The maps identify areas in the county judged to have at least a 1 percent change of flooding. The maps also indicate where mortgage lenders may require property owners to purchase flood insurance and where regulations related to flood plains apply.
Approval of the maps, which was required by Sept. 5, allows residents living within flood plains to purchase affordable flood insurance through the National Flood Insurance Program, run by the Federal Emergency Management Agency.
The county is required by law to adopt the maps, developed by FEMA, and to consider them as the best science for understanding and analyzing flood hazard areas.
According to Gordy Euler, a planner with the county's Community Planning Department, 3,680 parcels lie in the county's flood plains. Many of those parcels are large rural properties where the home itself is not located in the flood plain, in which case the property owner is not required to purchase flood insurance. Homeowners are not allowed to build structures, such as boat ramps or sheds, in a flood plain.
The county also updated its flood hazard ordinance, which in part regulates activity in parks, recreation sites and agricultural areas that are in flood areas.
The ordinance originally said that any of those activities had to be reviewed before they could be permitted. County Commissioner Steve Stuart worried that the requirement would unnecessarily restrict some activities, such as camping. He made a motion to alter the ordinance's language to say that if an activity did not change the land, that activity would not need to be reviewed.
The shoreline master program regulates economic and other development along all of the county's waterways.
The program helps determine, for example, how and whether the Ports of Vancouver and Ridgefield could expand. It sets processes for regulating mining and dredging, maintaining floating homes and determining what property owners living along shorelines need to do if they want to build a structure.
About 5,300 people in Clark County own properties along the 370 miles of shoreline that the program will regulate.
Shorelines are defined as marine waters; streams and rivers with a mean annual flow of more than 20 cubic feet per second; lakes 20 acres or larger; upland areas called shorelands that extend 200 feet landward from the edge of these waters; and wetlands and river deltas that are associated with marine waters, qualifying streams or rivers, qualifying lakes or shorelands. Wetlands within the 100-year flood plain also are considered shorelines.
All municipalities in Washington have been required to have shoreline master programs since the Legislature passed the Shoreline Management Act in 1971 and voters approved it in 1972.
Clark County's shoreline program was locally adopted in November and submitted to the state Department of Ecology in December. After the department made changes, including restricting houseboats to marinas and allowing private docks only if there is no net loss of shoreline, the county readopted the program.
Euler told the board that the guiding principle in developing the program is to preserve shorelines so that there is no future net loss.
Euler also told the board that the program is now part of county code, which it had not been before. The program's regulations are included in the county's comprehensive plan, which will impact and influence development regulations.
Source: http://www.oregonlive.com/clark-county/index.ssf/2012/07/clark_county_adopts_new_flood.html
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