FARGO – Many basic assumptions about the Fargo-Moorhead flood diversion were scrutinized Monday, Oct. 23, at the first meeting of a task force seeking compromises that would make the $2.2 billion project more acceptable to opponents and to Minnesota regulators.
One member of the 16-person task force questioned the validity of the 100-year flood plain used by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers in designing the Red River diversion channel and dam, which the regulators have refused to permit.
Others revived discussion of options long dismissed by engineers such as building ring dikes around the metro area and using upstream retention ponds, which Minnesota regulators had earlier said are impractical.
That made it seem like drastic changes to the project were possible, something North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum had warned might risk the loss of the rare congressional authorization the project’s received. He, together with Minnesota Gov. Mark Dayton, convened the task force and chaired its Monday meeting at the Fargodome.
The group’s goal, Burgum said in a news conference after the meeting, is to agree to project changes that would provide protection from a 100-year flood and address concerns by upstream and downstream communities but not result in so much change as to lose authorization.
Dayton said he, too, wouldn’t want to “scrap” the diversion plan, which would be unrealistic. Still, he said, he wanted the task force to be able to freely discuss all changes and work with the corps and congressional delegation to see which changes would be allowed.
The governors assembled the task force after Minnesota regulators sued the Corps and Fargo-Moorhead Diversion Authority and convinced a judge to halt construction during the lawsuit. Burgum and Dayton said they’ve agreed that the task force would stop its work if parties involved continue litigation. They also agreed if the Corps and authority file a motion to appeal the judge’s order to meet the judge’s deadline – but put it on pause right away – that that wouldn’t be construed as litigation.
The task force’s work follows the work of a technical team from both sides that tried earlier to compromise, suggesting changes such as moving a portion of the dam in North Dakota north to reduce the floodwater stored on the Minnesota side.
Many points of view
The task force is designed to include diverse opinions.
Among its members are upstream opponents of the project such as Richland County (N.D.) Commissioner Nathan Berseth, downstream representatives such as Hendrum (Minn.) Mayor Curt Johannsen, legal experts such as Fargo attorney Tami Norgard and engineers such as Moorhead City Councilman Joel Paulsen.
In introducing himself, Fargo businessman Ron Bergan, who was part of a group that worked to develop the current diversion plan, reminded the task force of how perilously close Fargo-Moorhead came to catastrophic flooding in 1997 and 2009. Hospitals and nursing homes had to be evacuated, he said.
Former Wilkin County (Minn.) attorney Tim Fox, who advises the Richland-Wilkin Joint Powers Authority that sued to stop the project, said the way Diversion Authority officials went about buying out upstream property owners was unfair. He said he himself had negotiated hundreds of flood buyouts when his county built its flood protection project after the 1997 flood.
“Ultimately, what we’re asking this task force to do, regardless of where they’re coming from, is we’re asking everybody to come together as a group and look for a new solution,” Burgum said. “This is not about litigating the past. This is about defining our future.”
The past, though, was not far away.
Past decisions revisited
The 100-year flood plain that the Corps used to design the diversion project was questioned by Fox, who said he felt the corps had arbitrarily decided the flood elevation to fit its agenda.
This is the area estimated to have a 1 percent chance of flooding each year and is used by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) to determine flood insurance requirements. Those in the flood plain would be required to buy insurance and face higher rates because they’re considered at higher risk. The diversion project is designed to keep homes out of the flood plain when FEMA revises its flood plain map.
Fox complained that the Corp’s flood plain map has a higher elevation than FEMA’s current flood plain and refused to believe it when Cass County Engineer Jason Benson, a task force member whose job involves diversion planning, said FEMA used data from 1971 and the Corps used data from after the 2009 flood.
Moorhead City Engineer Bob Zimmerman and Nathan Boerboom, a senior Fargo city engineer, said that is what happened. In its latest map, they said, FEMA used old data to compute the volume of water in a 100-year flood but used new models to determine how high the water would reach. The Corps used new data to compute the volume of water, raising the flood plain elevation 2 to 3 feet higher, they said.
FEMA has said it’s aware its flood plain map is outdated and will revise that map if the diversion is not built.
DNR Commissioner Tom Landwehr, designated as Dayton’s surrogate if he can’t attend task force meetings, was among several task force members who questioned why Fargo and Moorhead couldn’t replace the diversion with ring dikes as in Oxbow, N.D., a community that would be on the wet side of the dam.
According to Benson, Boerboom and Gregg Thielmann, an engineer with the Houston Moore Engineering Group working with the Diversion Authority, the Corps did consider dikes but found them too costly for the benefits provided. Earthen levees, which are the most affordable dikes, are too heavy and would have to be built further away from rivers and drains, requiring many more costly and unpopular buyouts. They’d have to be quite high especially to the south where a ring dike would induce higher flood elevation. In addition, they’d be complex endeavors because there are so many rivers and drains in the area.
Oxbow is a smaller community and doesn’t have all those waterways.
Other task force members asked why “distributed storage,” meaning retention ponds spread out across upstream farmland, was earlier dismissed as an alternative.
The DNR had earlier concluded such a system might be possible, but it would take too long to win support from the many landowners needed.
According to Benson, such a vast system would be too complex to operate and raises questions of who controls each pond. The diversion dam would also retain water but would be controlled by the Diversion Authority.
New dams and other solutions
It’s possible the task force will consider some of the changes discussed by the technical team that the DNR and Diversion Authority had assembled earlier. The DNR scuttled the effort after Landwehr expressed unhappiness with the legal tactics employed by the authority’s attorneys.
Much of that discussion had been kept confidential, but on Monday, Kent Lokkesmoe, a DNR official involved, revealed some details to the task force about the technical team’s work on what Minnesota officials called “Plan B.”
He said the team discussed changes such as having more floodwater go through Fargo-Moorhead; storing some water within the dry side of the diversion; building a downstream dam; and moving the northwest corner of the L-shaped dam further north, presumably toward Horace, N.D.
All of these could reduce the impact on upstream landowners, especially in Minnesota. Dayton had complained Minnesota landowners were more impacted than North Dakota landowners even though more structures in North Dakota would be protected.
Though Diversion Authority officials have said the technical team was close to agreement, Lokkesmoe said he didn’t think the team was ready to issue any recommendations at the time it was dissolved.
Asked if any of that would be discussed by the task force, Dayton replied, “I think you heard it all with Plan B, which lasted, what, a minute and a half?” He echoed Lokkesmoe in saying the team hadn’t produced a recommendation.
Dayton and Burgum agreed it had been a good first meeting but that a lot of hard work remained in the weeks ahead as the task force works to meet its 60-day deadline.
“We've got a number of very complex issues ahead of us,” Dayton said. “Failure is not an option. We have to come up with a solution we can all live with and is going to reflect different points of view.”
The task force is tentatively scheduled to meet again Wednesday, Nov. 1, in Moorhead.
