Redrawn flood maps for Jefferson County, issued last month, have put some residents in deeper water financially.
Dennis DeLeon, who lives in east Lakewood, must take out flood insurance on the home he has owned since 1997 by the end of March, but is ill-equipped to afford the premium.
“I’m so angry about everything,” DeLeon said. “How can the government come in and do this?”
His insurance agent quoted him a flood insurance policy premium of $7,000 a year, he said, while his lender, Wells Fargo, offered to arrange a policy with a premium closer to $2,200 a year.
Given that his mortgage payments are about $11,000 a year, DeLeon said the first premium quoted would send him into foreclosure. Even the lower quote won’t be easy to absorb for the recently disabled construction worker, who lost his foot in a work accident and now survives on $2,000 a month.
If you have a property in a floodplain with a federally backed mortgage, your lender is required to make sure there is flood insurance coverage on a home.
“We don’t enforce compliance. It is done through the lender,” said Jerry DeFelice, a spokesman for Federal Emergency Management Agency Region VIII in Denver.
Map revisions, like what Jefferson County issued in February and what Boulder County adopted in 2012, almost guarantee lenders will revisit coverage.
The map revisions — unrelated to September’s floods — have been in the works nationally since 2004 and are slowly grinding forward, and eventually will reach every county in the state.
“Anytime FEMA issues a new map, there are changes that we must review to see if any of our mortgaged properties included in the mapped area have moved into or out of a Special Flood Hazard Area, since we are required by law to maintain flood insurance on the loan if the mortgaged home is in a SFHA,” said Cristie Drumm, a spokeswoman for Wells Fargo in Denver.
DeFelice said the reviews may capture some property owners who might have been missed in previous map updates.
In Weld County, flood-plan administrator Tom Parko said his office has heard from residents receiving notices to add flood-insurance coverage or pay higher premiums, even though a final map isn’t out.
“I have a hunch that some companies are going off of these preliminary maps,” he said.
The county has appealed the revisions, arguing changes made between the digital and print versions of the map are excessive, Parko said.
September’s flooding has also changed the dynamics in that county, DeFelice said.
One advantage of digitization is that property owners can more easily see where they are located in relation to the floodplain. The added precision also allows lenders, who use private providers to draw their maps, to get a better sense of risk.
DeFelice encourages those who don’t trust the lenders’ maps to compare them with those available through the city or county or at floodsmart.gov.
Remapping can work both ways. It reduced the number of parcels in the floodplains of Lakewood and Arvada, but increased them in Wheat Ridge.
In Arvada, 420 properties were taken out of the floodplain in the revision, while 179 were added, city engineer Pat Dougherty said.
Arvada retiree Don Roach was among those who lost out in the redraw. The new map has boosted his flood insurance premium from about $940 a year to $1,351 a year, he said.
Roach’s understanding was that his lot, just north of Arvada West High School, where he has lived for five decades, barely touched the flood zone.
Given that he never had flooding problems, he thought he would escape the dreaded designation when he heard Arvada’s new map would remove hundreds of homes from the floodplain.
But on a visit to city hall, he found out that his home was deeper in a flood zone than shown in earlier maps. The premium increase notice wasn’t far behind.
“It will be more than my homeowner’s insurance premium,” he said, with the difference being about $160.
Complicating matters, Dougherty said the National Flood Insurance Program is raising premiums everywhere to cope with a $24 billion shortfall after claims from hurricanes Katrina and Sandy.
DeLeon’s neighborhood is in a floodplain, although revised maps show a significant flood would only reach his garage and patio and not his house. In past years, his agent was able to get him an exemption, but not his time.
Drainage improvements following the conversion of the old Villa Italia Mall into Belmar have actually improved water flows in the neighborhoods to the east, where DeLeon lives, said Lakewood city engineer Anne Heine.
The problem is that West Nevada Place, near DeLeon’s house, becomes a surface waterway draining into Weir Gulch and still will flood.
DeLeon could hire a surveyor to obtain an elevation certificate and make an appeal. But he estimates that would run $1,200, on top of new premiums he must pay.
“It won’t guarantee they will do anything,” he said.
DeFelice said FEMA doesn’t charge property owners who challenge a designation and that surveyors can run from $400 to $800.
The insurance industry tries to get ahead of map revisions by providing agents in affected areas additional training, said Carole Walker, executive director with the Rocky Mountain Insurance Information Association.
Most agents can help homeowners sign up for flood insurance, typically underwritten through the federal government, Walker said.
Even those who aren’t required to maintain flood insurance, either because they are no longer in a floodplain or because they are mortgage-free, should seriously consider maintaining coverage, she advised.
“Across the life of a 30-year mortgage, you are more likely to have a flood than a fire,” she said. “People would never think of not having fire insurance.”
DeFelice said premiums for coverage in low to moderate risk areas, where about a quarter of NFIP claims are made, run about $400 a year.
Aldo Svaldi: 303-954-1410, asvaldi@denverpost.com or twitter.com/aldosvaldi
Figuring out your flood risk
In addition to insurance agents and local government officials, homeowners and businesses have a few more places to look for information about flood risk to their properties.
The first two are simple to use to locate a property on flood maps currently in force. The third is more technical, but provides a Google Earth-like look at properties in the flood plain.