U.S. Sen. Dick Durbin met Monday with leaders of Madison, St. Clair and Monroe counties to hear their pleas for a proposed five-year delay in new federal flood hazard maps for the metro-east.

If the delay is not granted, flood insurance rates for 150,000 residents and businesses in the Mississippi River flood plain could soar by January.

Durbin met with Alan Dunstan, Mark Kern and Dale Wittenauer, the chairmen, respectively, of the Madison, St. Clair and Monroe County Boards. He heard concerns from the three about the push to fix the river levees in the region in time to stave off those insurance rate increases.

Durbin is set to meet today at his Senate office in Washington, D.C., with the top administrators of the Federal Emergency Agency and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, said Christina Mulka, a Durbin spokeswoman.

"He's going to take (their) concerns to FEMA and the Army Corps," she said.

Durbin, D-Springfield, the Senate assistant majority leader, has so far declined to endorse a bill sponsored by U.S. Rep. Jerry Costello, D-Belleville, that would mandate at least a five-year delay in regions of the country where an active effort is under way to rebuild local levees.

In a letter published Jan. 6 in the News-Democrat, Durbin explained his reluctance to sponsor Costello's measure in the Senate by stating that while he supports it, it "may need to be improved in order to fully protect metro-east residents and businesses."

The FEMA maps are still set to take effect as soon as January -- despite the agency's disclosure in a letter to Durbin last month that the agency has no evidence to support public statements that local levees are functionally worthless and in danger of failing.

This disclosure represents a contradiction of FEMA statements going back more than two years, during which time the agency indicated it possessed information provided by the Army Corps that the metro-east levees did not meet federal standards.

FEMA has now dropped that contention, stating instead that it lacks information on the levees because local flood districts refused to provide it.

"Well, as far as I can tell, FEMA never asked for anything," said Les Sterman, the chief engineer for the Southwestern Illinois Flood Protection District Council. "So our goal is to roll back the clock to restart that process."

Meanwhile, the local flood protection district is weighing legal options for delaying the flood maps by at least five years, while finding the money needed to upgrade 64 miles of flood-protection levees to meet federal standards, according to Sterman.

If the FEMA maps take effect as planned, "It's going to have an enormous impact ... an enormous chilling effect on economic growth," Sterman told a gathering of civic leaders Monday morning at a meeting sponsored by the Chamber of Commerce of Southwestern Madison County.

The three counties hope to fund their part of the levee repair project with the combined $10 million a year in new revenue they are bringing in through a special sales tax that took effect in January 2009.

The Army Corps of Engineers, however, has estimated the project cost will surpass $450 million -- with almost the entire cost borne to be by metro-east taxpayers. The three counties expect to bear no more than $180 million worth of the cost, while the federal government now says it has no money for the project until 2024.