Flood Insurance Reform Act of 2011

Floor Speech

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Mr. WALZ of Minnesota. I thank the ranking member for her work on this and the chairwoman of the subcommittee. Thank you for coming together and creating a process that allowed us to interact and work for our constituents.

Recognizing the gentleman from North Dakota, I have actually been on those flood flights that he's experiencing and am very appreciative of what he brought forward.

Today, I have a pretty simple amendment, I think, that addresses a real issue that we're having.

Over the past decade, there have been two real changes to the levee system that protects our communities in this country. The first, of course, was FEMA increasing the amount of information and the due diligence they're doing on recertification of levees. That's appropriate after Hurricane Katrina. Secondly, the private engineering firms that perform the recertifications are facing astronomically increased costs from their private insurers.

No one wants to insure a levee in a flood-prone area other than the rest of the community, thus the government. Together, these two changes have added increasingly high costs to our local communities as they're trying to protect their residents and keep their levees up to standards. It has created an extra burden on these communities that they can ill afford. This amendment offers a solution.

The Army Corps of Engineers stands ready and able to perform these levee certifications. In many cases, they built the levees. They can do it at a significantly reduced cost to the local communities. But under legislation passed in the 2000 Water Resources Development Act, State and local communities cannot hire the Corps of Engineers to do the work; they must first go to private contractors. It's exactly what happened in my town of Mankato, Minnesota. The north Mankato levee, which was designed and built by the Corps, needed to be recertified because of these changes. Because they couldn't use the Corps of Engineers, our local officials had to scramble and go out of their way to find a private contractor willing to do the work at an added cost of tens of thousands of dollars. At no fault to the private contractors, their insurance of liability was so high they had to pass the cost on to the local communities.

This approach was worked on in the last Congress with then-Representative Boozman, now-Senator Boozman. It has the support of the National Association of Counties, the National League of Cities, and the National Association of Towns and Townships. And here's the good thing: The Congressional Budget Office has certified this amendment will cost nothing to the taxpayers. Our taxpayers on the local level are paying far more as it is. This is a way to get it right, use the Corps that we already have, save taxpayers money, increase the efficiency of our levees, and reduce the claims that are made by this.

I urge my colleagues to support this piece of legislation, and once again I thank the committee for their outstanding work on the underlying bill.

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