Local officials demand updated FEMA flood maps

Rock County officials won’t schedule a required open house to finalize preliminary flood insurance rate maps until the maps are fully updated.
“There is no way that we, as a local unit of government, should sign off on this and hope in another 30 years they come back and look at it again,” said Rock County Administrator Kyle Oldre.
He and Rock County Land Management Office director Eric Hartman told Rock County commissioners at their Feb. 21 meeting that the meeting shouldn’t happen in April.
Local officials have requested the maps be updated with flood mitigation information, and they are waiting for a response.
The preliminary maps reviewed at the first open house in December are missing two flood mitigation projects built in Luverne in the 1990s.
Both projects slow the water flow through Poplar Creek on the west side of Luverne during heavy rain events.
Because of this, previously flood-prone neighborhoods — including 30 or 40 homes — should no longer be designated as “flood plains” in the updated maps.
The flood plain maps for Rock County were last updated in the 1980s.
Hartman relayed Rock County’s concerns to Jeff Weiss of the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources who handles the FEMA map-updating process for Minnesota.
“I followed up with him and the two others on the correspondence stating that the locally elected officials preferred that we do not set the second meeting until we have the study done and we have more accurate mapping,” Hartman said.
Weiss indicated that a restudy of Poplar Creek has been submitted to FEMA.
“Since this is a new grant, we would start the work toward the end of 2023 or early 2024,” Weiss wrote.
The timeline would be near the summer of 2024, a deadline FEMA has imposed for counties to accept the preliminary maps.
Weiss also admitted that other flood plain areas around Luverne may also be incorrect.
“In addition to Poplar Creek, we are also proposing that we restudy the Rock River through Luverne at the same time because we found some issues that need to be addressed, particularly with the floodway for the draft maps.”
The December meeting wasn’t the first time that local officials told the DNR that the flood retention projects around Luverne needed to be included in the flood map updates.
The first meeting to redraw the flood maps in Rock County took place in 2018.
“And they continue to miss it and clean it up,” said Oldre.
Residents in counties where FEMA-proposed maps are not approved would not be eligible to purchase flood insurance through the National Flood Plain Insurance Program.