County, Flood Control District to expedite wash project

A civil but emphatic crowd filled the multipurpose room of Mendoza Elementary School, 2000 S. Sloan Lane, for an open house and town hall meeting Jan. 30. The event was the first of three public meetings to discuss proposed improvements to the Las Vegas Wash and the redesign of Desert Rose Golf Course.

The changes were originally part of a five-year plan, but in light of the flooding in the area during two rainstorms on Aug. 22 and Sept. 11, 2012, the project is being expedited. Gale Fraser, general manager and chief engineer for the Clark County Regional Flood Control District, hopes to have the project in place by the end of 2015.

It was billed as a joint meeting by Clark County Commissioner Chris Giunchigliani and Las Vegas City Councilman Bob Coffin, but Coffin was detained by an unexpected personal matter and sent a representative.

Giunchigliani said the meeting was called in a large part to give residents of the neighborhood a voice in the planning process, and many of the more than 100 people attending the meeting spoke out.

Many of the speakers voiced concerns similar to Las Vegas native Burton Watts, who has lived in the neighborhood since 1989 and felt that improvements to washes and channels upstream of the area have caused more water to flow more rapidly to the neighborhood resulting in the flooding.

“I understand that when there were floods in the northwest a few years back, they had to fix things up there,” he said. “But when they do that, it ends up coming down here. We’ve never had flooding like we’ve had the last few years. Something has obviously changed. I’m not mad; I just want it fixed.”

Fraser repeatedly refuted the allegations that the floods were the result of the recent conversion of dirt washes to concrete lined channels. He said unusually heavy rainfalls caused the flooding. The new channels were designed to handle a 100-year flood, but Fraser pointed out that 100-year flood is a deceptive term.

“A 100-year flood only means that there is one chance in 100 of it happening, not that there will only be one in every 100 years,” Fraser said. “If we’re particularly unlucky, we could have three 100-year floods in a season.”

KerriAnne Mukhopadhyay, public information coordinator for the Clark County Regional Flood Control District, said the district was prepared for the possibility that many of the people who attended the meeting would be upset.

“We knew there would be some strong voices,” Mukhopadhyay said. “The whole point of the meeting was to express that we had this positive project that was coming.”

She added that this is the first time a resolution for a flood control project has been funded before the design phase, as all parties involved saw there was a pressing need.

“It’s a resolution where we’ve set $35 million aside for this project from our bonding authority,” Mukhopadhyay said. “Typically the projects need to be designed beforehand, and there’s a rigorous financial schedule.”

In her opening remarks, Giunchigliani noted that although $35 million had been earmarked for the project, they hoped that it might be brought in for less, but that would be something that would be revealed in the design process.

Many of the people attending the meeting had been directly affected by last summer’s floods. Tom and Betty Parker, who live just south of the golf course, have been through flooding repeatedly, despite being outside of the official flood plain.

“We had a bad flood in 1990 and the water got into the house to just above the baseboard,” Betty Parker said. “A flood in ’96 got to our garage door. In the September 11 flood we lost 98 percent of everything. They had to take our house down to the studs.”

Tom Parker blames the damage in part on faulty design of the neighborhood.

“We have 340 homes and two apartment houses and only two drains,” he said. “With this magnitude of water, it didn’t have anyplace to go.”

Betty Parker added that an attempt by neighbors to clear the drains was thwarted by neck-deep water.

The Parkers were part of a group of nine homeowners who successfully sued the homebuilders regarding whether the homes were in a flood zone following the 1990 incident. At the time they didn’t have flood insurance, but they have purchased it since. That allowed them to rebuild following this summer’s floods.

“We were out of our house from Sept. 11 until we moved back in on Dec. 1,” Betty Parker said. “It’s back like new, but we found out that if you have flood insurance, it does not cover housing or food. I hope we don’t have to go through it again.”

In a follow-up telephone interview, Coffin noted that he was one of the sponsors in 1985 of the sales tax bill that provides funding for the Clark County Regional Flood Control District.

“It was controversial at the time,” Coffin said. “We had a hard time getting the votes to pass the quarter-cent sales tax. It now has yielded a billion dollars in revenue. When you add the federal money and the other money, we’ve spent $1.7 billion on flood control in this valley.”

He added that while people in the area around the golf course have come to expect flooding because nearly all the water that falls in the valley flows through there, changes in the amount and type of flood insurance that are required have put a larger burden on them in recent years.

Before and after the public forum, residents clustered around displays, maps and charts around the room while government representatives tried to address their individual issues and point out where and to what extent flooding had occurred in their neighborhood.

Several voices in the audience pointed out places where the flood channels had been clogged with debris that contributed to flooding. Giunchigliani said the county would look into the specific areas. She noted and agreed that a general policy of ensuring that the channels were clear should be put in place.

Giunchigliani took a rough poll of the room, which she said confirmed what she had been hearing from her constituents since the 2012 floods.

“People want it to remain a golf course, and they want it to remain green,” she said. “I haven’t heard from many people who want to see a concrete channel in there.”

Plans call for lowering and regrading the golf course in stages so that some part of the course would be available for use throughout the project.

A second public meeting to go over the preliminary design is set to be scheduled in June or July. Detailed information about the project is available at www.lvwashproject.com. Interested parties can still submit comments at projectteam@lvwashproject.com, by mail to Clark County Public Works, 500 S. Grand Central Parkway, Las Vegas, NV 89155 or by contacting Giunchigliani’s office at 702-455-3503.

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Contact Sunrise/Whitney View reporter F. Andrew Taylor at ataylor@viewnews.com or 702-380-4532.