M.V. Residents Sound Off About Flood Control Issues

A routine report about the status of upcoming flood control projects quickly devolved into a heated exchange at a meeting of the Moapa Valley Town Advisory Board (MVTAB) held on Wednesday, Aug. 11.

Residents whose homes and yards received significant flooding in storms earlier this summer expressed impatience to the board about the slow pace of implementation of the county’s flood control plan.

The conversation began with a brief report delivered by Amelia Smith, liaison from the office of Clark County Commissioner Marilyn Kirkpatrick. Smith said that two flood control projects are in the pipeline to address trouble spots in the community.

The first is a proposed detention basin to the east of Logandale to relieve flooding at the Clark County Fairgrounds and Grant Bowler Elementary School.
“The grant was submitted to the BLM in July 2016 and we received that from them in January 2020,” Smith said. “So it is in the works.”

The other project was to address a system of levees and detention basins at the west end of Bryner Street in Overton. This system had been built many years ago by private property owners on public lands. In more recent years, the Army Corps of Engineers had determined that the system was not properly engineered and unsafe. So it was required that the levees be breached. Since that time, flooding problems occur down Bryner toward Moapa Valley Blvd., and continues on south of the boulevard to flood homes and businesses in that area.

“It was something that was illegally placed up there and was never properly approved,” Smith explained. “So the Army Corps of Engineers told the county that it had to be taken out. It wasn’t something that we had control over.”

Smith said that in 2019 an application was submitted to the state for a permit to address the problem. That permit was received in May of this year, she said.
“So now we can start working on the engineering for the project,” Smith said.

Overton resident Victoria Coston questioned why this project had taken so long and what had been done to expedite it. Coston has long lived on Cottonwood Ave. where flooding from the western hills frequently occurs. She also worked for many years as a local administrator in the Clark County Northeast Office in Overton.

“I believe that this has been an issue for about 13 years now,” Coston said. “When is some action going to take place on it?”

“I don’t have a timeline on it at this point,” Smith responded. “We are kind of at their mercy as far as their process goes.”

“The county has been saying they would address this for more than a decade now,” Coston said. “We were working on it when I was working in that office. So what has happened in the meantime while people are being flooded.”

“What has happened in the meantime is that we finally received a permit to be able to do the work,” Smith said. “That was just in May of this year. That is what has happened. Now we can move forward with the engineering portion.”

MVTAB member Brian Burris spoke in defense of the county’s timeline saying that the projects were complex and took time.

“Everything that comes with the federal government is a long process,” Burris said. “Generally it takes 5-10 years to get permitting done with them. Then it requires engineering which also takes some time. Then on top of that, it still has to go through the bidding process. So it is not a project aht is going to be done in six months. We are probably looking at it closer to two years.”

Burris added that appropriating the funds for these projects also takes time. He said that the Fairground detention alone had a budget of $13 million.

“The county has told us that, at our current tax revenue rate in this community, it would take 30 years to have enough to build one of these detention basins,” Burris said. “Commissioner Kirkpatrick has gotten that money put together in just the time she has been in office.”

But Coston argued that all of these projects had been identified on master plan for flood control for more than thirty years.

“They have been working on these projects for thirty years and nothing has been done except talking about it,” Coston said. “When do we have some leadership and set some priorities and get something done for our community.”

A review of county flood control planning documents for Moapa Valley confirms Coston’s claims. Proposed detention basins and other infrastructure to address flooding from the western washes – particularly the Wieber Wash system feeding across the railroad tracks onto Cottonwood Ave. – have appeared in the master plan since 1988, the earliest flood control documents available.

Neither of the two projects reported by Smith would address the Cottonwood Ave. problem.
“If all these things have been in the plan that was passed more than 30 years ago, then why has the board not prioritized these things and gotten something done?” Coston asked.

Taylor Leavitt, who said he has lived on Cottonwood Ave. for three years, confessed that he didn’t know details about the flood control plan. “All I know is that every time it rains for 10 or 15 minutes, we have flood water surrounding our house,” he said. “It seems like that should be a priority in this plan.”

Leavitt suggested that there was probably no need for multi-million dollar dams to be built to fix the problem.
“The old-timers who have been in the neighborhood for years can tell you exactly what needs to be done,” Leavitt said. “They know why the water runs out the way it does now. There are simple temporary fixes that would relieve the problem.”

“The problem is, if we just go out and do temporary fixes that the old-timers know how to do, we are right back in the same situation as we were before,” Burris said. “What happens then is, a lot of it is on BLM land. And the BLM is going to come in and take it down because it is not permitted because it isn’t permitted and engineered for that purpose.”

Leavitt expressed impatience that the residents of the area are not allowed to solve the problem, but the public agencies also won’t move forward with it.
“Three and a half years ago I came to a board meeting just like this and said the same thing,” he said. “And it was the same kind of answer: we are working on it. Nothing has happened.”

But Burris said that the two projects currently in the queue was evidence that progress had been made. “We have moved the ball forward,” he said. “It is not as far as we would like to move it and I know that is frustrating. But there is work being done on it.”

Another Cottonwood Ave. resident, Kurt Lytle, who is a former MVTAB member, suggested that it might be a good idea to invite county flood control planners out to more fully explain the master plan and its implementation.

“I think it would be helpful to have the county’s drainage engineers come out with drawings and things that we can actually look at and see where the water is actually coming from, what areas are impacted, and the different proposals and processes for addrsesing it,” Lytle said. “I think that would go a long way towards the community having more empathy for the governmental process and why there is really not a quick fix solution here.”