California Governor Jerry Brown inked an agreement in April 2016 to tear down four hydroelectric dams on the Klamath River, owned by PacifiCorp utility. To fund the tear downs, PacifiCorp agreed to pay $200 million and Gov. Brown diverted $250 million from the $7.5 billion Proposition 1 Water Bond that was supposed to fund flood control.
But with Oroville Dam’s spillway collapsing in February, tthe Central Valley Flood Protection Board approved a plan this week to recommend that the state and federal government invest more than $20 billion over the next 30 years to protect Californians from the risk of flooding.
California Department of Water Resources’ lead flood management planner, Mike Mierzwa, told Capital Public Radio, “From a cost perspective, we’re talking about having more water move through our systems earlier in the season, and in a shorter time period, which has really significant fiscal impacts on how we would manage the system and what we would design to handle those flows.”
Mierzwa believes that as the Houston flood recedes and the recovery program begins, “they’re going to find that everything they had spent, wasn’t enough. And they’re going to want to spend and do more in the future.”
The Central Valley plan improvements are expected to cover an area stretching from Mount Shasta in the North to Bakersfield in the South. Mierzwa hopes that with Congress funding a massive recovery program for Houston, California can win funding for “new projects as well as costs of operating and maintaining the current flood control system.”
Article Appeared @http://www.breitbart.com/california/2017/08/31/california-tries-to-leverage-hurricane-harvey-to-fund-20-billion-flood-control/