Officials briefed on federal rules

JACKSON TWP — Municipalities are required to follow federal guidelines outlining what they must prevent from being built in floodplains.

They also have to follow the law and not be overly strict when implementing those restrictions.

Representatives from nearly a dozen southern Butler County municipalities learned on Monday about what can and cannot be done when communities move to mitigate flooding by restricting building in floodplains.

The municipalities, which have been working together for more than two years to come up with a collaborative approach to prevent stormwater damage, heard about these limits from Bill Bradfield, the state’s National Flood Insurance Program coordinator, as well as Don Graham, an attorney with Dillon McCandless King Coulter & Graham.

Bradfield said in 1968, when the federal government began offering subsidized insurance through the National Flood Insurance Program, or NFIP, they also began mandating some stormwater management practices if a community wished to participate in the program.

Graham said while those restrictions are the minimum a community in the NFIP must implement, they aren’t the limit. Communities can’t outright ban building within a certain number of feet, he said. That would be considered a “taking of all economic uses” of that land, something for which the municipality would have to compensate a landowner. However, communities can put regulations in place that directly relate to the prevention of flooding.

One way in which municipalities can mitigate flooding, which was a large piece of the conversation Monday, is by limiting the amount a development can contribute to the flood elevation. Flood elevation is the amount of water that would result from a 100-year flood.

Harmony Mayor Cathy Rape said the borough recently decreased its flood elevation limit from 12 inches to 9 inches, a community-wide limit. She questioned whether communities in the Connoquenessing watershed adopting similar, strict limits would decrease the likelihood of damaging floods.

Chris Rearick, Jackson Township manager, said Jackson had a no-rise limit, which prohibits any development from raising the flood elevation even the smallest amount. Doug Roth, a Penn Township supervisor, wondered aloud if the 10 communities should “be on the same page” regarding flood elevations.

“If you’re going to do that type of thing, you need to sit down and document exactly why,” Graham cautioned.

Cranberry Township manager Dan Santoro asked if having no-rise policies throughout the watershed would decrease the amount of — or the damage from — flooding in the lower portions of the watershed, such as Harmony and Zelienople. Ben Gilberti, Jackson Township engineer, said it likely would not.

“I think it’s more of a political ‘We’re not going to make it any worse than it is’ statement,” Gilberti said. “That we’re going to learn from our past mistakes and not repeat them.”

While municipal representatives simply learned about the different options Monday, Bradfield said it was a step in the right direction.

“This is great to see, this kind of a regional approach to stormwater and flooding,” he said, adding he would like to see similar approaches throughout the commonwealth.