When we last left Fred Mitchell, he was relinquishing an eight-year battle against Arlington officials, who have been trying to take his house because they claim it sits in a flood plain. Mitchell had reluctantly agreed to sign a contract selling the property to the city, but with a clause allowing him to stay in the house for the rest of his life. For years, Mitchell has claimed that the city was using 30-year-old, outdated Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) maps to wrongly place his house within a flood area. City officials resisted updating the map because a more current survey would show that his East Mitchell Street house actually is not in a flood plain and prevent the city from legally bullying him out of his home, Mitchell said. (His house has not flooded in 40 years, even during June’s record-setting rains.) However, tiring of the fight, he finally agreed to a price, and when a city employee asked him to come in last week — a day early — to sign the “life estate” agreement, he complied.

Three days later, FEMA announced a massive plan to update flood maps in Tarrant and surrounding counties. A FEMA project contractor told Static that the re-mapping was announced to cities (but not the public) in July. So Arlington officials had pressured Mitchell to sign just before the news was made public. “You can call it a coincidence if you want, but I’ve been predicting it for years,” Mitchell said. “Isn’t it strange that as soon as the city gets the houses, they are going to redo the maps? It seems the government will find a way to do what they want, and there is hardly anybody to stop them. Nobody in power seems to give a damn, and it’s a shame.”