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Date: 6/8/2022
AMHERST – The Amherst Planning Board hosted a public hearing on June 1 to discuss updates to the floodplain overlay district and amend the official zoning map as shown on the Flood Insurance Rate Maps (FIRM). The current Amherst flood maps were last updated in 1983.
“The town of Amherst has been a participant in the National Flood Insurance Program, which is administered by FEMA (Federal Emergency Management Agency),” said the town’s Planning Director Christine Brestrup. “This program provides flood insurance for property owners whose properties are subject to flooding if the municipality in which the property is located participates in the flood insurance program. The town has been working on this project of updating the flood insurance rate maps and flood insurance study since around 2012.
“The purpose of the project is to create accurate, federally approved maps for land affected by flooding in order to provide information to banks, which grant mortgages, to landowners, to the Amherst Conservation Commission and Planning Board and other interested parties,” she added.
Public hearings by the board and the Community Resources Committee (CRC) will continue until early September on two different but associated topics. Brestrup said one of the items is both the text and map zoning amendments and the second item is the FIRM maps and the flood insurance study completed by FEMA and the town’s consulting firm, AECOM.
With the old maps last updated in 1983, Brestrup and Senior Planner Nate Malloy told the board that new and better technology has helped FEMA and AECOM to draft more accurate mapping of floodable areas around rivers and streams in Amherst. As long as Amherst remains in the National Flood Insurance Program, anyone in the municipality may purchase flood insurance even if their property isn’t mapped as a floodplain. The presentation noted how many property owners may want to be removed from the new floodplain as it is usually detrimental to the property’s value.
“If the town fails to adopt the new maps, the town will no longer be able to participate in the flood insurance program and people in Amherst will not be able to purchase flood insurance through the flood insurance program,” Brestrup said. “Flood insurance only covers damage to buildings; it doesn’t cover damage to properties. I understand that some people in the Tan Brook area see that there’s flooding in their yards but the damage to yards wouldn’t be covered by flood insurance.”
Board member Jack Jemsek asked if the new maps tried to account for climate change and how that might impact the future of the floodplains.
“The consultants said that they have 40 years of new data now to put into their equation so some of that is instream gauges in New England and New York state,” Malloy said. “Whether or not it’s trying to predict the future, it actually has more accurate data in terms of rainfall events in the 2000s and early 2000-teens that were factored into the equation so that’s why there was this delay from 2019 until now, because we realized FEMA had updated their regression equations. Previously they weren’t updated for 35 years so we opted to wait and use the newer equations. They don’t have a variable for climate change as part of their equation, they don’t have some factor of, ‘Every year it’s going to increase by a certain percentage because of climate change,’ but they do try to incorporate what they’re recording in data into their equation.”
District 4 Councilor Pam Rooney said she had a liaison question as it relates to the process after the board’s conversation. She asked if a date certain for September would allow enough time to make changes that will be able to go through the CRC and the Town Council process
“We’re not sure that we can get the letter of final determination until sometime in July or August, so we thought that an early September date would be a good time to aim for and we also know that the CRC continued its public hearing,” Brestrup responded. “It held a public hearing on May 26 and they’ve continued their public hearing to Sept. 8 so it seems that if we have ours on the seventh then we’re kind of in tandem. I don’t think there’s a timeline that comes into place until one or the other of those bodies closes its public hearing and then we have a certain number of days in which to write our reports and the town council has a certain number of days in which to act.”