that's a longer term project and what we're aiming more towards so something like a new model and then compared to the manual is going to be further out so if it's something where the town is interested the planning commission says we want to move forward we want to do that this fall then we say ok we can give you an idea of the current models and those current points the planning commission says this is something that we're going to look into over the next year and a half or something like a longer term project then it may be more appropriate to wait until the town is more ready to pick it up and run with it and then we would probably provide the newer models with  that we have it and i don't know if we necessarily will and i think part of that is because of the fact that towns may want to take different approaches in the response to him to a flood declaration or flood disaster and it's also going to pan on the scale of the flood disaster so if it's a very concentrated flood that maybe only affects a handful of structures that may not be something that the town wants to enact a full on in term by law you have something on the scale of irene when most structures are located in the flood ha impacted in some way and that might be a time when the town says ok well let's look and see what is our flood policy are there things that we want to streamline for permanent are the things that we don't what are the types of development that we want to encourage by streamlining you know what are the things that we want to make faster because they're small you know small repairs or replacements and that's something that i think is it's kind of a crazy thing in the aftermath of a flood to sit down and figure those out i think that we would be somewhat hesitant to have a model built into the bylaw maybe have a stand alone model that the town can consider because at that time that i read happened we didn't really have anything and we tried to put something together for towns to consider put it on the street as our permanent interim like emergency response bylaw would probably want to make sure we have attorney look it over because at that time it was it was after irene everyone knows it was like so we're just trying to get something that towns could consider so that they weren't waiting thirty days for the meeting to be able to get permits so we probably would have something available and i think it's something that we're probably going to be looking at when we change the overall bylaws we have something now that we had developed at that time that we could probably use and continue to use but we maybe want to flesh that out more kind of like the bigger policy discussion of the new england towns except for massachusetts don't have very many communities that are in the sierras program i think part of it is a fact that we have individual town government we tend not to have very strong county government so it's kind of that individual  town effort and saying that we it's important enough to us to join the program and we're going to expend some of our staff time to administer the program that's one of them i think the other piece is that we don't tend to have as many flood insurance policies as some of the communities like you are pointing out there you know the communities that are on those top tiers you know class one class for they have thousands and thousands of policies so the savings per community is so much greater and it's easy to say we're going to have people that are only going to do this and so that's all they focus on they can work on our application they can work on the ongoing prop program so i think the class nine why so many communities are a lower level is because those are a lot of the activities that are more passive the town doesn't have to do a lot of active things and i think just the application process itself you know it's not something like the towns as we want to be in the serious program a month later and it's something that usually i think from what i have heard usually takes about a year a year and a half to develop a full application that is then brought to fema for enrollment so it's an up it's a long process so i think a lot of it is just a town making the commitment to do it matter of magnitude i mean you could adopt a bylaw that is essentially the minimum fema regulations and add we require structures to be built a foot above base foot elevation if you're going to qualify for one hundred points or fifty points or twenty points or whatever the warning protection systems it's going to be doing lots of things that are a lot more costly and require a lot more active participation say that discussion kind of her if the town says we are interested in moving forward with that i mean i think part of what we were asked to present here is some information about the program so that everyone on the board has an idea of what is this program what does it mean what do we have to do and if there is interest then we can come back and provide more detail information working maybe with an ad hoc committee or something like that does something you guys want to reach out to each other probably through from court former or some other mechanism where you guys can get together and and bargain it's going to be less expensive if you can get one surveying crew to come into a street than it is for them to drive out to each house on a different day so it makes sense to work together if you're if you're subject to this requirement in the last summer they just dealt with insurance they came up with this idea of no subsidies and fever has been trying to figure out how to slow it down and hope the congress to change its mind and congress has said no and so it's kind of all hitting us i think the other piece of it too that there is a look at doing the bigger reform of the flood insurance program and really the only part that got reform was flood insurance policy premiums so part of there is ample bunch of things that were being proposed like community insurance or community bias but sure and having a larger group policy things like that but this is the only piece that was really an active you're welcome to it and so it very well could be that some insurance company will come around and offer a special deal for people on the edges you know that are lower risk and they can handle pick it up i would expect that to kind of emergent some ok well i'd like to thank everyone for coming thank you indeed for for presenting it was very very educational