Is flood control losing priority in the state’s climate change agenda? Money matters | Opinion

From Fisherman’s Wharf to Oracle Park, where the Giants play baseball, San Francisco wants to build a 30-foot wall to prevent a rising bay from submerging this low-lying edge of the city.

The 7.5-mile wall is expected to cost $13 billion. It would be the largest public works project in an expensive city’s storied history. And it’s just the tip of the proverbial iceberg for the Bay Area.

Opinion

Managing flood in the Central Valley comes with the territory and is a perennial work in progress, with some regions better off than others. The Valley has grown accustomed to being the big kid on the block when it comes to flood protection needs. It is, after all, where the rivers of the western Sierra can rage before reaching San Francisco Bay. We have happened to decide to occupy lands throughout the floodplain, including the state Capitol itself.

Now, however, the Bay Area has to worry about floods coming from the Bay through a cruel combination of sea level rise and peak storm surge. Its needs are exploding — financially overwhelming those of Sacramento and the Central Valley.

A study earlier this year by the Bay Delta and Development Commission identified $110 billion in infrastructure needs to adapt to sea level rise. The flood control strategies for the Sacramento and San Joaquin River Watersheds devised by the Central Valley Flood Protection Board, meanwhile, is a comparable pittance, at “only” $25 billion to $30 billion.

As the price tag of flood protection goes up, it is anything but clear just how high this is in the agenda of the Newsom administration or the California Legislature. Flood protection’s share of a proposed climate change bond, for example, is about half the slice that it has gotten in bonds approved earlier this century.

Why? Climate change means more than preparing for the occasional massive flood. Climate change is also threatening watersheds and water supplies. There is a small army of water interests fighting over supplies. The much smaller flood control community runs the risk of being the financial orphan in California’s climate change priorities.

Until, of course, it really, really floods.

“What are we obsessed about for the last 15 years? Drought,” said Jeffrey Mount, a senior fellow at the Public Policy Institute of California’s Water Policy Center. “Eventually we’ll have a ... big, damaging flood and we’ll get our eye back on the ball.”

As a region in the valley, Sacramento is in comparatively good shape. The region has spent an estimated $5 billion since 2005, most of it from the federal government, on a variety of projects. A new spillway at Folsom Dam on the American River, for example, can release more water earlier in storm cycles. Downstream levee improvements can carry more water. And levee strengthening projects on the Sacramento River better protect at-risk communities like Natomas.

But flood protection is never over.

“The environmentalists that work in flood are really thin,” said Senior Policy Advocate Ron Stork of the Sacramento-based Friends of the River, a dean among his small group of peers.

Drought — the scarcity of water — can dominate the agenda by its very number of participants.

“The water supply folks are always knocking at the doors of legislators saying, ‘Fix my water problems,’” Stork said. “The flood people may try, but I don’t think the doors get opened that often.”

There are some statistics to back his feelings up. Since 2000, according to an analysis by the Public Policy Institute of California, flood protection projects received about 27% of the funds of resource bonds approved by state voters. But that percentage appears to be slipping.

A $15.5 billion climate change bond making its way through the California Legislature at present has only 11% is funding dedicated to flood protection, $1.65 billion. This should serve as a red flag to flood control advocates, because this bond was crafted in a winter marked by more than 30 atmospheric rivers slamming California and chart-busting rain and snowfall totals.

Why is flood control losing ground? When it comes to climate change, there are many needs. The title of this bond illustrates the quandary: “The Drought, Flood and Water Resilience, Wildfire and Forest Resilience, Coastal Resilience, Extreme Heat Mitigation, Biodiversity and Nature-Based Climate Solutions, Climate Smart Agriculture, Park Creation and Outdoor Access and Clean Energy Bond Act of 2024.”

The bond has about 1.5 time the money for wildfire and forest resilience needs, for example, than flood control.

“The (climate change) problem is so big, people don’t know where to start half the time,” said State Senator Ben Allen (D-Santa Monica), the bond’s author. With so many needs, “ultimately it’s about trying to find the balance,” he said.

Both Stork and Mount worry about Central Valley communities like Stockton and Lathrop with huge flood exposure that remains unaddressed. Also in the cross-hairs of climate change is the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta, the 1,100 square-mile estuary where the rivers merge before heading to San Francisco Bay, with 1,100 miles of levees.

“I try not to think about it, because it can be a bit depressing,” Stork said. “You got these peak discharges that are coming in from the tributaries that are going to be greater. That is not going to be pleasant for the Delta. And then you have the slow drip, drip, drip of ceaseless sea level rise. It kills you slowly.”

If there is a lesson from Sacramento’s success in recent decades on improving flood protection, it’s on the funding front. In the best of worlds, the state and federal governments will pay 90% of a flood protection project. But communities that do not come up with that 10% match, typically from a property assessment, are at the back of the line.

Mount worries less about competition for dollars inside California and sees states with more frequent flooding disasters, like Florida, as the money sumps for federal dollars. His homegrown solution is for California to step up annual spending to about $3 billion towards improving flood infrastructure. Spending that amount every year can whittle away at some very big problems.

For the Bay Area and its $110 billion in flood needs, “two billion a year for 50 years (isn’t) bad,” Mount said. “If you spread it out, you’re in good shape.”

We were so, so lucky last year. If some atmospheric rivers in the second half of the winter had been ultra-warm events from the south, that would have quickly melted massive snow packs, and downstream flooding would have been far worse. One of these winters, that will happen. And California will be consumed by the flood’s fury.

In the meantime, flood protection is like a hungry mouth that is inadequately fed by the political powers in Sacramento and Washington.