Ephrata set to see higher flood insurance rates

EPHRATA — If Ephrata wants to lower insurance rates for home and business owners in those parts of the city prone to flooding, it will have to do something drastic — like shutter downtown and move much of the city to higher ground.

“We have done all the easy stuff,” said Ron Sell, director of community development, during a city council meeting Wednesday evening.

Under discussion was Ephrata’s participation in the National Flood Insurance Program, how the program’s community rating system applies to Ephrata and what that means for flood insurance for Ephrata residents who live in the city’s floodplain.

According to Sell, the city has enacted all or nearly all of the building code measures required under the flood program. However, if Ephrata wanted to further reduce its collective flood insurance rates, it would have to do more — purchase land to keep it out of development, drastically expand the city’s flood canal system, and relocate much of the city currently in the flood plain to higher ground.

Projects City Administrator Wes Crago said would cost the already cash-strapped city between $20 million and $30 million.

Participation in the community rating system is voluntary, Crago said, and the city’s current downgrade will leave a typical Ephrata household in the city’s floodplain — everything between the canal and the railroad tracks — paying roughly $150 more per year for flood insurance.

According to Sell, the average Ephrata resident pays around $1,200 per year for flood insurance.

“We will still have to comply with all codes, just not as severely, and insurance rates will go up,” Crago explained. “This is a business decision.”

Ephrata is listed as having a 1 percent chance of major flooding — one year out of every hundred — and while major floods in the late 1930s and again in the very late 1940s left downtown under a foot of water for a bit, and the city last saw some flooding in 1996.

The city council didn’t make any decisions, though it was clear to most that doing what FEMA needed to earn another 5 percent discount on flood insurance rates — especially moving the city’s downtown — was simply out of the question.

“This will cost us whichever way we go, but if FEMA had its way, no one would live in the flood plain,” said Mayor Bruce Heim.

The U.S. government took responsibility for flood insurance in the late 1960s after many insurance companies dropped flood coverage — because flooding events tended to be catastrophic and hit whole communities at once — in the 1950s.

Charles H. Featherstone can be reached via email at countygvt@columbiabasinherald.com.