Flood Insurance

Brian, Senator Schumer and Mayor Brown signing the revised flood maps removing hundreds of Buffalo homes from the flood plain.

The National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP) requires homeowners and business owners in floodplains to purchase flood insurance as a condition of securing federally approved lending for the purchase of their property.  Whether a community is in a floodplain is determined by maps created by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA).  Brian's office has found these maps for WNY to be wildly inaccurate, claiming that certain streets and neighborhoods are in a floodplain despite common sense evidence that there is clearly no flood risk.  However this requirement is forcing many WNY families and business owners to purchase flood insurance and thus lowers property values and reduces the incentive for private investment in these neighborhoods. 

Over the last 30 years, homeowners and businesses in Erie County have paid $35 million into NFIP and received only $8 million back.   Historically, WNY residents have been victims of a fundamentally unfair system that forces low risk communities like ours to subsidize high risk communities in other regions of the Country.  Of the $34 billion which has been paid into the NFIP nationally over the past thirty years, $15 billion has gone to Louisiana, despite the fact that Louisiana has paid less than $3 billion into the program.

For these reasons, Brian has strongly opposed the NFIP since coming to Congress fought against the NFIP, and if oftentimes one of a handful of Members voting against extending the program.