Corps of Engineers visits with Concordia

Thursday was a great day for Concordia. The Corps of Engineers came to town to discuss the flood control project. The Corps is working on a 50/50 project with us to establish whether we qualify for funding in their Section 205 program. Section 205 is part of the flood mitigation authority. What makes this a great day is that we are one step closer to knowing if Corps funding is possible.

We spent the day discussing what we wanted out of the project. The obvious is a flood control structure on the 21st street alignment. Secondary is the ability to sell property for economic development purposes. I have to say secondarily because if we rated the flood structure on a scale of 1 to 100, the flood structure is 100. Making the balance of the property available for sale would rate a 98. Seeing sales of land is important in the long run. It will help us repay the cost of purchasing the land.

The Corps brought a team of six to Concordia to evaluate the project. We described the work that has been done to date. Campbell and Johnson finished doing the topographic work to provide our engineers with information to develop a preliminary plat. This will be the initial step in making the land available for sale.

Briefly, to subdivide property for sale, a developer must prepare a drawing showing how the lots will be laid out. That is called a preliminary plat. Once approved by the planning commission and the city commission, the division of land becomes a “final plat” and sale of property can occur.

Getting into the Corps of Engineers funding cycle is our objective at this point. The Section 205 program is a 65 Federal/35 local cost share. We learned that land costs can be applied to the local share. Doing the math, $500,000 of land purchase provides up to $1.4 million of project cost. What the real issue now is Congress is not funding the Section 205 program like it used to. We started the process of lobbying our congressional delegation – Senator Brownback is on the Appropriations Committee – to help us fund the project.

The question to be discussed by the City Commission is whether we want to wait on Federal money for a 2007 or 2008 construction or pay the cost of construction from a GO Bond today (meaning 2006 construction). Weighing the risk of waiting on the Federal money against using local tax funds will not be an easy decision.

One side bar to the discussions was the capacity of the existing storm sewer system. Most of the rain events in Concordia are handled by the existing storm sewer system. The reason two dams are proposed is the quantity of storm water exceeds the capacity of the storm sewer. I asked Campbell and Johnson to estimate the project cost of addressing the capacity of the probable storm. The price tag is $8.0 million. It didn’t take too long to it was not a viable solution.

The Corp project team will have their work done in October in time for us to get our request in the next federal budget process. We should know by then whether our project qualifies for Corps funding.