Maine is preparing to launch a grant by early summer that will provide up to $15,000 for year-round residents in York, Cumberland, Kennebec and Penobscot counties to replace their roofs and fortify their homes against severe storms.
The new program intends to help prevent Maine residents from having their home insurance policies canceled due to their roofs being in poor condition, which annually accounts for more than 75 percent of all home insurance non-renewals in Maine, according to Bob Carey, superintendent of the Maine Bureau of Insurance.
Carey and other officials said they are hopeful that the $15 million HoME Resiliency program will help Mainers weather future disasters while tempering home insurance rates and boosting federal flood insurance enrollment, which grant recipients in flood zones will be required to have.
Although most mortgage providers require homeowners in federally designated flood zones to have flood insurance, flood insurance enrollment hit a record low in Maine this year, a symptom of rising premium costs.
The grant will be managed by Carey’s bureau and funded by a one-time allocation from the bureau’s surplus of insurance licensing fees.
The projected rollout later this spring or summer will come a year after Gov. Janet Mills codified her landmark climate resilience bill, from which the grant spurred, and more than two years after a slew of winter storms flooded both inland and coastal Maine.
Carey said the home strengthening grant is modeled after a similar program that Alabama launched in 2013, which has helped minimize damage to homes from tropical storms.
The need to replicate the program in Maine became clear to Carey, he said, when he and fellow members of the state Infrastructure Rebuilding and Resilience Commission toured Downeast and western Maine communities especially damaged by the winter storms.
“It was a common theme that people needed some help in hardening their homes,” Carey said. “It seems to align that: A, there’s this roof replacement program that has been successful in other states, and B, we get a lot of [home insurance policy] cancellations and non-renewal notices.”
In Maine, the program’s roof grant will be specifically designated for roof replacement projects that follow industry standards to withstand hurricane force winds and rain.
The first phase will be limited to full-time Maine residents in York, Cumberland, Kennebec and Penobscot counties, and there will be two tiers of awards depending on an applicant’s income: a $10,000 base grant or a $15,000 grant for residents enrolled in MaineCare or Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program food benefits.
Eligibility will hinge on an evaluation by a licensed home inspector who will determine whether an applicant’s roof is in need of a fortified replacement and if the home can support it. If the home is in a federally marked flood zone, then the owner will need flood insurance, too.
“It’s not a shingle replacement program. It’s a roof replacement program,” Carey said. It will “help homeowners pay for not just a new roof, but a new roof that’s more resilient to extreme weather events.”
Right now Carey and his bureau are in the process of recruiting more than 60 roofers and ensuring they’re certified by a national industry nonprofit called the Insurance Institute for Business and Home Safety, which also drafted the standards for the fortified roofs.
Unlike similar rebates offered by Efficiency Maine for heat pumps, the HoME Resiliency program will pay contractors directly, drawing from a pool of qualified roofers and connecting them with grant recipients through an online portal.
After applicants receive preliminary approval, they will need to hire an evaluator to inspect their home, confirm its eligibility and then prepare an outline for the work required to replace the roof.
It will also be up to homeowners to get quotes from two separate, program-eligible roofers and finalize a contract with one of them. Upon the roof’s completion, the home inspector will return to certify that it meets fortified standards, and then the bureau will pay out the grant to the roofer.
The grant won’t cover the entirety of the project, including the $500 to $600 the home inspector will likely charge, but Carey said he believes the financial help will be a deciding factor for some residents looking to replace roofs when they wouldn’t otherwise be able to.
Roof fortification may pay for itself down the line, according to Carey, preventing damage from severe storms and motivating insurance companies to provide discounts on home insurance premiums.
He cited a study by the Alabama Department of Insurance that found Alabama homes fortified to IBHS standards, including the now more than 8,700 funded through the state’s home hardening program, fared better than conventional homes when Hurricane Sally struck the state in 2020.
“Insurance companies recognize this, and they’ll give a discount,” Carey said. “I’ve had meetings with some of the insurance companies saying, ‘Hey, this program’s coming. I hope you’re planning on giving a discount on insurance premiums for homeowners.’”
The state insurance bureau won’t mandate that discount, Carey added, but it will analyze how the market reacts and try to quantify what the discount could look like. The bureau plans to expand the roof grant beyond the initial four counties after it recruits more roofers and fine tunes the program.
Then, if everything is running smoothly, Carey said the bureau will launch a second-phase flood resilience grant around 2027. That grant will fund projects along similar eligibility criteria to retrofit home electrical wiring, seal openings in foundations and install drains to limit water seepage.
Both he and state floodplain coordinator Sue Baker said they were hopeful the grants would prevent the same scale of wind and flood damage that storms caused two years ago, especially considering Maine recently hit record-low federal flood insurance enrollment.
The number of flood insurance policies in Maine have decreased 51 percent between their peak in 2009 and earlier this March, according to Baker. That’s a drop from 8,576 policies statewide to only 4,316 active policies, even though most mortgage providers require homes in federally designated flood zones to have flood insurance.
Most Maine policyholders saw their premiums increase in 2022 after the agency overseeing federal flood insurance changed how it calculates flood risk; only a third of policyholders saw prices decrease.
“The financial pressures are significant for people, and I think they roll the dice, and it’s unfortunate,” Carey said.
This story was originally published by The Maine Monitor, a nonprofit and nonpartisan news organization. To get regular coverage from The Monitor, sign up for a free Monitor newsletter here.