Cates meets with FEMA About flood insurance
Key West Mayor Craig Cates made rounds at the U.S. Conference of Mayors in Washington, D.C., this week, cornering federal officials over federal flood insurance and other issues facing the island city.
During an interview at The Capitol Hilton where Cates and mayors from around the country discussed the issues facing their cities, Cates said he’d met with Federal Emergency Management Agency officials about keeping flood insurance rates lower for Key West’s homeowners.
“The federal government plans to raise flood insurance rates that affect everyone in the United States, but particularly in the Keys,” Cates said. “We are perpetually in a flood plain down there.”
Cates met Thursday for more than an hour at FEMA headquarters with agency officials. The meeting was arranged by Key West’s D.C. lobbyists, Holland & Knight. He told officials that residents in Key West can put in waterproof doors, build their homes on raised foundations, and do other things to prevent flood damage and keep flood insurance rates down.
“I told them that the people of Key West have been dealing with hurricanes for generations,” Cates said. “I told them the people who would have to pay higher insurance rates would be the working families who would see the increase in their mortgage payments.”
The rates aren’t to be increased for at least a year and Cates hopes the city will convince FEMA to keep their rates down. FEMA also has to do more before it can raise rates.
“The federal government hasn’t done a flood-plain elevation map since 2005 and they are supposed to be done every five years,” Cates said.
Cates also met with officials from other cities whose homeless aren’t just a strain on their services, Cates said. He heard from city leaders whose own residents end up dying in the cold. It was 12 degrees in Washington, D.C., Friday.
“Their homeless are people who worked in their cities, have children attending their schools, and sleeping in trucks and vans in their city limits,” Cates said. “In Key West, 98 percent of our homeless residents are from elsewhere.”
“When it gets cold in their towns, they have to set up special shelters or their own residents freeze to death,” he said. “However, they have a large inventory of abandoned property they can convert into warm, modern, transitional housing for their homeless population. In Key West, we don’t have that inventory of buildings to convert.”
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