There's different branchesof the NFIP. There's the flood insurance branch,there's floodplain management, as well as coming up with the flood insurancerate maps, which are used in regulation and currently inrating of insurance. NFIP insurance costs about seven hundreddollars per year or about two dollars a dayfor residential properties. It covers up to two hundred andfifty thousand dollars of damage to the building and one hundredthousand for building contents. It also requires a 30 day waitingperiod, so participants must sign up ahead of a storm coming their way. Some stakeholders see theNFIP insurance as flawed. So if you live in a home that'sfour hundred thousand dollars and you only bought a two hundred and fifty thousanddollar limit and the home was flooded, it poses the question,what do you do? The second responsibility of theNFIP is tracking flood risk. Using the floodplain map. They determine your price for yourflood insurance by two main factors. One, what flood zone you're in andthen the height of your home. When I say height, the elevation incomparison to what they determined to be your 100 year flood event. There's three different flood zones. There's a flood zone X where you'renot being forced to purchase flood insurance through yourmortgage company. And then there's two other flood zones,flood zone A, which is a proximity to water, and then flood zone V, whichwould be on the water where you have the potential for storm surge. The flood insurance rate maps were verygood for the time, but currently with a flood rate, maps all risksin the same zone, with the same elevation in the same buildingtype are rated the same. The NFIP intends to release a newmapping plan called a Risk Rating 2.0. We know more about flood risk nowthan we did when the current rating methodology was put in placefour decades ago or so. And so now, because of technology,because we understand the risk better, we can create a rating methodology thatidentifies what the risk is on a property specific basis insteadof a zone basis. 
It's going to be a littlebit of a switch up. Some people will probably see increasesas other people see decreases, but it'll be more balanced overall. Communities are the third dimension becausethey have to adopt land use ordinances to managetheir floodplain. Communities need to fulfill the requirementsand show that they've actually adhered to and are making progressin terms of making themselves more flood resilient. FEMA is very goodwith working with communities to help them bring their codes and ordinancesup to meet the NFIP standards. Some examples ofimprovements could be. Elevate your house if you're in aflood zone, don't put enclosures down below and convert theminto living space. You know, allow for water tofreely flow on that bottom level. Our insurance, went down almost fourthousand dollars a year just by replacing the windows. As of 2020, theNFIP is over twenty billion dollars in debt to the U.S. Treasury. But it's debt that onegovernment program owns to it another government program. And it is wholly attributable to theareas in the program that are not actuarially sound. The program was never designed to necessarilybring in all the money needed to pay for all the programs,whether that's insurance claims, the grant program, the mapping program orthe floodplain management program. And so the program is actuallyfunctioning and operating as it was designed. It just the designneeds to be updated. In 2012, the Bigger Water Act changedthe NFIP to create rates based on more information than just the floodmaps and attempted to overhaul the NFIP to ask for higher premiumsthat better match the risk. That law was amended to gradually increasethe cost over time instead of doing an adjustment in just one year. This was a big deal. We were tryingto make some progress, trying to to write and rate andprice the risk accordingly. But politics set in and in this NFIPprogram is often one of the biggest political footballs.
