An environmental writer and consultant looks at the reclamation districts.
An excerpt.
Peter Asmus: State should look at flood control districts
By Peter Asmus
Published 12:01 am PDT Saturday, July 29, 2006
If any good came from what happened in New Orleans with Hurricane Katrina, it was the stark reminder of California's degraded levee system. Could such a disaster happen here, where levees were threatened during record rainfalls last spring?
The federal government's response to expediting repair is to relax environmental reviews of critical levee repairs. But state lawmakers need to require more than simply repairing outmoded physical structures. They also need to reform the governing and financing of the current levee management system, which is threatening the environment, public safety and the economy.
The city of Sacramento has a particularly large stake in this debate: It is the most vulnerable of all major cities in the United States in likelihood of a devastating flood.
Today, California's levee repairs largely are managed by byzantine special local agencies called "reclamation districts." San Joaquin County's Reclamation District 348 is emerging as ground zero for a possible remaking of how California deals with its crumbling levee infrastructure.
One of hundreds scattered throughout the state, RD 348 was organized nearly 100 years ago in the San Joaquin Valley on approximately 9,000 acres of what was once first-rate farmland. The responsibility of RD 348 is to improve the levee system that protects the small San Joaquin Valley community of Thornton from flooding by the adjacent Mokelume River. Thornton flooded when a levee broke in 1986.
