CBRA is administered by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS), whose enforcement efforts have run into a problem: The paper maps on which CBRA are based are a quarter-century old, and often not as definitive about boundaries as they need to be. This is potentially a huge issue; for example, someone who has unwittingly built a home and purchased flood insurance – with the government’s sanction – in a CBRA zone could have a future claim denied. Through a cooperative agreement with FEMA, FWS is working on updating and digitizing a number of the CBRA zone maps.

In working to resolve issues such as CBRA compliance, USACE is evolving into the role of problem-solver or conflict negotiator on floodplain management issues of national significance. Recently, for example, it was discovered that a USACE project to reduce flood risks in the Red River floodplain around the cities of Fargo, N.D., and Moorhead, Minn., would affect the base flood elevation, or BFE – the elevation associated with a “100-year flood” or a flood with a 1 percent chance of occurring annually.

The BFE is the basis of FEMA’s National Flood Insurance Program, and activities that potentially change the BFE – which USACE’s flood risk reduction project has the potential to do – are disqualifying, explained Bray. “By strict interpretation of FEMA’s regulations, a community that participates in the National Flood Insurance Program cannot permit activities, which include construction of flood risk management projects, that influence the BFE … So after this conflict arose in the field a few times, and most recently and prominently in the design of the project to reduce the flood risk to the Fargo/Moorhead area, the headquarters staffs of FEMA and the Corps were able to sit down and talk through this issue – to find different regulations and policies we each had that could help the staff get through this issue when it comes up again in the future, so that the projects can be developed to help the community manage the flood risk without resulting in their being disqualified from the Flood Insurance Program.” The workaround devised by USACE and FEMA is already being discussed and adapted for other communities seeking flood protection in other parts of the country.

Meanwhile, an exhaustive review of federal policies and program alignment within the agencies is under way, to identify which programs are working and which ones may conflict with others. The expected outcome of this review is an objective measure of how effective federal policies have been in protecting the nation from floods, and a list of recommendations for continued action.

Of course, no member of the FIFM-TF wants to continue to address such problems and conflicts on an ad hoc basis. The purpose of reconvening the Task Force has been to coordinate floodplain management at the highest levels of government, to prevent such conflicts from occurring in the first place. In March 2012, it took an important first step, issuing a simple half-page document titled, “Guidance on Unwise Use of Floodplains.”

The production of a half-page document may not seem like much, said Alexander, but when you’re trying to align battleships, it’s a major accomplishment – an important milestone in the federal coordination effort. “It is the start of saying: ‘Here’s the definition of unwise use, as the federal government views it – not as the Corps views it or as FEMA views it, but as viewed by 12 agencies within the federal government,’” he said. “As we go forward and start working on individual agency guidelines and regulations, we will have this one document to guide those efforts, so that we’re all trying to take the nation as a whole in the same direction.”

This article originally appeared in the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers: Building Strong®, Serving the Nation and the Armed Forces 2012-2013 Edition.