A handful of residents living along a portion of the Carbon River southeast of Orting won’t have to worry about getting wet this flooding season.

Pierce County is moving them out of harm’s way by buying up eight homes along a flood-prone section of 177th Street East, also known as Alward Road.

Moving, however, can be bittersweet. While residents are escaping the threat of more flooding, they are leaving behind long-time homes.

For some, the buy-out experience has turned out to be unpleasant and stressful. Some got the price for their property that they wanted; others feel shortchanged.

County flood managers defend the flood plain land acquisition program as a cost-effective method of flood control.

Since 1989, an estimated $27 million has been spent on acquiring flood plain land, primarily along the Puyallup and Carbon rivers as well as South Prairie Creek, according to county officials.

On Alward Road, Pierce County is paying $1.24 million to buy and demolish the homes of eight residents. FEMA pays 75 percent of the cost; the state and county each are picking up 12.5 percent of the cost.

While county officials acknowledge that they can’t make every property owner whole, they say they are paying a fair price while watching out for the taxpayers’ interest and the requirements of the law.

TOUGH MOVE

With packing boxes stacked up in a corner of the living room behind her, Christina Edwards nearly broke into tears last week. She doesn’t want to leave the two-story Lindal Cedar Home she built along Alward Road nine years ago. The front windows look out through trees and shrubs to the river 150 yards away.

Edwards, 45, has owned the property for 11 years and spent a lot of time there while growing up. Her grandfather’s ashes are buried on the property.

“It’s my home,” Edwards said. “This is a good place to live if they maintained the levee. If they maintained it we would stay and fight the river.”

In November 2006, she watched the river surround her house. When she built the house, the county told her it was not in the flood plain.

Selling to the county is voluntary, Edwards acknowledged, but she doesn’t feel she really had a choice.

She contends the county’s appraised value of her house on 1.5 acres is too low at $258,000.

An appraiser she chose, and the county paid for, put its worth at $300,000, closer to the value the property had a few years ago. The residents were told two years ago that the valuations would be based on pre-2006 flood values.

A few of her neighbors, including Edwards’ parents next door, used the same appraiser to challenge the county’s valuations. The new appraisals came in higher and the county accepted them.

“We knew the county was trying to low-ball us,” said Edward’s mother, Dot King. Their appraisal raised the value of their property from $272,000 to $300,000 and the county agreed to accept it.

But the county didn’t accept Edwards’ new appraisal.

They ordered a tie-breaking second appraisal of her property. It confirmed the lower figure. They gave her until Nov. 23 to take it.

Edwards was going to hold out for a higher price. But a lawyer she hired advised her she might as well accept the county’s price. Fighting it could take years and money.

If she missed this buyout, the next one could result in an even lower price, he told her.

And the county could, if it wanted, take the property through eminent domain and a court would set the value.

“I feel they cheated me out of the pre-2006 flood value of the home,” she said.

Last Tuesday, Edwards signed with the county for $258,000.

With her second mortgage to be paid off, she expects to walk away with only $45,000.

Though she works two jobs, she said her pay won’t allow her to buy a house.

“I’ll have to rent,” she said.

Jeff and Leah Brockmoller and their three young children live next door to Edwards and are angry at the county, too.

The county gave them the same Nov. 23 deadline to sign a buy-out contract, but they don’t think they can afford to do it.

The county appraiser put the value of their three bedroom home on 1.25 acres at $134,000.

Self-employed as a tree cutting service, Brockmoller, 47, said he uses his mostly cleared property for his business.

Replacing his house and property would take at least $200,000, he said. He hired an appraiser who set the value at $185,000 and he would accept that, but the county won’t budge.

“They know we’re poor and probably can’t fight it,” Brockmoller said.

A FAIR PRICE?

Harold Smelt, the county’s surface water manager, defended the county’s process. “Our method (of land acquisition) is very fair,” he said. “The direction we give to the appraiser is to appraise the property as it was the day before the flood. We use certified appraisers. If a residents disagrees we will pay up to $750 for a review appraisal.”

If the appraisals turn up a large disparity, the county may use another appraisal as a tie breaker.

Smelt said the county has created a arms-length process to avoid putting his staff in the position of choosing who should get more money over someone else.

To pay more than the fair market price simply because someone has financial problems would be an illegal gifting of taxpayers’ money, Smelt said.

The entire effort is to try and make whole a person who has suffered flood damage, though that isn’t always possible, he said.

“We have found frequently that so many people are so extended with second mortgages,” he said. “We can’t make them whole.”

Flood plain land acquisition, though considered a cheaper way to manage flooding, is controversial.

Smelt said some wonder why public money should be spent to bail out those people who chose to live near a river.

Three years ago, Smelt said the Pierce County Council restricted using county money for buy-outs, requiring all purchases to be first approved by the council. The more recent economy-driven county budget problems have made finding county funding even more difficult, he said.

Flood plain land acquisition, however, is “a vital tool in the county’s flood management tool bag,” Smelt said.

On Alward Road, the process began two years with applications for FEMA funding. The purchases are part of an estimated $3.64 million in county flood plain land acquisition under way this fall. Three properties along Needham Road southwest of Orting along the Puyallup River and four in the Riverside area near the Puyallup River are slated for acquisition. Only one person so far has officially has refused to sell.

The focus of the program is to buy land where the county hopes to do future capital projects to reduce flooding and flood damage.

Buying land is cheaper in the long-term than building and maintaining river levees, Smelt explained. By comparison, he noted that a recently built one-mile section of new levy near Orting cost $5 million.

Along Alward Road, Smelt said the long-range plan is to buy up about three miles of homes and property. Then the county will install a smaller setback levy farther back from the river or next to Alward Road and allow the river to flow where it wants to.

The county is years away from having all the land it needs for that project, Smelt said.

Mike Archbold: 253-597-8692

mike.archbold@thenewstribune.com