Eleven homes to be demolished

Sullivan flooding program nears completion

By FRITZ MAYER

SULLIVAN COUNTY, NY — “There are a couple of old Victorians.” That’s how Tom Cawley described some of the 11 homes that will soon be demolished as part of the county’s flood mitigation program. Cawley, a Sullivan County assistant attorney, told lawmakers at the government center on January 7, that once the homes are demolished, lawmakers must decide what they want to do with the remaining properties, whether to keep them, auction them off or otherwise dispose of them.

The program was started by a law introduced by Senator John Bonacic and passed in Albany in July 2009, which gave funds to seven counties in the Hudson Valley region to buy homes that had been flooded over the past five years. The program was voluntary and came with certain conditions, such as there must be no liens on the properties once the transfers to the counties were made.

About 25 property owners applied for the program in Sullivan County, but some were not eligible because of various reasons, for instance if the mortgage of the property was considered to be far above market value of the house. In the end, the county paid about $1.5 million to purchase 11 homes; five are in the Town of Callicoon, five are in the Town of Rockland and one is in the Town of Fallsburg.

Of the Callicoon properties, four are in the neighborhood known as The Island, which has flooded repeatedly over the past few years. Cawley said the residents who opted to sell were glad to do so because it had become difficult to sell the homes with the history of flooding.

The county paid prices ranging from $35,000 to $198,000. The prices paid were based on appraised values minus any funding property owners received from insurance companies or organizations such as Federal Emergency Management Agency to pay for flood damage.

There are severe restrictions as to what can be done with the parcels once the houses are demolished. Cawley said, “There’s very little you can do with those properties. You’ve got recreational uses, open space, wetlands management, or flood mitigation. That means, to me, that after we knock the house down and fill in the hole, it’s going to look like that perpetually.

“The bottom line is it was a dangerous situation,” he said. “We had people being taken out in boats, and firemen going in and pumping out places and, after multiple floods, the structures become hazardous. And the purpose of the grant was to be sure that we’re not putting people in harm’s way, be they residents or emergency workers or firemen.”

Mitigation efforts

In a related development, Brian Brustman of the Sullivan County Soil and Water Conservation District told lawmakers that his agency would be carrying out various flood mitigation efforts in 2010, with a total price tag of $326,500. The projects include culvert replacements and stream stabilization projects mostly in the Callicoon Creek area, with a couple in the Livingston Manor and Roscoe areas.

These projects are separate from the ones that may be recommended by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers once its study is complete in a couple of years. Those projects are likely to be quite a bit larger in scope than the ones being undertaken now.

Regarding flooding along the Upper Delaware River, Brustman said there wouldn’t be any efforts regarding the river itself because the scope of the flooding situation along the river was beyond the scope of what his agency could address.