By CALEB FREY

Staff Reporter

LAPLACE – Representatives from FEMA and the Louisiana Recovery Authority (LRA) were on hand Thursday, along with the St. John Parish Council, to discuss and attempt to field criticism and concerns about the new advisory based flood maps, which would require many people to raise their homes by as much as seven feet.

LRA Director of Hazard Mitigation Paul Rainwater expressed early in the meeting it was his organizations purpose to rebuild Louisiana not only safer but higher. Many St. John developers were in attendance to disagree with the substantial minimum elevation standards that would be required for homeowners to be included in the National Flood Insurance Program.

If St. John did adopt the FEMA advisory-based flood maps, they would be eligible to receive a $2.3 million grant for severe and repetitive loss, houses that continue to flood. Parish President Nickie Monica noted there was only four requests for money from that grant so far which would amount to approximately $300,000 out of the $2.3 million allotment.

Councilman Steve Lee’s concern was that raising the elevation levels so drastically would cause a financial spiral not only for residents who could not afford to raise their homes, but by developers who would be forced to increase costs to raise new homes to a safe elevation.

&#8220$2.3 million – I don’t want it to sound like it’s chickenfeed, but it’s certainly not a whole lot compared to what we could lose by accepting this advisory board elevation,” Lee said.

Developers in attendance were also very skeptical of the methods FEMA used to develop the maps, a technology called LIDAR, which stands for Light Detection and Ranging.

LIDAR works by bouncing light off the ground to a satellite and then the satellite measures the distance it takes the light to return.

FEMA representative Larry Voice explained that LIDAR is used to save time because it can measure distances much quicker than an actual surveyor.

&#8220You can’t send out a surveyor and say we want you to survey the elevations for all of St. John Parish, that’s going to take a lot of time,” Voice said.

Although time consuming, developer Michael St. Martin felt that a physical survey would much better serve FEMA and the residents than just simply using satellite technology, noting that many of the elevation lines in the advisory map just seemed to be drawn arbitrarily.

&#8220If you reviewed these maps with some local people or just rode around and looked at it, you might see how ridiculous some of these lines are,” St. Martin said.

Even if the council decides to adopt the FEMA maps, no required flood elevation changes would be made until a new advisory map firm is agreed upon sometime next year. Council Member Jaclyn Hotard advised that rushing into something like this could be disastrous.

&#8220When you’re making a decision like this, I think time really needs to be taken,” Hotard said.