Archive: News

When Don Lein got his home insurance policy last month a series of additional coverages were offered to him.  "One of them was flood insurance," he told the Village Trustees at their regular meeting last Monday.  "From where I sit I don't see any imminence of flooding, but things do happen.  I called my carrier and he said he'd be glad to give me a quote.  But the next day he called back and said, 'We can not give you a quote, because Lansing is not registered with FEMA.  Until it is registered with FEMA we can not give you a quote of flood insurance.'"

The Town's been in existance a lot longer than the Village," noted Deputy Mayor Larry Fresinski.  "If they were a member a long time ago it may not apply here since the Village was formed."  Nobody knew whether the problem is with the Village or the Town being registered, but the Trustees agreed that they should find out.

"The thing of it is that with this new FEMA and SEMA thing, nobody really knows what it is," noted Trustee John O'Neill, suggesting that it might be more fruitful to ask a local insurance agency to check whether the Village is registered than to try to traverse the FEMA bureaucracy.  "It's a sixteen hundred pound gorilla," he said.

Town Bookkeeper/Personnel Officer Sharon Bowman called FEMA Wednesday after being asked by the Lansing Star whether the Town is registered.  "A woman at FEMA indicated she could tell that we had filed an application back in 1996, so she said that technically we are registered," Bowman says.  "She said there is no formal registration, so when I posed the question to her she didn't really have a clear answer for me.  But she made that assumption since we filed a claim and were granted federal assistance."


Bowman also says that Town residents whose dwellings are in the flood plain are required to have flood insurance, citing a Highway Department employee who lives near Salmon Creek that has it.  "As recently as the flooding that the county experienced this past April (Highway Superintendent Jack French) said he was being hounded by FEMA to complete his paper work to finish a flooding claim," she noted.  But she said the Town hadn't applied for assistance at that time, surmising that it had been submitted by the County for all its municipalities.

According to one source, the Village of Lansing is one of two in New york State that doesn't carry flood insurance for its own property, because of the expense relative to low exposure of Village properties.  But as of this writing it was unclear what the Village must do so that residents could obtain the coverage for their own properties.

Lien said that he probably doesn't need flood insurance where he lives, but that people who live along the lake or Salmon Creek certainly need it.  "You've got to be part of it, because if there is a real disaster they're going to pick it up," he told Village officials.  "But you need that two way street for that to happen.  I think we need to be doing this for the community.  It's important."

The Trustees promised Lein that they would pursue the issue.  Indeed Village Attorney David Dubow called a local insurance agent, who in turn put in a call to FEMA, but by mid-week the agency had not returned his call.  "We'll be following up in several directions" Fresinski promised.

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