www.montereycountyweekly.com march 23-29, 2023 MONTEREY COUNTY WEEKLY 21 by comparison, about 48 percent of residents are renters, and the median home price of owner-occupied homes is $596,400.) And even as the current Army Corps project to shore up the levees was federally approved in December 2019, it wasn’t funded beyond the initial planning stage. Its BCR score at the time was 1.02. And that number was only reached after lobbying by local officials—Congressman Jimmy Panetta played an outsized role—to reconsider how the benefits are calculated. Stu Townsley, a project management engineer for the Army Corps’ San Francisco district, says historically, projects had to hit a BCR score threshold of 2.5 or higher to merit consideration for funding. It was a scoring system, he says, that started in the 1940s after the federal government began cracking down on pork barrel projects that members of Congress added in the earmark process which, Townsley says, “didn’t add much value at all.” The guidelines the Army Corps uses now date back to 1983, and while they were updated during the Obama administration, the revised guidelines have yet to be implemented—that’s still another year or two out. When they are implemented, the Army Corps will be empowered to take a more holistic view for how to value projects, including factors like environmental justice. In Townsley’s opinion, the Pajaro project’s BCR score, which is a product of scoring guidelines codified 40 years ago, “didn’t address the overall value” of shoring up the levees to take into account things like environmental benefits and the value of lives, safety and livelihoods. “The challenge for both Watsonville and Pajaro, on both sides of the river, is there isn’t that much housing,” Townsley says. “It’s mostly agricultural land, and ag land doesn’t drive the benefits up very high.” Yet even while the Obama-era guidelines have yet to take effect, the federal government’s aperture for how to value projects eventually widened to a more holistic view in 2021 and 2022, and the Pajaro levee project got its first allocations of federal funding, totaling $149 million, and a promise from the state to pay its share as the project is designed and built. (Sixty-five percent of the money for the project will come from the federal government, and 35 percent from the state.) The estimated cost, in December 2019, was just over $434 million. Mark Strudley, executive director of the Pajaro River Flood Management Agency, says it’s now expected to exceed $500 million, and that the Army Corps is in the process of updating that number. If so, that would make the funding at least $175 million short on the federal side. And like all Army Corps projects, the ongoing maintenance is incumbent on local government agencies, and in June 2022, residents in the Pajaro region voted with a 79-percent majority to add an assessment on their properties—$16 per residence, per month—to close an annual $1.2 million shortfall for funding the levee system’s maintenance. (The total cost of the maintenance, annually, is about $3.8 million.) The project remains in the design stage, and construction is not expected to begin on its first phase until 2025. When completed—and it’s not clear when that will be—it’s expected to provide protection, 90 percent of the time, against a 100-year flood event, which has a 1-percent chance of occurring in any given year. But unfortunately for Pajaro, the shift in the federal government’s assessment came too late. “It’s tragic this happened now, when we’re so close to starting construction,” Townsley says. The Pajaro River watershed drains approximately 1,300 square miles in four different counties—Santa Clara, San Benito, Santa Cruz and Monterey—and its headwaters are just southeast of Gilroy, near San Felipe Lake. And even though the river only passes through a relatively small part of the latter two counties, that is where the flooding occurs as the river swells and gains power on its path toward the sea. So for Monterey and Santa Cruz counties, it makes sense to act as one when addressing the downstream impact and manage the Army Corps project once completed—the river is the border between the two counties. To that end, the Pajaro River Flood Management Agency formed in the summer of 2021. It’s a joint powers authority comprising Santa Cruz and Monterey counties, the Monterey County Water Resources Agency and the city of Watsonville. It was created to help facilitate the project—the Army Corps prefers to deal with a single entity, Strudley says—and so that ongoing maintenance of the levees will be streamlined, as there are cost savings in keeping it “under one roof.” Strudley, a hydrologist, is widely considered to be the leading expert on the Pajaro River Flood Risk Management Project—Panetta calls him Mark “Studley.” Before coming to PRFMA, which he was instrumental in creating, he was most recently a flood control and division manager for the Santa Cruz County Department of Public Works from 2017 to 2021, until PRFMA was formed. Above: A woman holds a rescued cat in Pajaro on March 16. Right: The Pajaro River levee where it breached on March 11. Even after contractors plugged the breach March 14, workers continue to shore it up to raise its height, working around the clock. Below: Jose Guadalupe Estanquero, 79, has lived in Pajaro for over 30 years, through both the 1995 and 2023 floods. “They have abandoned us,” he says of the failure to prevent the recent breach. daniel dreifuss daniel dreifuss daniel dreifuss
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