CITY MAY SEEK MONEY TO BUY LAND THAT FLOODS

Bea Poole's home in Red Star sits just a little too high to have qualified for Cape Girardeau's current flood buy-out program. But she was happy to hear that the city may apply to the State Emergency Management Agency for funds to buy out and demolish her home and those of 18 other residents.

The City Council will vote on whether to apply for those funds at tonight's meeting.

Her house at 1327 N. Water St. wasn't flooded in 1993 or 1995. But she and her husband Kenneth had to sandbag and operate a sump pump to keep the waters out and had to wade or take a rowboat in and out of their home during the height of both floods.

She said the water on Water Street got "butt deep."

"You should try to carry groceries through a flood," Poole said.

For the earlier flood buy-out programs, the city ranked properties based on how easily they flooded and how long the waters covered them. With the $1.9 million in state and federal money already allocated, the city made offers to buy 99 properties in Smelterville, Red Star and the Meadowbrook areas. Seventy-six homeowners took the offers and the city expects to close on four more offers, said Ken Eftink, development services coordinator for Cape Girardeau and the person in charge of the writing the city's proposal for more buy-out money.

Eftink expects that with demolition costs, the city will exhaust the entire $1.9 million allotment. But because some other local governments completed their buy-out programs with money left over, there is more money available.

So the city sent surveying crews out to Red Star, Meadowbrook and the 700 block of South Fountain Street near Giboney Avenue and took measurements. The 19 additional homes are either below flood level for a 100-year flood or, like Poole's, would be inaccessible by land in the event of a 100-year flood.

Under the program, the city offers homeowners a price equal to what the property would have sold for before the 1995 flood. However, if the Federal Emergency Management Agency paid a homeowner anything for flood damage and receipts cannot be produced showing the money was used for fixing up the house, that amount would be deducted from the offer. If the money went for fixing up the grounds, it couldn't be deducted.

Among the homeowners most anxious to be eligible for a buy out are Lucell and Jake Riehn of 1210 Meadowbrook Drive. They are among the four homeowners left in their neighborhood. As with the Pooles, the elderly Riehns' home was surrounded with water in the 1993 and 1995 floods.

"If the flood comes, we'll have to go in a boat and I'm too crippled up," Lucell Riehn said. "I couldn't raise my foot to get in."

Riehn and her son-in-law and next-door neighbor Gene Hahs don't have city water or sewers. The city has planned to hook them up but the two families say they would prefer to be bought out.

But not everyone wants a buy out. A renter in the Red Star area who declined to give her name said she wants to stay, at least for the time being. "I ain't seen a problem with it," she said. "But if a flood comes, I'm gone."

The city would make its offer to her landlord, not her.

A neighbor, Bill Whitener of 1132 N. Spanish, said he would consider a buy-out offer "depending on us finding another place and what they would give us."

Whitener, a Baptist minister, said he couldn't find a house he could afford out of the flood plain when he moved to Cape Girardeau two years ago. He said he put a lot of work into remodeling the house and would hate to abandon it.

Some of the homeowners bought out in earlier programs had to get aid from other sources, including the Salvation Army, to be able to afford a home out of the flood plain.

One consequence of the buy-out program has been to take some of the least expensive homes off the Cape Girardeau market. According to figures from the Missouri Housing Development Commission, Cape Girardeau has lost 175 housing units from flood buy outs and highway construction in the last three years.

The point of the buy-out program "is to get everyone out of harm's way," Eftink said. "In the Smelterville area, we've acquired all the housing. That area has a long history of flooding, and in the next flood event everyone's going to be out and the next flood won't cause property damage and human suffering."