Rod Harm’s Interview with The Mercury, August 14, 2012, Reporter Corene Brisendine. Question 7. Where do you rank the Wildcat Creek flooding issues for the commission? Well, it’s pretty high on my personal agenda, and I think it should be high on the county and city commission’s agenda too. It may not rank up there with the finishing the health department transition or figuring out how to reduce the law board budget, perhaps. But, it’s not if, it’s when, Wildcat Creek will flood again. This spring we had a two or three inch rain way up in the north of Riley County. It had no impact to Manhattan. It did $100,000 damage to bridges and roads in Riley County. A non-consequential event did $100,000 worth of damage. If that doesn’t tell you some action needs to be taken, nothing will. When Wildcat Creek flooding hit Manhattan June 2011 (and June 2010), I think it was close to $1 million in public damage and untold millions in private property damage. How long do we allow that to happen? Now then, there is also a social injustice of it. Who is impacted? The same people every time. Did the residents of National Church Residents do anything to deserve that? No. I’m told by the manager that the residents are weary enough that no one will live on the first floor (because they’ve lost their personal property two times). So, it just doesn’t make any sense to ignore this problem. And we can spend days/months/weeks arguing that the flooding was caused by this new development or the Optimist Ball Fields filling in the flood plain—or we can accept it as fact. It’s reality. We need to deal with it. The Wildcat Creek Working Group subcommittee I chair deals with detention and watersheds. We have had the local working group meetings and my sub-committee has met with the state, KDHE, KWO, Dept. of Agriculture and other departments, through all that, what I believe today, with the information we have gathered to date, it seems very clear that a Wildcat Creek Watershed District is a statutory mechanism that could be implemented that could start to solve
our problems. There are watershed districts all over the state. Its kind of a surprise we don’t have one in Riley County. There’s some in Pottawatomie County and to the east. I would say there probably aren’t any in Riley County because of the takings related to Tuttle Creek Reservoir, the big fight, “big” government and all that. My “grandfather’s” watershed district built farm ponds and detention structures all over the state. Watershed districts have taxing and bonding authority. This could be a concern—the conservative city commissioners may compare a watershed district to the law board. A watershed district has its own board of directors elected by the residents within the district—They can levy, by state statute, up to five mills. Now, I say, all we need is a half a mill, but the naysayers will say, “But they could do it.” If a board does levy more than what the residents think appropriate, in the next election you need to vote those guys off the board. But they do have the authority to raise five mills in levies. A key component is the district has the authority to bond improvements, sell bonds. Which is a market based things, if the bonds are worthless, investors won’t buy them. The process includes development of a watershed plan. The plan is then approved by the state water office. You define the watershed district boundary, which is easy to do with todays high resolution maps. The perimeter of the district is defined as any where a drop of water falls and ultimately finds its way into Wildcat Creek (approximately 98 square miles. Any parcel within that district, would be subject to the mill levy. Everybody worries that the farmers and the ranchers will be taxed. A preliminary spreadsheet, prepared by Greg McHenry, county appraiser indicates that revenue from a watershed district would come 0.5% from ag land, 2.5% farms, 23% commercial and 73% residential (1% other) ? The total tax estimated on farms was $2,600. – the total from all the farms in the 98 square mile watershed district. The majority of the revenue is collected from commercial interests and urban residential, where it should be in my opinion. I think that it’s fair
as rural areas are where the improvements can be made at economical costs. If we tried to create a large detention structure over by the Garden Way apartments—build some big structure there—as opposed to 12 miles upstream in the watershed it would be much more expensive. And then another reality of that is, why put an improvement at the downstream end of the watershed instead of putting it at the top of the watershed to benefit more people. The higher in the watershed the greater benefit or improvement to the base flows of the creek Soil conservation district representatives believe that in that 98 square miles there are some number of farmers and ranchers that have a project in mind, that if they had some assistance, they would agree to undertake it. It’s just not ponds. It’s riparian buffers, pulling cultivated crop land farther away from the creek bank, planting deciduous tree cover. You don’t straighten out the channel. You want to do everything you can to increase the length of the channel and increase infiltration. So, it is a problem, maybe not the one on the top of the pile. But there is a mechanism to address that. And we should vet that.
