Some two dozen levy improvement districts, municipal utility districts and municipalities in Fort Bend County are banding together to speak as one voice in Washington, D.C., on critical flood-management issues.

The entities are forming the Fort Bend Flood Management Association. And their first order of business is to block legislation in Congress that would require all residents nationwide who live or run businesses in areas protected by levees to purchase flood insurance.

In Fort Bend County, about 100,000 people currently live in such areas, with assessed property values of about $10 billion.

When all planned development is completed, those numbers will be 240,000 residents and $20 billion of assessed value — all within levy districts.

Under current law, people living in levy-protected areas are not required to have flood insurance but can choose to buy it at subsidized rates that max out at $320.

But under the proposed legislation, the cost could soar as high as $3,500, according to some estimates, said Lynn Humphries, a partner in the law firm of Allen Boone Humphries Robinson LLP, which represents several MUDs and LIDs in Fort Bend County.

“It will be based on risk, and no one knows how much it will cost — or who will enforce it. We are already taxing ourselves to build the levies and maintain and operate them. We aren’t dependent on federal government for flood protection,” Humphries said.

And that is the crux of the issue for association organizers.

“We think we have a very different situation with our levies and flood management than other parts of country,” said André McDonald, board president of Fort Bend LID No. 2 and a leader in forming the new association.

In many areas of the country, he said, “farmers dug up a few feet of dirt to protect their fields from flooding, and those were added to with little engineering. Here, our levies are highly engineered, and they are set up as governmental entities with taxing authority so they can be maintained. We think that gives us a very different look.”

Fort Bend levy districts have issued more than $375 million in bonds and have debt service of more than $750 million, totaling more than $1 billion of investment in levees, McDonald said. And the districts spend $12 million annually to operate and maintain the levies.

If mandatory flood insurance were to cost $2,000 a year per homeowner, that would mean $100 million a year flowing out of Fort Bend County.

“We could build a lot of levies for that,” said McDonald. And, he added, unlike levies, “insurance doesn’t save lives or homes.”

Fort Bend’s levy districts are designed not only to prevent flooding but, in cases of emergencies where damage does occur, levy districts that have been certified by the U.S. Corps of Engineers Rehabilitation and Inspection program are eligible to tap Corps of Engineer resources and be insured by the Corps for 80 percent of the cost of repairs and 100 percent of design costs.

This assistance does not require a federal disaster declaration.

Several LIDS in Fort Bend have applied and are in various stages of being inspected and working to meet the standards for this certification, McDonald said.

These standards are designed to protect the area against a 100-year flood event.

McDonald’s LID 2 is applying for the certification for the perimeter of Sugar Land while Sienna Plantation is close to being certified and Pecan Grove is working on it.

As for the federal legislation currently in Congress, leaders of the Fort Bend Management Association want to get an exception carved out for an area such as theirs so that people in their levy districts would not be required to purchase flood insurance.

The mandatory insurance proposals passed both the House and Senate in the last session of Congress but did not make it out of the conference committee — in part because leaders of Fort Bend’s levy districts, including County Judge Bob Hebert, got wind of the proposal and went to Washington, D.C., to testify against it.

“If we had not gotten involved last year, there’s a good chance this (mandatory flood insurance) would already be in effect,” said McDonald.

Similar proposals are working their way through Congress, and Fort Bend levy district leaders, along with a lawyer from Allen Boone, are working with District 22 U.S. Rep. Pete Olson’s office on the issue.

Olson said, “We must ensure that residents are not unnecessarily subjected to a mandate to purchase unnecessary and costly flood insurance.”