Starting in 2021, the Federal Emergency Management Agency started using a new practice to determine insurance rates. Now, Louisiana officials are taking the agency to court over the “Risk Rating 2.0” methodology.
“Many of the parish presidents in southeast Louisiana have been asking FEMA for some time now, even before the program was implemented, for information on how they determine these flood risk premiums,” said St.
Charles Parish President Matt Jewell, who joined WWL’s Newell Normand this week.
Jewell filed his own lawsuit against FEMA in April. Since then, there has also been action from Louisiana Attorney General Jeff Landry, Lafourche Parish and Terrebonne Parish.
According to a resolution passed by Terrebonne last week, government officials in Louisiana have “grave concerns about the soundness of Risk Rating 2.0’s underlying methodology, its failure to properly take into account any of the numerous improvements Louisiana’s Levee Boards have made to the flood protection system and its catastrophic effect on Louisiana’s flood insurance rates and the ability of Louisiana’s homeowners to purchase flood insurance.”
FEMA said that its update of the National Flood Insurance Program’s (NFIP) risk rating methodology includes the new Risk Rating 2.0 price rating strategy. It said that the program “leverages industry best practices and cutting-edge technology to enable FEMA to deliver rates that are actuarily sound, equitable, easier to understand and better reflect a property’s flood risk.”
However, Jewell and others disagree.
“The numbers that we were seeing just weren’t making sense,” he said. And, you know, in-person meetings, phone calls, we were always just denied. They weren’t... they weren’t turning over this information to us. So in St. Charles Parish, we took it a step further. We decided to do a public records request. And once we were denied that, we went through our, you know, all of our administrative remedies. And unfortunately, we had to take it to the courts to try to decide if this indeed is a public record. We certainly believe it is.”
Jewell explained that Louisiana officials and residents want to make sure that their risks are being accurately reflected.
“Since Katrina, there’s been billions of dollars of investment in flood protection, and I believe that southeast Louisiana is better protected than we ever have been,” he said. “And we’ve actually seen that play out in real world scenarios like Hurricane Ida, where we had little to no flooding at all inside the levee protection. So, FEMA needs to be looking at these real-world scenarios and basing their interpretations of the model off of that instead of whatever it is that they're using.”
Listen to Normand’s full conversation with Jewell here.
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