Capital Press - Bill Would Ease Flood Insurance Restrictions

News Article

By Tim Hearden

A bill in Congress would make it easier for farmers protected by weakened levees to insure building upgrades on their land.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency is working through a remapping of floodplains and has downgraded many of the levees that protect agricultural land in California, finding they are no longer adequate to guard against 100-year floods.

As a result, farmers in many places have had difficulties putting in new or upgraded structures to maintain or increase production. Among those is Charley Mathews, a Marysville rice grower who said he was required to put flood vents in a new concrete grain storage structure.

"I have flood vents that only open when the building's empty," Mathews said. "I have a pretty solid concrete building that floodwaters are not going to damage anyway, but there's nothing that separates me out from a wood house."

A bill by Rep. John Garamendi, D-Calif., would allow farmers to obtain subsidized flood insurance on existing and new agricultural structures in these zones. The bill would also establish a task force to study flood insurance issues in "legacy communities" whose main economy is or has been agriculture, according to a news release.

The legislation would exempt new and substantially improved agricultural structures from the flood plans communities must adopt to be eligible for flood insurance from FEMA, according to a bill analysis.

Aspects of Garamendi's bill have won praise from the California Farm Bureau Federation, which is working with the newly formed Agricultural Floodplain Management Alliance to advocate farming as the best lowest-risk use of floodplains, said Elisa Noble, the Farm Bureau's director of livestock, public lands and natural resources.

"We will be working with his office and the Alliance to further develop the best assistance for agricultural communities located in floodplains," including provisions that compensate rural communities for bearing the increased risk from the remapping, Noble told the Capital Press in an e-mail.

Garamendi, a cattle rancher from Walnut Grove, Calif., said farmers in the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta region appealed to him for help.

"I am proud to take their voice to Washington, so American farmers have the freedom to grow their businesses and grow the products this country needs," he said in a statement.

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