About 1,100 homeowners in flood-prone northern New South Wales will be offered buybacks this month but the Northern Rivers Reconstruction Corporation says a further 500 properties will miss out due to a lack of funds.
About 300 owners have been offered buybacks at pre-flood values and 130 have accepted. The NRRC’s chief executive, David Witherdin, said a further 800 would receive offers over the next fortnight.
He said those who had received an offer owned homes that were the most obvious targets for buyback, including the houses most severely affected during the unprecedented 2022 floods, under the joint state- and commonwealth-funded $700m program.
But if there was more money available for buybacks, Witherdin said the NRRC would “definitely” look at making about 500 more offers.
“With a greater funding pool, we’d certainly be in the order of about another 500 homes [that] we would look to voluntary purchase,” he said.
A spokesperson said the federal government would consider any funding requests it received.
NRRC has also released updated flood mapping for the northern rivers as part of the scheme and given every property a hazard rating. This was used to prioritise home buybacks, the raising of houses and retrofits.
“The importance of the mapping is that it enables us to have consistency at a regional scale,” he said.
“We can prioritise what we do in our program of works because what we’re doing here is adaptation at a regional scale. By buying back those highest-risk properties, we get people out of harm’s way for the future and also, importantly, remove that need or that potential for first responders to have to rescue them.”
The goal of home raising and retrofits was to reduce the economic damage to homes and contents in the floodplain by making them more flood resilient.
The new maps draw on data from councils, the SES and other sources, including the Bureau of Meteorology and other experts. Witherdin said they would continue to be updated.
“It provides a really powerful tool there into the future but clearly, this point in time, we can’t let perfect be the enemy of good,” Witherdin said.
Homes being prioritised for buybacks are in areas with more frequent, high and fast floods. Residents eligible for the scheme will also be prioritised for access to land in the region to be developed in the resilient lands strategy released this month.
The scheme intends to develop land for more than 10,000 homes across 22 sites.
The strategy includes plans for “immediate on-ground investigations” at 15 sites across the region, with the goal to provide homes for about 7,800 residents from the areas most affected by the 2022 disasters.
The NRRC has started feasibility studies for each of the first 15 sites.
While there is widespread agreement that the area needs more homes, community members including the Ballina MP, Tamara Smith, have said the plan lacks critical detail and said there had so far been insufficient consultation with the affected communities.
“How can we as a community make informed submissions about what will be huge new residential developments when we don’t actually know where they are?” Smith said.
