A New Clock Starts Ticking: The FEMA Surprise

Late October brought a phone call that shifted everything. Just as we were catching our breath from the road vacation victory and prepping our pitch for the planning commission, I got a call from the city planner with a quiet warning: new FEMA rules were coming down the pipeline—and fast.

These weren’t small changes. FEMA was pushing new restrictions on how land in designated floodplains could be developed—restrictions that bordered on overreach. The catch? FEMA threatened to revoke subsidized flood insurance for communities that didn’t fall in line. For coastal towns like ours, that kind of pressure carried real consequences.

To their credit, the City of Waldport made the decision not to enforce the rules. But Lincoln County still appeared to be moving ahead with them, which meant that if we wanted to keep our project alive, we had to move—fast.

The only way to avoid getting tangled in this was to be “grandfathered in” under the old rules, which meant submitting a complete set of plans and permit applications by December 1—less than five weeks away.

That gave three of us—none of whom had ever developed land before—the task of planning, civilly and structurally engineering an entire glamping resort in just over a month.

It felt impossible. But if we missed that window, we risked years of delays—or worse, being told we couldn’t build at all.

Next up: how we scrambled, sketched, reimagined, collaborated, and willed this project into existence in 40 days flat.