The board of commissioner's failure to act on the clustering option for property in the flood plain is a big mistake. Mr. Burr summed it up pretty well when he said that rancher's can sell off their water and basically brown out our green open space and flood plain.
The green open space that many people enjoy and want to preserve is in fact property owned by individuals who are in the business of agriculture and they have property rights.
As I understand it the clustering option was to become another "tool" in the land use "tool box" designed to offer options to owners of the flood plain land. Truckee Meadows is finding out just how valuable and expensive flood plain can be. Truckee Meadows unwisely developed their natural drainage path, the flood plain, and now have to replace it with a concrete and re-bar contraption that will cost them hundreds of millions of dollars as Mr. Kite has pointed out numerous times.
If they had made it possible to keep the flood plain in its natural state they could have saved a bundle of money and maintained natural open space and bio-infrastructure.
Douglas County has been blessed with a natural flood plain that takes the velocity out of flood events by spreading out the slug of water into sheet flows that basically flood lots of agriculture land then the flood water's ebb and the county drains to the north east. The county has already dodged a bullet because they do not maintain the flood plain, for the most part, the rancher's have done it for free.
We taxpayers also save a bundle because we don't have to pay for a flood control district, design, construction and maintenance of a flood control structure that would be ugly, expensive and would wreak havoc with our surface water conveyance and irrigation systems and probably screw up the recharge of our aquifer. It was an option that would have been available to ranchers who wanted to keep ranching our open space and keeping it green while saving the taxpayers from the huge costs of an engineered flood plain. What's wrong with that?
To add insult to injury this was the second reading, meaning that it was already heard and voted on for approval; what happened? Do the county leaders want to incur the costs of an engineered flood plain like Truckee Meadows?
Do the taxpayers want to pick up the tab to replace our green open space with a concrete and re-bar scar, something akin to the L.A. River or "wash" as the engineered drainage structure is called.
It's huge, it's ugly. It has to be crossed by bridges for roads that are really expensive, it's a hangout for gangs, it collects trash and pollution; there's no upside to it unless you want to grow the government by adding a huge bureaucracy for flood control. Our bio-infrastructure deals with surface water conveyance and conveyance of flood waters and it is used to irrigate productive agriculture land and saturates out soil with water so we have a time released spring time run off event rather than a flushing of the run o ff out of the county via the river.
Do we really want to brown out our green open space or replace it with a costly concrete scar? Do we want rancher's selling off water to jurisdictions down stream? Give rancher's a break, they work as our unpaid flood control department, they accept flood water on their property which not only saves buildings but it damages their irrigation ditches which they have to repair without any compensation from the county. I think the three board member's who took this option off the table made a huge blunder and I hope they fix it real soon. The ramifications of losing our bio-infrastructure are huge, costly and very negative for the county.
n Michael Hayes is a Gardnerville resident and former Douglas County planning commissioner.
