By Zac Anderson
zac.anderson@heraldtribune.com
Published: Sunday, February 8, 2015 at 4:56 p.m. Reprinted with permission of the Herald Tribune
Sarasota County has rolled out a more user-friendly way to search proposed new flood risk maps, making it easier to determine which properties are among the 42,700 being added to high risk flood zones. The new search function addresses a major source of frustration with the maps.
Using a link on the county’s website, property owners can plug in their address and see their current flood zone and whether it is changing. The information is important because flood insurance is mandatory for structures in high-risk zones in order to obtain a mortgage, and there are also tougher construction standards for such properties.
Property owners had expressed “consistent” complaints about how difficult it was to navigate the draft flood maps put out by the Federal Emergency Management Agency, said Desiree Companion, the county’s point person for the map revision. The FEMA maps have no search function for individual properties and do not include property lines, making it difficult to determine whether the new high-risk zones are touching certain properties. So county mapping experts took the FEMA information and overlayed it onto local property records. “It’s wonderful,” Companion said. “Just quick, fast, you can see the old (zone) and the new.” The county’s map revision page also has dates, times and locations for four upcoming public forums on the issue.
Copyright © 2015 HeraldTribune.com (link to original article)
Interactive maps can be found here:
www.scgov.net
https://ags2.scgov.net/