Lawmakers worry heavy snow could cause spring flooding

Heavy snowfall has some Iowa lawmakers worried about the lack of a short-term strategy to protect Iowa communities from flooding this spring.

“We've got 20 inches of snow across the watershed already,” Senate Rebuild Committee Chairman Rob Hogg, D-Cedar Rapids, said Thursday. With predictions of more extreme weather, greater precipitation and higher stream flow as a result of climate changes, “I want to know what my community can do in 2010 to prevent this.”

“Sorry, I didn't bring that silver bullet with me,” Bill Ehm of the Iowa Department of Natural Resources told him.

He was at the capitol to brief the committee on the report of the Water Resources Coordinating Council of the Rebuild Iowa Advisory Commission, but conceded there is little that can be done this year. He laid out a long-range plan for flood prevention and mitigation calling for more than $50 million a year to build levees, implement better watershed management plans, fund the Iowa Flood Center and hire additional staff.

Sen. Wally Horn, D-Cedar Rapids, worried that if a plan wasn't in place this spring it might be too late.

“We need a plan for April,” Sen. Wally Horn, D-Cedar Rapids, said. A flood this spring could be the death knell for Cedar Rapids' downtown and industries along the Cedar River, he said.

Coralville City Administrator Kelly Hayworth, who attended the meeting, shared the lawmakers' concern.

“I think there's a real question about how do we deal with the present,” he said. “For Cedar Rapids, Coralville and the University of Iowa, if we get another flood this spring, there'll be nothing left to worry about.”

Hayworth said city staffers are closely monitoring the water level in the Coralville Reservoir.

Although he understood those concerns, Ehm said it's not possible to flood-proof communities in the next few months.

Hogg agreed the situation is complicated by the fact the state doesn't have money to fund those projects.

“If the economy was better, I would seek money to get projects on the ground this year,” he said. Until resources are available, Hogg said, “Iowans have to voluntarily step forward and make changes.”

Voluntary change may not be enough, Ehm said. It will take regulation, incentives and education to change Iowans development practices.

“We don't like regulation, but that's the only way to move the dial sometimes,” he said.

He called for limits on development in the 500-year floodplain and said it will be necessary to move critical infrastructure out of those floodplains.

Ehm seemed to tweak Cedar Rapids a couple of times in his criticism, specifically mentioning jails as “critical infrastructure” that shouldn't be located in a floodplain. Later, he said, it doesn't help the community to have critical services “if they are located on an island in the middle of a floodplain.”

Ehm also called the construction of a new Cedar Rapids federal courthouse on the banks of the Cedar River “arrogance.”