The Metro Council is set to take up the second round of changes to floodplain development regulations, part of a local reckoning with flood risk and development practices in the wake of the 2016 floods.
A working group that has reviewed the city-parish Unified Development Code for months finalized its recommendations last week after gathering input from neighborhood groups, developers and others. The proposal goes to the Metro Council for consideration, and it comes as the first round of changes to floodplain rules go into effect in April.
“These are primarily technical, what I would call common sense changes,” Planning Director Frank Duke, who led the working group, says of the most recent proposed changes.
The proposal would require more regular updates to flood maps, tighten definitions, require the Metro Council to get a recommendation from the floodplain administrator on future changes, bolster inspections of drainage controls and updates a process for fill mitigation credits, among other things.
Notably, the proposal falls short of recommending an increase to the freeboard, or the distance between the base flood elevation and the height of the lowest floor of a building in a flood zone. Not only does the Federal Emergency Management Agency incentivize raising the freeboard level, but planners and flood experts say it is a good way to prevent future flooding, at least in new developments.
“(Freeboard) is something we had extensive discussion about,” Duke says. “There was not unanimity in the working group as to what we should do.”
The group tabled the idea until the engineering firm HNTB is done with a wide-ranging stormwater study commissioned by Mayor Sharon Weston Broome. That study, which is currently underway, will give local officials a wealth of data on the region’s flood risk, and is expected to usher in the third, and most significant, round of changes to ordinances and practices for managing flood risk.
Council members over the past year debated several proposals designed to improve the region’s resilience and prevent future flooding. Among those was a proposed moratorium on new developments in floodplains, proposed by Councilman Buddy Amoroso, that ultimately failed to pass but which spurred some action at the council.
