Please sign this petition to Asheville City Council Members:

It has been 3.5 months since Hurricane Helene devastated our community and damaged many commercial and residential buildings.  Many homeowners are still unable to live in their homes, if their homes are still standing, and 30% of businesses have not been able to reopen due to the damages sustained to their properties.

There are two things that stand in the way of the buildings in our community being restored.  The first is funding, over which city council has very little control. The second is city, state and federal floodplain development regulations. The development services office has not been issuing permits to most of the buildings in the floodplain, even when we apply for them.  Our understanding is that these are held up because the city is trying to understand the rules from FEMA and tell us what we can and cannot do to our properties.  

Based on the city staff presentation from the December 10th city council meeting, Asheville’s Unified Development Ordinance is currently meeting all of FEMA’s requirements, with the exception of a few minor wording changes.  If the minor wording changes were fixed, the current regulations are completely sufficient to ensure that FEMA will provide compensation to our community in the event of a subsequent disaster.

This is fantastic, and we are writing to express our desire to keep the current Unified Development Ordinance as it is for floodplain development.  Making any substantive changes to the UDO will be burdensome and costly for property owners in the floodplain.  These costs will ultimately increase rents for tenants.  Particularly since most of us are very short on funds and are already having difficulty in obtaining the funding necessary to rebuild, we implore you to leave everything as is in the current UDO, with the exception of the minor wording changes.

Specifically, we are stating that after this major disaster, the city should not be unnecessarily requiring more difficult standards for rebuilding in the floodplain, as our UDO is already meeting FEMA requirements.  These specific items are of particular concern:

1.       After a flood, rebuilding should not have to comply with a 2-foot freeboard requirement. Currently we can replace equipment like for like after a flood, and this should stay the same.  Something this major in the code should not be changed right after a major disaster.

2.       The ordinance should not require more than 2 feet of freeboard. More than that would be burdensome and could potentially even make rebuilding impossible. For example, 4 feet of freeboard would mean many buildings could not put lighting or HVAC on their first floor.

3.       We are in support of continuing to have a 1-year look-back period. A 5-year look-back period would make it very difficult for anyone in the floodplain to do any renovation projects in the future and may put a lot of businesses out of business.

4.       We also collectively want to express that we are not concerned about a 5 or 10% flood insurance premium increase. The proposed changes to the Unified Development Ordinance such as the 5-year look-back period and additional feet of freeboard would be much more costly to us over time.

Why is this important?

Nine percent of Asheville lies in the floodplain. Changes to the Unified Development Ordinance affects a significant amount of the population and buildings in our city. As stated previously, 30% of businesses have not been able to reopen. Changes to the UDO could cause a substantial increase in reconstruction cost which would result in a large amount of those businesses failing to ever reopen.  This would cause a loss of thousands of jobs and revenue to the city. In addition, many of these buildings and businesses are in extremely important sections of the city such as Biltmore Village and the River Arts District. If these businesses fail to reopen, the character of our city will change to such an extent that our tourism industry may never recover, which will cause additional business failure throughout the rest of the city that is not in the floodplain.  

We implore you to do the right thing and keep the Unified Development Ordinance as is—complying with the minimum FEMA and state requirements.