Property buyout plan for Cataldo area refloated

Cataldo residents may get another chance to relocate out of the reach of the Coeur d’Alene River, which occasionally spills its banks and floods the town.

Yet not all the residents of the small community, straddling the border of Kootenai and Shoshone counties, are confident the government’s offer will be good enough for them to afford to move.

Kootenai and Shoshone county commissioners will have a public meeting Feb. 16 at Canyon Elementary School to see how many Cataldo residents would be interested in a buyout.

If some are interested, the counties will apply for a $3 million Federal Emergency Management Agency grant that would provide the money to buy out residents who live in the “flood way.” The counties would have to come up with a portion of that money, an amount that hasn’t yet been determined.

The counties tried for the same grant last year but the application wasn’t accepted because of problems with the cost-analysis section. Kootenai County grant writer Colleen Allison said that won’t happen again.

FEMA and Idaho Bureau of Disaster Services representatives also will attend the meeting.

Allison said up to 25 property owners in both Kootenai and Shoshone counties could be eligible for the buyout.

Tina and Michael Irwin have lived in Cataldo since 1993 and aren’t opposed to relocating. But they would only take the proposed buyout if they were offered a fair price for their land and home.

Yet Tina Irwin said a better option would be for Kootenai County to relax its building codes that prohibit property owners whose land is in the flood way from building new structures or improving existing buildings, such as lifting the homes to keep them out of the occasional flood waters.

“They’ve forced our hand,” Irwin said.

After the 1996 flood, Kootenai County asked FEMA to update the Cataldo flood-plain map.

It was obvious to the county that the map was wrong because the flood did more damage than a larger 100-year flood was expected to do.

The flood way is a path the Coeur d’Alene River will take when it spills its banks. FEMA reclassified part of the town from a flood plain to the higher-risk category of flood way, meaning Kootenai County would no longer issue building permits in that area.

The section of Cataldo that sits in Shoshone County wasn’t reclassified and those residents don’t have to follow the strict building codes of Kootenai County.

Kootenai County residents such as the Irwins said that has hurt their property value because they can no longer make improvements such as getting rid of their mobile home and constructing a stick-built house that would meet building requirements for flood-prone areas.

Terri Matthews also is leery of any government offer. During the buyout that followed the 1996 flood, FEMA and the county wanted to give Matthews $52,000 for a home, shop and one-acre lot.

“We spent that on the house and $73,000 on the shop,” she said.

Matthews and her husband Steve plan to attend the meeting and ask how the buyout values will be calculated. They also want to know if businesses, such as their cat-skiing operation, will be included in the buyouts.