Flood Recovery Home Buyout Program
2017 NACo Achievement Award Winner
Boulder County, Colo., CO
Best In Category
About the Program
Category: County Resiliency (Best in Category)
Year: 2017
Boulder County experienced a historic rain event in September 2013 which led to destructive flooding across the county. Flood waters and landslides caused substantial damage to public and private properties, displacing thousands of residents. The 2013 Flood was declared a National Disaster by President Obama which opened Federal and State funding programs to assist Boulder County through the recovery process. The Flood Recovery Home Buyout program is one of many recovery programs developed with help from the federal funding support. Boulder County was able to develop a local program to provide property owners with an option to sell their high hazard, or heavily impacted properties at a pre-flood value. The program was funded by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) Hazard Mitigation Grant Program (HMGP) as well as the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) Community Development Block Grants for Disaster Recovery (CDBG-DR). Once the impacted property is purchased by the county, the land is restored as close to its predeveloped state as possible, and managed as undeveloped land in perpetuity. Maintaining this land as undeveloped space greatly reduces the risk of damage or human injury from likely future events. Returning the land to predevelopment state means that all structures and inorganic surface debris are cleared from the property, and then the property is revegetated with native seed mixes. After all properties have been restored management decisions will be made to determine what the undeveloped uses and future maintenance will be on these properties. The program began shortly after the flood in 2013 and is expected to fund more than $18 million in acquisition and reclamation for up to 50 properties across Boulder County. Reclamation of all properties in the program is expected to be complete by August 2017, nearly four years after the disaster itself.