County supervisors push for improved flood protection along Pajaro River

County supervisors from Monterey and Santa Cruz have been working to get the Pajaro River levees replaced for decades.

Supervisors Zach Friend and John Phillips are both pushing to get the project finished, but they’re not alone.

Officials say the Army Corps of Engineers built the levee in 1949 and told the county it would replace it, but it hasn’t gotten to that project yet.

Central Coast county supervisors say the Corps has put other flood prevention projects at a higher priority because they impact higher-valued homes. But they add the Corps, “hasn’t taken any consideration for the value of the farmland that’s at risk along the Pajaro River, and that farmland supports a lot of lives. We lost that and we lose a big economic driver in our community,” says Supervisor Phillips.

This weekend in Washington, D.C., at the National Association of Counties conference, Friend introduced a new approach for the Corps to take when prioritizing projects, which includes looking at the land as a whole rather than just home values. County officials were all on board and decided to back the plan unanimously.

“The interim resolution is a vote of support by the nation’s largest organization representing counties for communities such as the Pajaro Valley, which live in constant fear of flooding, but have been left unprotected due to their economic status,” Friend said. “This is an important step forward not just for the Pajaro Valley, but for all low-income communities living in the shadow of inadequate flood protection.”

They are hoping by having the NACo vote, this will encourage the Corps to reconsider what they put as a highest priority.

The flood prevention manager with Santa Cruz County Public Works, Mark Strudley, said the river levee project is crucial. “It’s an area where we’ve had some pretty devastating floods in the past,” he said. “We’ve had loss of life. We had some close calls just a few years ago in 2017 where we thought the levees were going to break again and we prevented that from happening, but it came at great cost and we don’t want to have to do that every single winter.”

Strudley added that while there’s a way to go in the project, they’re getting closer. “We’re getting to a point now where we’re looking for that big investment from federal funding to get these levees built,” he said. “We’re past now the planning stage. We’re now looking for design and construction funds and that’s a place we’ve never been before.”