Pinellas post-hurricane home assessments rife with flaws

A state contractor hired to evaluate hurricane-damaged homes across Pinellas County made mistake after mistake in its assessment reports, muddling the rebuilding process for storm-ravaged residents.

The Tidal Basin Group’s reports, used in cities from Gulfport to Madeira Beach, triggered thousands of letters sent to homeowners. Because their houses were determined “substantially damaged,” they would have to either tear down or rebuild to more stringent standards.

Reporters with the Tampa Bay Times spoke to homeowners across six Pinellas cities who said they were flagged for damages that didn’t exist.

In one case, Tidal Basin staff noted a Gulfport homeowner had removed flooring, resulting in a higher damage assessment. But the floors were never touched. In another, assessors reported thousands of dollars in damage to the foundation, roof and interior of a Redington Shores home. In reality, there were only small cosmetic fixes.

At the direction of local officials, the company relied on county property data to perform assessments, often without entering homes — sometimes resulting in figures that elevated damage percentages.

Both Tidal Basin and Pinellas County defended their practices in statements to the Times.

“We are committed to the highest-quality data possible,” said Heather Stickler, a Tidal Basin spokesperson.

In a statement, the county took responsibility for checking for accuracy of the data and training of Tidal Basin workers. But there has been a “a robust quality control process,” county spokesperson Tony Fabrizio said.

“We agree that this has been a confusing topic for many residents, which is why we made a thorough substantial damages webpage and explanation videos.”

Homeowners who tried to fight back have been bounced across different city and county departments, thwarted by an opaque web of bureaucracy. Meanwhile, short-staffed city governments had to correct errors for hundreds of homes, further delaying rebuilding. In some cases, exhausted hurricane victims were left to hire appraisers to try to fix the errors themselves.

“The help we’ve been receiving has actually created more work for us,” said former Gulfport Mayor Sam Henderson. He lost reelection last month, after a campaign cycle focused on hurricane recovery, including what one of his opponents called “TidalGate.”

“It’s been a nightmare, honestly,” Henderson told the Times.

A high-stakes math problem

After a disaster, local agencies are required by the Federal Emergency Management Agency to assess buildings and determine the extent of the wreckage. When the damage exceeds around half of a home’s market value — excluding the land — its considered “substantially damaged,” and must be demolished or rebuilt to be more resilient. The process is designed to break the cycle of rebuilding properties that are vulnerable to being destroyed again, requiring more taxpayer-funded help each time.

If local governments run afoul of the federal rules, residents can lose coveted discounts on their federal flood insurance premiums — as some Southwest Florida residents did after Hurricane Ian. Pinellas scores high marks for its flood planning and as a result residents get 40% off their premiums, one of the highest discounts possible.

Although there are some broad guidelines set out by FEMA, each government decides for itself how officials will approach this high-stakes math problem.

In Pinellas County, assessors use an adjusted tax assessment of the building’s value to determine how much each property is worth. To estimate the cost of repairs, they plug numbers like a home’s square footage, foundation type and height of floodwaters into a calculator tool designed by FEMA.

The cost of repairs and the home’s value are used to estimate a damage percentage.

“This is the quickest, most accurate way to conduct thousands of initial assessments and follows the County’s flood recovery procedures and floodplain code,” Pinellas County spokesperson Tony Fabrizio said in an email.

Since last year’s hurricanes, Tidal Basin signed contracts amounting to more than $82 million with the governor’s office to conduct assessments around the state.

The New York-based emergency management contractor has a history of inking lucrative deals in Florida, assisting with Covid-19 vaccine sites and housing for Hurricane Ian victims, records show. During the pandemic, a Tidal Basin rental assistance program failed to prevent evictions as the rollout lagged. The company also contributed $1 million toward Gov. Ron DeSantis’ second inauguration, and gave $48,408 to Hope Florida, the embattled DeSantis-led charity.

When Pinellas County asked the state for help assessing homes in unincorporated areas and several smaller municipalities with overwhelmed staff, the state sent Tidal Basin.

Assessments are mostly completed by Tidal Basin employees, using data provided by the Pinellas County Property Appraiser’s Office and a process decided by county officials. The results are shared with city building departments, which then send out letters to homeowners.

Fabrizio said the county provided initial training with Tidal Basin and coordinated regularly to answer questions. Training included how to collect assessment data and guidance on FEMA’s calculator.

Problems emerge

Early on, city staff noticed issues with assessment results.

“The data is pretty much garbage,” Anne-Marie Brooks, mayor of Madeira Beach, said in January.

Curbside assessments misidentified homes as having damage that didn’t exist. Brooks said the company’s reports would sometimes come in with photos of a completely different house. Eventually, Tidal Basin stopped submitting photos.

Homeowners were confused when they started getting letters.

“This has to be a scam,” thought Alan Nastansky, who was told in December that his Redington Shores home must be elevated or demolished.

In the immediate aftermath of the storms, Nastansky considered himself lucky. Water had surged through homes in his neighborhood and tornadoes ripped off roofs. But his home needed only about $400 worth of repairs — minor things like missing roof edging and damaged outdoor lights.

He’s reached out to town officials several times to try and get the decision reversed. He is still waiting to hear back.

In the end, the company’s data flaws have wasted state money on “inaccurate information that doesn’t benefit anyone,” Brooks said.

Stickler, the spokesperson for Tidal Basin, said Pinellas County reviews its data and cities are ultimately responsible for “making the final determinations of damage.”

“If issues about data quality are brought to our attention and county and municipal governments allow it, Tidal Basin collaborates with property owners to conduct re-assessments and submits the updated data, which runs through the same quality control and approval processes,” she said.

Asked about the quality control process, Fabrizio said there were “multiple layers.” Tidal Basin checked the data before submitting it to the county’s quality control team. The data was also checked using an automated process and spot-checked before letters were sent out.

Substantial damage letters do not share how assessors came by their numbers. Even if they had, some of the errors were hidden within a complex mathematical formula, virtually untraceable for the average homeowner battling their results.

The Times reviewed Tidal Basin’s initial assessment data for thousands of properties in seven Pinellas County communities, studied FEMA’s guidelines for calculating substantial damage and interviewed homeowners, appraisers and government officials.

The initial assessments relied on data that the property appraiser’s office normally uses to calculate the building value for tax purposes.

Jennifer Sutton, a certified Florida appraiser who worked for Tidal Basin for several months last winter, argues the data isn’t compatible with the FEMA tool, resulting in inflated damage estimates.

Sutton, who was hired through a staffing firm, said the costs used for some repair calculations were “in the stratosphere,” leaps and bounds beyond what outside appraisers would normally use for this purpose.

As part of her job, she reviewed more than 120 cases in which homeowners contested their substantial damage calculations. The initial determination was wrong in almost every single case, Sutton said.

After her supervisor showed little interest in addressing the issues, Sutton said she decided to resign. Tidal Basin did not respond to questions about her employment.

Pinellas County Property Appraiser Mike Twitty said the data is accurate and useful for conducting initial estimates because it’s proportionate to the structure value being used. Twitty said some homes’ assessments may be skewed by technical differences in how depreciation is applied to the final home value.

“That is where the wheel is coming off for people. That is the point of contention — the level of depreciation,” Twitty said. “That’s why our values are not the end-all, be-all.”

He noted that some discrepancies in the initial assessments are inevitable since it’s being done on a mass scale.

Sutton estimates as many as 75% of homes deemed substantially damaged might not have hit that threshold if different valuations were used.

Henderson, the former Gulfport mayor, said city staff had to correct more than 100 initial assessments from Tidal Basin, about half of which included reversing the company’s finding that a home was substantially damaged.

Earlier this year, he sent an email to DeSantis complaining that Tidal Basin “has performed abysmally” and is “generating ill will, additional delays and more work on already overtaxed residents and municipal departments.” The governor’s office did not respond to emailed questions from the Times about Henderson’s letter and the issues with Tidal Basin.

The letter concludes with a plea for help. “We are not big enough for this lift,” Henderson wrote.

He never heard back.

Little recourse for homeowners

Fabrizio and other county officials emphasized that Tidal Basin’s assessments are meant to be a first pass. Homeowners can apply for reassessments with more detailed information to potentially get their status reversed, he said.

But residents across the county say in the months since receiving a substantial damage letter, they’ve struggled to get more information from county officials or Tidal Basin employees.

“They’re leaving us in limbo, waiting,” said Wendy Durocher, a resident at Crystal Bay Mobile Home Club, a 55+ community nestled along Avery Bayou in Palm Harbor. “We don’t know what to do.”

Nearly every home in the community was deemed substantially damaged, county records show. About half of the homeowners are still trying to appeal their fate, said Jim Averill, Crystal Bay’s board president.

Others chose to leave. Scattered throughout the community are patches of disturbed earth — empty lots where homes once stood. An excavator stands ready at a home across the street from Durocher.

After receiving a substantial damage letter in December, she asked the county to reassess her home. Tidal Basin employees visited in March, and a few weeks later, she was told her repairs would cost around $42,000 – well over half her structure value of $72,000.

But neither Tidal Basin nor county employees would explain how the damage estimate had been calculated. She called and emailed numerous county departments on a weekly basis — each time, she said, she was told to wait or she was passed to someone else. Without a breakdown of costs, she felt she had no recourse to contest Tidal Basin’s estimate.

“That’s crazy,” Durocher said. “I’m about to lose my home, and you’re just saying, ‘Here’s your number.’”

Fabrizio said residents have access to all this information via the county portal. Durocher said her documents didn’t appear for months.

When she finally received a cost breakdown in April, she learned the company had marked several things as damaged, like her bathroom floors and her hot water heater, that were unharmed by the flooding. They also overcharged for some items: Tidal Basin estimated she’d have to pay $425 per door, when in reality, she paid only $90.

Other residents got their homes reappraised to increase their overall structure value. The Property Appraiser’s Office can complete a “Building Value Reconsideration,” a chance for residents to get a revised value and updated damage percentage.

Averill’s home valuation increased by more than $25,000 through this route. While he still felt the county overestimated his damage, the new valuation dropped him under the 49% threshold. He was relieved.

But within a week, he was issued a new damage estimate, and then another, ultimately bumping his repair costs from $47,500 to over $65,000. No one had come to view his home.

“They’re really not doing a reassessment,” Averill said. “They’re not collecting any new information.”

Some residents have moved ahead with repairs. Others, afraid of sinking money into a home they can’t save, gutted the insides or demolished them altogether.

Averill and other neighbors moved to Crystal Bay in search of the Florida dream: affordable, waterfront living. Now all of that may be at risk.

Many residents live on fixed incomes. Skyrocketing housing costs across the region mean if they leave, they may have nowhere to go.

“That is probably the most devastating thing,” Averill said. “It’s hard to talk about.”

A tangle of bureaucracy

Deborah Adkins and her husband have been living in their Gulfport house with no walls, using folding tables and a utility sink.

“We’re basically camping in the shell of our home,” said Adkins, 65, earlier this year.

They received their damage letter after a five-month wait and soon found Tidal Basin’s assessment had at least two inaccuracies. Workers wrote that she hadn’t allowed them to take photos inside. Adkins said that is false. They also listed her floors as having been removed. They are still there, according to Adkins, and she has no plans to remove them.

Adkins said she understands the purpose of all the regulations involved in rebuilding and is sympathetic to local governments trying to closely adhere to FEMA rules. But in the months since her house was destroyed, she described a lack of accountability that’s left her enraged. She feels like everyone in power says it’s someone else’s fault.

The beach town mayors, for example, say Tidal Basin’s faulty data is leading to the inaccurate letters. But Stickler, the spokesperson for the company, said the cities are ultimately responsible for “making the final determinations.”

Local government leaders have been raising their concerns with state officials, like Florida House Rep. Linda Chaney, R-St. Pete Beach, who told the Times that she discussed the concerns with the Florida Department of Emergency Management. A spokesperson for that agency, Marnie Villanueva Marrero, responded to a list of emailed questions about Tidal Basin by saying the substantial damage process is “directed and managed by the local governments.”

In the absence of clarity, neighbors have tried to help each other, coaching the older residents through confusing forms.

“It leaves me feeling like absolutely no one really cares,” Adkins said. “You are on your own.”

The layers of bureaucracy have led officials to come to opposing conclusions of what caused all these problems, leaving unresolved questions even as the next hurricane season looms.

Pinellas County Commissioner Kathleen Peters criticized Tidal Basin for not entering homes for many of its assessments.

“They’re making assumptions,” she said in an interview.

But days earlier, a Pinellas County building official expressed the opposite opinion in an email to a reporter.

“Tidal Basin (has) performed outstandingly,” Kevin McAndrew said.

Times staff writer Colbi Edmonds and Times/Herald Tallahassee bureau reporter Lawrence Mower contributed to this report.