Council to Hold Public Hearing on Buyouts of Flood Prone Homeowners

The Oakland Council will hold a public hearing next week on a grant application to purchase five flood-prone properties along the Ramapo River.

According to borough administrator Richard Kunze, the borough is preparing a grant to the county that would help fund the purchase of five homes on Roosevelt Boulevard at an estimated cost of $1.6 million. The figure is rough, he said, and will include added costs for legal services, acquisition of the properties and the demolition of homes, if purchased.

“We have been looking at this since the hurricane, and since the hurricane before Sandy,” Mayor Linda Schwager said. “These are properties that continuously flood.”

Flood Commission chair Lew Levy explained that flooding is particularly devastating at that section of the river because a sharp turn there forces the water over the bank at high speeds during storm surges.

“We’ve had a storm situation there where the river actually picked up the road,” he said. “It’s not just how high the water comes; it’s how fast it comes down the street.”

Schwager said that the borough has met with the property owners, who expressed interest in the program. The borough has previously bought out one property on the end of Saratoga Drive. Roosevelt, located downstream on the same side of the river, was “uninhabitable” after last year's storm, she said.

Even after federal grants to raise flood-prone homes, Levy said, the effort remains a financial burden on property owners, who have to shell out upwards of $50,000 for such mitigation projects up front and wait for reimbursement.

More severe storms in recent years, coupled with the river’s deteriorating health, he said, have made the decades-old developments at the location no longer sustainable.

“I’m sure at the time the engineers looked at it, it seemed like a good thing to do,” he said. “But nobody could foresee the developments that would take place.”

The borough already has a $325,000 Green Acres grant that the council could apply to the buyouts, according to Kunze, and will continue to seek funds from the DEP as well as FEMA for additional phases of a buyout, in addition to applying for the county grant being prepared by the Land Conservancy of New Jersey.

“We needed help. We couldn’t do it on our own, and that’s when we hired the land conservancy,” Schwager said.

Should the borough submit an application to the county, it will have to compete with other Bergen towns for scarce funds, as most of the federal money to be distributed by the state for buyout programs is expected to go to property owners in Sandy-ravaged shore towns.

“I’m not very optimistic about it,” Councilwoman Elizabeth Stagg said at a July 10 discussion of the program, pointing to applications expected from other area municipalities, Ramapo River neighbor Mahwah among them.

The land conservancy will be present at a public hearing on the grant application at the council’s July 24 meeting.