Under Title 42 of the United States Code Chapter III Section 4101(e) FEMA is to revise and update all floodplain areas and flood risk zones identified, delineated, or established, based on an analysis of all natural hazards affecting flood risks on a five-year cycle. Revisions to floodplain risk zones are dependent upon the identification of instances where information on Flood Insurance Rate Maps does not reflect current risks in flood-prone areas. The Coordinated Needs Management Strategy (CNMS) is a FEMA initiative to update the way FEMA organizes, stores, and analyzes flood hazard mapping needs information for communities. CNMS defines an approach and structure for the identification and management of flood hazard mapping needs that will provide support to data-driven planning and flood map update investment process in a geospatial environment. CNMS tracks the lifecycle of needs, specifying opportunities to capture needs and proposing methods for their evaluation to inform planning, tracking, and reporting processes. CNMS establishes a geospatially enabled effective means for users to enter, monitor, and update their inventory of floodplain studies. In addition, CNMS will be used to document the areas across the Nation where flood studies meet FEMA’s current validity standards and, until otherwise noted, do not need to be updated on the FIRM.
Validity of flood hazard studies is determined by identifying critical and secondary deficiencies. Deficiencies are evaluated for seven critical elements and ten secondary elements. One or more critical deficiencies or four or more secondary deficiencies would classify a flood hazard study as having an "UNVERIFIED” validation status. Critical and secondary elements are evaluated for detailed flood hazard studies and this information captured as CNMS study polygon records. Flood hazard studies conducted under the standards set during FEMA Map Modernization (Map MoD) are eligible for “bulk validation”. These study reaches do not need to be fully assessed, and have been re-validated.
The second piece of CNMS is an inventory of stream centerlines that should capture validation statuses determined in the CNMS study polygon and bulk validation records. “UNVERIFIED” studies may either be assigned resources for restudy in the current Fiscal Year (FY), a future FY, or are currently being restudied. The CNMS Inventory is designed to capture the validation statuses determined in the CNMS study polygon records. The CNMS Inventory should include validation statuses of detailed, limited detailed, approximate studies and unmapped areas that have been considered for a new study. The inventory will be a stream centerline representation of FEMA’s mapped and unmapped areas. FEMA will utilize the CNMS Inventory as the sole mechanism for reporting New, Validated or Updated Engineering (NVUE) percentage. The NVUE percentage is a ratio of the miles of validated flood hazard studies to the miles of all FEMA flood hazard studies. Additionally details about CNMS can be found on the FEMA website at: https://www.fema.gov/flood-maps/tools-resources/risk-map/coordinated-needs-management-strategy. CNMS is updated by the FEMA and the NCFMP during pre-discovery, post-discovery, project funding and scoping, preliminary issuance, Letter of Final Determination (LFD) and post-production updates for MT-1, MT-2 and the 5-yr revalidation of existing flood studies.
The NC CNMS viewer allows communities to see areas currently being studied and to be studied in the State of North Carolina as captured by the CNMS database. The viewer also allows communities to make future flood study updates requests or needs as a point or area through the viewer. The NCFMP and FEMA will evaluate these requests with the communities during the Discovery meetings and will update the CNMS network if a new flood study is warranted. The NC CNMS viewer also allows communities to see areas that have been studied by Base Level Engineering (BLE) analysis that are outside of the regulatory flood hazard area and are no longer considered unmapped by the CNMS protocols. This non-regulatory flood hazard information is available through the NCFMP Advisory Flood Data website at https://flood.nc.gov/advisoryflood/.