HENRICO COUNTY, Va. — People who own property in Henrico County's floodplain are about to get a nice discount on their flood insurance.
I attended a ceremony at Echo Lake Park Thursday where county leaders announced Henrico has entered FEMA's Community Rating System (CRS).
The CRS program encourages floodplain management practices that go beyond the National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP).
Points are awarded for achieving more than a dozen individual steps, including requiring elevation certificates for structures, regulatory standards for structures in the floodplain, and outreach, which involves notifying individual property owners about changes or revisions to a structure's floodplain status.
Another step is mapping out community floodplains that go beyond the FEMA maps, which Henrico has done.
The escalating discounts that come with completing the various steps reflect the reduced flood risk.
Henrico enters the program with an unusually high Class 5 rating - one of the highest in the state- which means homeowners purchasing flood insurance will save 25% on their yearly premium, or about $145 per policy.
Henrico is the only CRS community in Central Virginia.
"The program is really intended to create a comprehensive floodplain management program and set communities up to be more resilient," said Kristin Owen, Henrico's floodplain and dam safety manager. "If we do have a flooding disaster, say like another Gaston, we have policies in place that help us respond and recover more quickly. We also have had development standards in place so that the damages we see [after an event], hopefully won't be as bad as what they were before. The insurance discount is really just the incentive so that people want to do these things that we were already doing."
Richmond and Chesterfield take part in the National Flood Insurance Program, but not the more demanding CRS program. A spokesperson for Chesterfield told me the county has not pursued the CRS program because not enough homes are in the floodplain.
A jurisdiction must sign on with the NFIP for homeowners to qualify for federal insurance; if it does not, property owners are left to fare for themselves in the private insurance market. And any mortgage loan from a federally backed financial institution (virtually every loan) for a structure in a floodplain, must have flood insurance.
Owen, who has been with Henrico for three years, pointed out that accruing enough points to achieve a lower class rating (the lower the classification, the bigger the insurance discount), is not easy, and requires an ongoing commitment from leadership.
"I had the benefit of coming into this program that already had these great things, so I just got to inherit them and then build off of those," said Owen. "I didn't expect we were going to get this high a rating. I told them we would get to a Class 7, which is a 15% discount. When I got the news [about achieving a 25% discount], it was really exciting. The program currently is very, very document-heavy. So we've spent four years getting our application together and working with FEMA to get this. It is a lot. But we wouldn't be here if we didn't have the policies and things in place that our board and the manager have enacted over the years."
Louisa County does not participate in the NFIP; a posting on the county website says that's because of a disagreement with FEMA mapping.
The discounted rate for Henrico homeowners takes effect October 1.
And if a jurisdiction achieves a Class 1 rating? That would be a 50% discount on flood insurance.
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