At its heart, the debate over restricting floodplain development in Lawrence isn’t just about flooding.

It’s about money. Perhaps your money.

	www.lawrenceplanning.org/ current/floodplainregs.html

One side says it’s about the millions of dollars Lawrence taxpayers must cough up for recovery efforts when the city gets hit by a big storm, or for expensive engineering projects to prevent a repeat of the devastation. It’s about money spent by home and business owners to rebuild and remodel after a flood.

“If the land we’re making hard to develop is land that’s likely to flood, causing problems for the city and the ultimate property owners,” said City Commissioner David Dunfield, “then I think that’s the decision we need to make.”

The other side argues the new regulations will drive up the cost of building and insuring homes, shops and factories in Lawrence costs that will be passed on to homebuyers and customers, and might make it harder to do business.

“It’s certainly going to add to the cost of development,” said Bill Yanek, coordinator of the Lawrence Builder-Realtor Coalition. “As building and developing get more expensive, it filters down to the consumer.”

The battle of pocketbooks is moving toward a climax. Planning officials have scheduled two hearings on the proposed regulations for July, hoping for a decision to send to the Lawrence City Commission.

	Lawrence’s builders and real estate agents have joined forces in a new advocacy group, saying they want to have a greater voice in city policy-making. Read about it Monday’s Journal-World.

And the ante has been raised. Planners recently released a map showing how many properties in the city would be affected by the new rules how many people, in other words, will bear the direct cost.

The answer: A lot more than officials expected.

Started in 1993

The proposed rules have been under consideration by city planners since last fall, an outgrowth of the city’s recovery efforts after the flood of 1993.

In the immediate aftermath of that storm, the city spent $2.3 million to repair streets, sewers and other parts of the infrastructure. Another $1.2 million went to designing and building a pump station to slow the buildup of rainwater in North Lawrence.

Additionally, the federal government provided Douglas County with $4.4 million to assist farmers, families and businesses in flood recovery efforts. The city has since spent more than $11 million to put in place a stormwater master plan to prevent a repeat of 1993, and expects to spend another $40 million by 2014.

The new rules originally would have banned all new construction in areas likely to flood. The current version would allow building if a property owner could produce a hydrological study showing the new structure wouldn’t change the floodplain’s elevation or contours. Those studies, developers say, typically cost between $3,000 and $5,000, depending on the size and location of the lot under development.

The proposed regulations also expand the floodplain to include areas that would be affected if the elevation of the federally designated 100-year floodplain was raised two feet.

Arbitrary regulation?

	According to the United States Geological Survey: Floodplains are lands bordering rivers and streams that usually are dry but are covered with water during floods. Buildings or other structures placed in floodplains can be damaged by floods. They also can change the pattern of water flow and increase flooding and flood damage on adjacent property by blocking the flow of water and increasing the width, depth, or velocity of flood waters.The magnitude of a flood is described by recurrence interval. By studying a long period of flow records for a stream, it is possible to estimate the size of a flood that would, for example, have a five-year recurrence interval (called a five-year flood). Although a 100-year flood is expected to happen only once in a century, there is a 1 percent chance that a flood of that size could happen during any year.

That last provision is drawing criticism from developers. Steve Glass, president of Lawrence’s LRM Industries, said he thought that even the federal floodplain maps were scientifically suspect and didn’t know why the city would expand those boundaries.

“I think it’s somewhat arbitrary,” Glass said. “If the city wants to include a bigger area, the city should go out and do an expanded study instead of taking an arbitrary number.”

Doing such a study would cost the city millions of dollars. And city planner Bryan Dyer said the two-foot elevation wasn’t entirely random. Existing city codes say houses built in floodplains should be elevated two feet above the elevation set by the federal government as the level likely to be reached in a so-called 100-year flood.

What’s more, he said, the 2001 federal maps, developed by the Federal Emergency Management Agency, were based on 1996 data that didn’t account for Lawrence’s growth since then.

“The growth of impervious surface parking lots, streets has a direct impact on the floodplains that those maps don’t account for,” Dyer said. “Two feet is a reasonable number we felt would generally account for the urbanization of the area.”

It has a wide effect, however.

The map shows that all or part of 2,600 land parcels in Lawrence would be included in the new restrictions. Not including city-leased land at Clinton Lake, the designated 100-year floodplain in Lawrence would expand to a total of 5.4 miles from 4.1 miles.

Roughly 1,200 of the parcels would be designated as floodplain only because the city says so: They lie entirely outside the federally designated floodplain for Lawrence.

Even Linda Finger, the city-county planning director, was surprised by the number of new properties that would be regulated.

“There are more property owners than I anticipated” in the new map, she said in a memorandum on the issue.

That’s not necessarily a problem, Finger said. The new floodplain areas contain “folks who have historically noticed water in their basements,” she said.

The financial burden

But opponents say the expanded floodplain required by the regulations puts a new financial burden on home and business owners. Those newly included properties may have to purchase expensive floodplain insurance.

Federal law mandates that banks and mortgage companies require homeowners within the FEMA floodplain to buy the insurance the annual premium on $100,000 insurance for a home in a flood-prone area runs between $321 and $1,371, according to FEMA estimates. Yanek, whose organization favors limiting restrictions to the federal floodplain area, said those companies would probably require insurance for the city-designated floodplain as well.

	Copies of the floodplain map are available online, or in print for $10, at the Lawrence-Douglas County Planning Office in City Hall at Sixth and Massachusetts streets.The planning commission will take public comment on the map and proposed regulations at a special meeting, 6:30 p.m. to 8 p.m. July 10 at City Hall.The commission will consider the regulations at its regular meeting, 6:30 p.m. July 24.

“They’re going to see ‘floodplain,'” Yanek said, “and they’re going to require flood insurance.”

Dyer disagreed.

“If you’re in the new area, your bank’s not going to make you buy flood insurance,” he said.

One local lender said that issue was still up in the air.

“We don’t have a determination on that yet,” said Todd Sutherland, president of University National Bank. “If (the properties) would become non-buildable, we would protect ourselves as a lender.”

North Lawrence impact

Outside of city-leased land at Clinton Lake, the largest expansion of floodplain on the new map is in North Lawrence. That worries Lawrence real estate agent Marilyn Bittenbender, who says the new rules might stifle ongoing redevelopment efforts along one of the gateways into the city.

“People have spent literally millions of dollars up there … that’s been good for North Lawrence and the community as a whole,” she said.

“If the ordinances are so restrictive that businesses cannot expand or grow … we’re telling North Lawrence that ‘We’re looking at you as the best you’ll ever be.'”

Developers also have been concerned that the regulations would make it impossible to continue development of East Hills Business Park. Finger noted the park is already platted, and that the regulations tread more lightly on such properties.

“If we had had these regulations when the park developed, it would’ve only meant a reconfiguration of their lot lines,” she said.

But proponents of the regulations agree it will be more costly to develop floodplain properties. They don’t think that’s a bad thing.

“(We) recognize it’s an additional cost, perhaps a significant cost,” Dyer said. “But the (regulations) simply represent the true development cost versus when the city is asked to retrofit stormwater improvements for a development that shouldn’t have been there in the first place.”

Having it both ways?

Jim Turrentine lives in the south part of Lawrence; his home flooded in 1993 and 1995. He doesn’t remember how much he spent on cleanup, but says there were significant costs not always financial involved.

“It was more time, wet vacs and the loss of a lot of possessions,” he said.

He doesn’t like the proposed regulations, because they’re not restrictive enough. No floodplain development should be allowed, he said; the land should be preserved as open space.

“You can’t have it both ways,” Turrentine said. “You can’t develop all the area and take away all the area where the water goes. The water has to go somewhere. You can’t do both. It’s physically impossible.”

That doesn’t keep developers from hoping the rules can still be modified. The city’s financial future may be at stake, they say.

“Everybody is sitting here struggling to know what the right answer is,” Bittenbender said. “The challenge is … how do you come up with a reasonable solution that keeps those problems from becoming exacerbated, but without taking away somebody’s business viability?”