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Flood Threat - Solutions require cooperation Day Three of a Three part series

Published in the Stockton Record on 05/31/05

Solutions require cooperation

By Dana Nichols and Hank Shaw - Record Staff Writers
Published Tuesday, May 31, 2005

STOCKTON -- Flooding of the San Joaquin Valley is inevitable because it is a flood basin, a place where water naturally accumulates.

But experts say there are ways to prevent the periodic deluges from drowning people, wrecking subdivisions and leaving taxpayers with huge bills.

- Build bigger levees and set them back from river channels to give the water room to spread.
- Buy up buildings or use easements on open land to make room for wider levees or emergency floodways.
- Require homeowners to buy flood insurance and force developers to elevate houses above flood level.
- Ban home construction in low-lying flood zones.

Engineers can draft the designs. Policy makers can write the rules. The problem is paying for it and getting everyone to agree on a solution. Dozens of government agencies and interest groups -- many already at odds over land use issues -- have to pull together to win the flood war.

Napa County has already learned this lesson.

The ratio of wine to water in Napa County may be a little higher than in Stockton, but not much. Like San Joaquin, Napa sits just above sea level in a flood-prone valley. California dreamers flock to buy houses there. Narrow, ugly flood control channels periodically fail, inundating farms and neighborhoods. Until recently, Napa developers, farmers, environmentalists and local governments deadlocked over what to do about it. It took a particularly nasty flood in 1995 to break the impasse. Once the waters receded, a small group of visionaries managed to bring the Farm Bureau, developers, the Sierra Club, the Army Corps of Engineers and local government officials together.

Three years later they developed a plan to widen the river channel through Napa, move levees, buy up tidal marsh islands to let them flood and, most importantly from a political standpoint, build a vast parkway where tourists and residents could boat, hike and picnic.

In 1998, Napa County residents voted more than 2-to-1 to tax themselves to pay for it. Now that the $250 million project is half finished, it has boosted an already roaring real estate boom and helped bring more than $200 million in new investment to the area, according to the Napa Valley Economic Development Corporation.

Flood control experts and Napa officials say the Napa River Flood Protection Project could be repeated in places such as Stockton, Lathrop or Manteca if the will exists to do it. "The sticky wicket is human nature," said Dorothy Lind-Salmon, senior consultant for the Napa Valley Economic Development Corp. and a leader in the campaign to win approval for the flood plan. "Until people realized there was a crisis -- which your folks haven't realized yet -- they didn't want to deal with it."

There's nothing like destruction to get people's attention. Floods have caused $542 million in property damage in Napa since 1961. San Joaquin's losses have been comparatively low, since most floods have hit rural areas. Stockton's last massive flood was in 1958.

Yet experts say it is only a matter of time until San Joaquin County suffers like Napa, whether it's the new neighborhoods rising behind leaky levees or out in the Delta, where even leakier levees guard farms and neighborhoods lying below sea level.

The chances that either the state or federal governments would have the money or pull to solve the problem are low, policy-makers and experts say. Years after San Joaquin County levied a fee on homeowners to upgrade levees around Stockton, it still hasn't been fully reimbursed by the federal government. More and more, local communities must solve their own problems.

A river-channel widening project now under way along Dry Creek near Sacramento, for example, is funded 25 percent with county park money, 25 percent by environmental preservation money, and 50 percent by flood-control funding through the Sacramento Area Flood Control Agency. Success in such a project is no different than passing a law or winning an election. It requires the proponents to assemble a winning coalition of temporary allies who can agree on the goal.

And in California, it requires public approval. Winning it is easier with projects that serve multiple purposes -- preserving habitat, creating parks and protecting residents and businesses from floods.

"This is something that we are very proud of that we could pull together this coalition of diverse community groups and businesses, and get them all on the table to come up with something that is expensive," said Bernhard Krevet, president of Friends of the Napa River. "But it returns the river to us as a natural resource."

Added Tim Washburn, chief counsel for the Sacramento agency: "You've got to make it an amenity. That is what we are essentially doing with these parkways."

San Joaquin County property owners, however, have a long history of hostility toward proposals for parkways, even if they would preserve habitat and reduce flood risk.

"We could have had bicycle paths. We could have looked at restoring habitat," said Jim Giottonini, executive director of the San Joaquin Area Flood Control Agency, or SJAFCA.

Giottonini said that in the late 1990s, when SJAFCA raised levees through Stockton to meet revised federal standards, the group considered also restoring water flows to Mormon Slough and making pathways along the restored waterway. The improvements would also have given neighbors of Mormon Slough 200-year-level flood protection.

But the idea died in a storm of criticism.

"A lot of the farmers that farm the property next to Mormon Channel were opposed to doing anything out there," Giottonini said.

Agricultural interests have been particularly strident in their opposition, arguing that what Washburn calls "amenities" really means prime farmland taken out of production.

Farmer Paul Sanguinetti was among those who opposed the Mormon Slough pathway proposal. He owns land along the slough east of Stockton.

"It's not good for my farming operation," Sanguinetti said. "First off, it's private property. I own to the middle of the river. That's not public land. And we have enough problems right now with people who don't belong on there destroying equipment and switch boxes."

Similar resistance in 2002 killed an effort to create a parkway along Old River north of Tracy. And the county's habitat-conservation plan has so far failed to meet its goals for preserving habitat along rivers because property owners don't want to sell for anything less than housing development prices.

A smaller cousin to the Napa project along the Cosumnes River faced similar problems. The project managers used to be able to buy an acre there for about $4,000. Now an acre goes for nearly $17,000.

Napa flood-control activists said they overcame such concerns with a vigorous

public-education campaign. Also, they gulped and paid the price necessary to buy vineyards, pastures and buildings in the expanded floodway.

Lind-Salmon said voter approval of the sales tax to fund the plan convinced homeowners and investors that Napa was solving its problems. It then caused a 30 percent jump in real estate prices in Napa overnight that added $80 million to the project's cost.

In previous eras, the state or federal government rode to the rescue. The Army Corps of Engineers built a floodway for the Sacramento River called the Yolo Bypass in 1917, several years after building a smaller version for the San Joaquin River called Paradise Cut.

Federal, state and local officials also combined to build the American River Parkway in Sacramento, a prototype for the Napa project started long before subdivisions and businesses crowded the riverbank.

But the big money is gone.

San Joaquin's SJAFCA raised millions for that levee project, but not without great controversy. Local officials say the idea of doing it again is daunting.

"Are the levees adequate? Probably not," said Steve

Winkler, deputy director of San Joaquin County Public Works. "Where does more money come from? That is the dilemma."

Even with the money, development's torrid pace in flood-prone areas has left little room to widen the levees without trashing chunks of existing neighborhoods. Some homes in Weston Ranch are within 50 feet of the earthen wall.

"We know California is going to grow," said Rick Cooper of the Bureau of Land Management, one of the prime movers in the Cosumnes River project. "It just makes sense to plan for this. But if you've already built to the toes of a levee, I don't know what you do."

Keep at it, say Napa's flood fighters.

"Maybe what you need to do is to bring a group of people who are even moderately interested up to Napa and we will entertain them," said Lind-Salmon. She said the gathering could include a boat tour of the new floodway. "I'd be happy to coordinate it."

Contact reporter Dana

Nichols at (209) 546-8295

or dnichols@recordnet.com

Contact Capitol Bureau Chief Hank Shaw at (916) 441-4078 or sacto@recordnet.com

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