Levee ballot results expected by July 14
As Sutter and Butte County officials made a last push Wednesday to win funding for a major levee overhaul, residents cast their final ballots — and their final thoughts.
Culminating a year and a half of planning, the Sutter Butte Flood Control Agency used a public forum in Yuba City to collect last-minute ballots for a 33-year, $72.5 million property assessment. The funds would support a 44-mile levee upgrade along the Feather River's western bank — an effort to head off flood-risk mapping that would drive up insurance costs and threaten a construction halt in mid-decade.
"It'll take everybody's work and everybody's effort, but hopefully we'll fend off the regulatory nightmare which would be the FEMA maps," Bill Edgar, the flood control agency's executive director, told about 120 people at Veterans Memorial Hall in Yuba City.
The meeting capped the 45-day voting period, with the flood agency board scheduled to announce the results July 14 in Yuba City.
More than a dozen Sutter County residents weighed in on the levee overhaul, with most supporting the upgrades despite concerns about the cost to homeowners and merchants amid a recession.
"Someone who wanted to open a 40,000-square-foot furniture store in Yuba City, the tax upon them might cause them to relocate somewhere else," said Wendell Green of Tierra Buena.
The levee assessment won an unusual endorsement from the Sutter County Taxpayers Association, a longtime critic of county spending decisions.
An SCTA member called the project worth the expense — if only so levee fixes across the river in Yuba County do not turn flood walls in the west into weak spots.
"We don't have Yuba County anymore to say, 'Oh no, they're going to go underwater before we do,'" said Roberta Fletcher, a Yuba City resident. "We're next. Even though we don't want our property taxes increased, we need our levees fixed."
More than 12,000 of the estimated 34,200 property owners who were mailed ballots from the Sutter Butte Flood Control Agency have cast votes on funding the upgrade. A simple majority in favor of the assessments is needed to raise 29 percent of the project's estimated $250 million cost, with state-issued bonds covering the rest.
The project would overhaul flood walls from the Sutter Bypass north to the Thermalito Afterbay, with the goal of protecting areas north of Yuba City against the peak high-water level expected every 200 years on the Feather and providing 100-year protection levels south of Yuba City. Construction is expected to last from 2012 to 2014.
Flood control officials have called levee upgrades essential to avoid price hikes for insurance in floodplains — a step the Federal Emergency Management Agency took in south Sutter County in 2008 — and a shutdown of building permits under a state law to take force in 2015. That building curb would effectively ban new construction in communities lacking protection against a once-in-200-years high-water event.
CONTACT Howard Yune at 749-4708 or hyune@appealdemocrat.com.
