Opinion: Boulder’s water challenges — too much and not enough

Boulder is in a unique position.

We are the most flood-prone city in Colorado, right up against the mountains and with multiple creeks running through town.

At the same time, we are reliant on water supplies that are very susceptible to climate change.

And the 100-year-old Colorado River Compact will multiply that effect on our Western Slope water coming via the Colorado-Big Thompson Project.

I want to address the flood issue now, and discuss water in an upcoming column.

I’ve been serving for many months now on the city’s Community Working Group focused on stormwater and flood control issues. To cut to the chase, the problem we have is that the Boulder City Council has not provided direction to come forward with a list of specific, actionable items to reduce damage and safety risks from future floods.

Additionally, there is no City Council commitment to fund what is needed in our lifetimes. The staff’s informal comment has been that to do what is necessary for all our drainages would take many hundreds of millions of dollars and 50 to 100 years to complete.

So whatever vague policy statements the CWG produces now are likely to be irrelevant to the future generations that will make the decisions.

The only commitment by the Council has been to the plan for CU South, where, in exchange for allowing the University of Colorado Boulder to build development on the size and scale of downtown Boulder, some areas of South Boulder get flood protection only for a FEMA “100-year” design flood, with no realistic possibility of expanding the detention pond when its size proves to be inadequate, as it will.

CU won’t sell Boulder the land necessary to build “500-year” protection for residents in this zone, yet CU’s plans for this gigantic third campus make it safe from such a flood. And because amendments to the annexation agreement do not require citizen approval, CU could convince a future council majority to change the terms to allow this to become a giant office park.

This plan does not even consider mitigating flooding from Viele Channel and Bear Creek that flooded nearby areas of South Boulder in 2013, because the FEMA design flood assumes a storm over only the Eldorado Springs area.

This focus on South Boulder Creek to the exclusion of these others is a big mistake: Bear Creek had $18 million in damages, and Viele Channel had $12 million, so those together exceeded South Boulder Creek’s $27 million.

In fact, of the total of $176 million in damages from the 2013 flood, Boulder Creek was first with $41 million, Twomile Canyon/Goose Creek was second with $39 million, and South Boulder Creek was a distant third with $27 million.

As to life safety risk, the only deaths occurred on the westerly extension of Linden Avenue, west of north Boulder. And a person was swept under a car on Mariposa Avenue, just south of Baseline, nowhere near South Boulder Creek.

Also, remember that if the actual flood exceeds the FEMA design flood, the floodwater will overtop the new dam and “flash flood” the same area as if none of the improvements were built, just for less time.

This brief discussion of South Boulder Creek illustrates that our flood planning process needs very significant improvements.

Based on my experience as the lead councilmember on Boulder’s first efforts to address flood issues in the ‘80s and my recent experience on the CWG, the Council needs to stop fantasizing that it can make good decisions from 30,000 feet, and appoint a couple of councilmembers to fully engage in this process.

These councilmembers can then join the CWG and face the myriad of sometimes-conflicting goals, confront the scale of what needs to be done, struggle with the type and complexity of the decisions to be made and finally generate some quantitative policy statements that are adequate to ensure that the outcomes have a solid connection to reality.

The list of potential projects will then need to be whittled down to those that make sense — i.e., they’re actually worth the money according to these criteria. Then decide how fast to get them done, meaning how much to fund with cash versus how much to borrow, and how much to raise our flood control fees to meet the need.

This will require frequent check-ins with the full Council. But then we might have a comprehensive flood plan, one that will produce on-the-ground results that actually work and are a net community benefit.

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