Appraisals begin on flood buyout properties in Illinois

OLIVE BRANCH, Ill. -- Two years after Alexander County, Ill., applied for a federal grant to buy out about 135 flood-prone homes and businesses, appraisers have begun establishing what those structures were worth before the Mississippi River overflowed its banks and inundated them.

In February, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers released a report estimating the total damage from the 2011 flood at $2.8 billion.

According to the report, the flood affected 119 counties in seven states, including Illinois and Missouri, damaging more than 21,000 homes and businesses and inundating 1.2 million acres of farmland.

Alexander County applied for a buyout grant from the Federal Emergency Management Agency in September 2011.

FEMA approved the grant last spring. At the time, authorities had suggested purchases and demolition could begin by summer.

Six months later, some of the legal paperwork is finished, but Alexander County engineer Jeff Denny was reluctant to say when bulldozers could start running.

Alexander County can't start buying properties until the state approves the county's appraisals, which are being conducted, Denny said.

Homeowners are under no obligation to accept the buyouts, but they will not be able to negotiate if they don't like the price that is offered, he said.

"It's a voluntary program. You can opt out at any point in the process. There's really not any sort of penalty or anything like that," Denny said. " ... It's a way to help out those people that were really hit hard."

Appraisers will rely primarily on tax records to establish the pre-flood value of the structures, many of which have been empty for two years, Denny said.

To qualify for the buyout, properties had to be in a floodplain, and a cost-benefit analysis had to show it was more cost-effective to buy out the properties than to keep repairing or rebuilding them, he said.

"We're looking at the long-term costs associated with it, versus just up front now," Denny said.

Property owners had to apply for the buyouts before the county submitted its grant application in 2011, he said.

About 135 homes and businesses throughout the county will be affected, Denny said.

"It's like an $11 million project," he said.

FEMA will provide 75 percent of the funding, with the balance coming from a mitigation program administered by the Illinois Department of Natural Resources, Denny said.

Most of the buyouts are individual lots rather than large tracts of land, Denny said.

"It's focused on the structures themselves," he said.

The idea is to remove buildings that are likely to sustain repeated flood damage instead of spending money to repair or rebuild them over and over, Denny said.

To that end, the lots in question will be subject to deed restrictions that keep anyone from building on them in the future.

"Depending on what it is, some of it'll just be open yards in a subdivision, or out in the county, someone could farm it," Denny said. "No insurable structure can ever be built on that piece of property again."

epriddy@semissourian.com

388-3642

Pertinent address:

Alexander County, Ill.