City and Corps clash over flood protection; city counting on Congress to come to the rescue

CEDAR RAPIDS - Rules that the Army Corps of Engineers are bound by law to follow couldn't clash more with Cedar Rapids' dreams for a new flood-protective system.

The clash, though, has not stopped city and community leaders here from clinging to the belief that the U.S. Congress, Corps' rules aside, still can make dreams come true.

The differing view between the Corps' ideas for a new flood-protection system for the city and City Hall's “preferred” plan, which was hatched out with the help of community meetings over four months in the latter part of 2008, is anything but a secret.

Corps representatives spoke at a flood forum here in March, and they will hold two public meetings in Cedar Rapids on June 23 to provide an update on the Corps' $8.2-million feasibility study for a new flood-protection system. The study report will be final by the end of the year.

In short, city leaders want much more from a new flood-protection system than the Corps' feasibility study will say it can justify.

Chris Haring, a geologist at the Corps' Rock Island district office and project manager for the Cedar Rapids feasibility study, says the Corps' emerging draft report tentatively recommends a flood-protection alternative - he called it Alternative 4-C - that will protect the east side of the Cedar River to a height two feet higher than the historic flood in Cedar Rapids of June 2008, and will protect from the Quaker plant just above downtown to the Cargill plant downstream from downtown.

However, the 4-C alternative protects nothing on the west side of the river and does not protect the Cedar Lake area upstream from the Quaker plant.

In addition, the 4-C alternative calls for permanent concrete flood walls in the downtown that Haring estimates will be 12 to 15 higher than the existing walls now in place.

In stark contrast, the city's preferred plan also calls for flood protection to the historic flood level on the west side of the river from the Time Check Neighborhood downstream beyond the Czech Village area.

Additionally, the city plan also calls for protection of the Cedar Lake area on the river's east side. And it envisions more-expensive, removable flood walls – which Haring estimates can cost 40 percent more than permanent ones and require ongoing mobilization and storage costs - in the downtown and at Czech Village.

The Corps' emerging recommendation is the result of a key marching order, which states that the Corps cannot recommend a flood-protection project that does not come with a benefit-cost ratio of at least 1.

In other words, the value of the property protected by a flood-protection system must be at least equal to the cost of putting the system in place as determined by a formula used in all Corps feasibility studies for every flood-protection system built in the country.

“We are diligently abiding by the rules and regulations set forward,” Haring says.

As now envisioned, the Corps' Alternative 4-C proposal would cost about $115 million to build and achieves a benefit-cost ratio of “right at” 1.1, Haring reports.

Built into the cost part of the ratio, he notes, is the extra cost for damage on the west side of the river as a result of only beefing up the city's flood-protection system on the east side of the river. The east-side protection adds little to the flooding risk on the west side of the river in a 100-year flood, but could add a foot to a foot and half more water on the west side in a 500-year flood, Haring says.

The Corps, he says, considers the 2008 flood a 500-year-plus flood.

The Corps' emerging recommendation has prompted emotional reaction from City Hall for some months now, which is not surprising in a city with a long-standing sensitivity to east-west-side disparities and slights, whether real or perceived.

“The Corps' plan isn't fine with the city because it comes up short,” Mayor Ron Corbett says. “It only protects a portion of the east side of the community, and doesn't protect the west side. Our intent is to build a flood-protection system that protects both sides of the river and then some.”

Just this week, the City Council took formal action to notify the Corps that the city wishes to append its argument for the city's preferred protection plan to the Corps' final report, which the Corps' Haring says will be done. The city also continue to ask the Corps to grant a waiver in its feasibility report and include in it protection on the west side of the Cedar River that comes close to the city's historic flood level of 2008.

As the feasibility study process moves toward completion, Corbett says the city will make the case that the city's preferred protection system is needed for economic, social and environmental reasons not factored in by the Corps' benefit-cost ratio. Reinvestment in the flood-damaged areas of the city is dependent on those areas having future flood protection, the mayor says. The city's future as a regional economic center, he says, is jeopardized without a good protection system.

Corbett says he understands the way the Corps must go about its business, though he says the Corps' idea of not protecting the west side of the river leaves people “scratching their heads.”

For now, he says the Corps' Alternative 4-C - if that what the Corps' recommendation is limited to - gets the city in the door at the federal government, and once there, it's the city's job to convince Congress and the Obama administration to fund the city's preferred protection plan.

“It's a massive effort to build a flood-protection system, and it will take twice as massive an effort to build up the political support for it,” Corbett said.

State Sen. Rob Hogg, D-Cedar Rapids, is in the forefront of the state effort to make non-structural changes – adding wetlands and installing buffers in the countryside along waterways, for instance – as a way to reduce flooding along the river and in Cedar Rapids. Even so, Hogg says Cedar Rapids needs a new system of levees and flood walls because non-structural changes upstream won't do all of what Cedar Rapids needs and won't do it quickly enough.

“I want to be very clear about it,” Hogg says. “We need both. … It really is an all-in approach.”

Hogg says it would be nice if the city could go back 150 years, but it can't. It's built up along the river, a river that now has shown it can flood in a dramatic way, he says.

Hogg says people are and will be skittish about investing in the flood-hit areas of Cedar Rapids until they know about what the future holds for flood protection.

“People need to be able to invest with some sort of reasonable assurance that this is not going to happen again,” Hogg says. “I think it's apparent as you walk through downtown and the west-side neighborhoods.

“I think until we get a permanent flood-protection system that works – and the only way to make sure it works is to also do the watershed stuff – I think we're going to be held back in terms of investment.”

The Corps' Haring says the Corps worked hard on alternatives that would provide flood protection on both sides of the river.

He says the Corps was able to improve on an initial benefit-cost of .4, moving it to a ratio of .6 or .7 by using permanent flood walls, not removable ones in the downtown and Czech Village, and by moving lines for levees and flood walls. But in the end, no alternative protecting both sides of the river could meet the required ratio of 1, he says.