The Juneau Assembly voted to wait on a second extension of Juneau’s Mendenhall River levee until after this flood season.
Assembly Member Greg Smith said the project to protect additional homes from annual flooding faces engineering and funding obstacles that can’t be solved before the flood expected later this summer.
“We don’t seem to have a way to fund this fairly this year, “ Smith said. “We don’t have a way to armor the bank and ensure the barriers are going to be properly installed this year… We want to do as much as we can, but this one just doesn’t seem to make sense to me.”
The city’s lawyer said there isn’t enough time to permit reinforcements for another section of the riverbank this summer. Without boulders to armor the bank from erosion, city officials said they aren’t confident that a second levee extension would hold up against a flood.
City officials also said the affected property owners would also need to vote on whether to create another local improvement district to divide the cost — estimated at more than $2 million.
The levee extension, called phase 1B, would go from Kax̱dig̱oowu Héen Elementary School to Brotherhood Bridge on Glacier Highway. City Manager Katie Koester said the intention would be to protect 96 homes and commercial properties from an 18-foot flood.
The likelihood of such a catastrophic flood is unknown, but the volume of water would have to be 50% higher than last year’s record-breaking 16-foot flood.
“There would be 96 parcels if we did not do 1B that would flood in a 18-foot event. We would attempt to mitigate the impact on 30 of those parcels,” she said.
Koester said this year the city will use large sandbags called supersacks to protect 30 properties on Meadow Lane that could see more water due to an initial levee extension that the Assembly approved last month.
The Assembly will consider the extension again next season, once city staff draft a plan to pay for it.
