 well this was easy in the older version of mamp that i had you would just drop them in place and they worked i was having a problem with something so i thought maybe there was an updated version of mamp that would solve the problem sure enough there was so i installed it and went along my way then i went back to the local version of my site and it was completely busted i finally tracked it down to htaccess files being ignored so i opened up my http conf file and went down to line 378 and sure enough this is what i saw directory options indexes followsymlinks allowoverride none directory in the older version of mamp that i had the default for this value was all in order to get htaccess files working in the new version i just had to change none to all restart the server and everything worked normally just thought i would share in case anyone else runs into this problem 