Community Corner

City Budget: 'Unmet Needs' Include Upgrades for Aging Flood Control System

At the end of a three-hour special meeting of the city budget/audit advisory committee on Wednesday, a Redlands councilmember and the city manager said in separate interviews that one of the city's primary "unmet needs" is flood control.

"I think it's balanced," Councilmember Pat Gilbreath said of the city budget, speaking outside the Civic Center at 35 Cajon Street. "The proposed budget that we're taking to the council is balanced, and it needs to stay balanced."

The budget/audit advisory committee meeting was announced just after 5 p.m. Monday May 20. It began at 8:30 a.m. May 22 and ended around 11:30 a.m. Gilbreath and Councilmember Bob Gardner heard from departments including finance, human resources, police, fire, and municipal utilities and engineering.

"There's a lot of unmet needs," Gilbreath said after the meeting. "But we basically are holding the line in terms of what we can do with the money that's coming in. . . . We're addressing the needs that we feel are more critical on this budget, and then trying to find ways to address the unmet needs. . . .

"Public safety, definitely," Gilbreath said. "We're trying to get the police level up to 83 officers, and I think we can do that if we manage the budget correctly. . . . We have 80 now. We're adding three more hopefully.

"Then we've got major issues with storm drains. It's not even being addressed and we've got to somehow come to an additional - how do we handle the storm drains?

"They need to be totally replaced," Gilbreath said. "Our residents are paying very high insurance for flood control that, right now, our system is only at capacity for a 13-year, 14-year flood. It should be 75-year flood. So it would be a huge cost. But it would potentially save a great deal of downtown damage.

"We have old structures downtown and they can't manage floods very well."

Inside council chambers, City Manager Enrique Martinez expanded on Gilbreath's concerns about flood control.

"It's not the drains alone, it's the flood control system," Martinez said. "It includes more than the drains. There's a basin on the east side of town, the Opal Basin. . . . 

"Right now there are four places that we are repairing in the flood control system," Martinez said. "I believe the flood control system has maybe about 65 miles worth of drains and gullies and all that. So at this juncture we're repairing four areas.

"We just spent four hundred and some thousand to correct one area that was collapsed on to the drain itself. . . . here in the downtown area. It was a channel that a partial building collapsed onto it, into it.

"The reason for that is the city has not devoted any resources to maintenance in  over 30 years," Martinez said. "So we have probably four other places that are similar to that one, that haven't collapsed, but they're at risk.

"But before we spend more resources we need to complete this overall plan of the system, so we know what areas are at risk and what is it that we need to do.

"What I'd like to . . . get across is most cities have a 25-year or 50-year or a hundred-year control for floods in their city," Martinez said. "My understanding from our municipal utilities department is we only have a 13-year level."

Martinez said he would like to see the city upgrade the flood control system to one-hundred-year level protection.

"I'm not sure if there's a standard of a hundred years, but certainly the frequency of floods leads one to be concerned for it," Martinez said. "The last big flood that we had was in '75 or '76.

"What we want to do is, not only is it prudent because it will lower insurance premiums, flood control premiums for the businesses and also residents in the area, it'll also help the University of Redlands develop some of their developments they're considering for the light rail."

Increased flood protection would also allow for improved conditions for developers in downtown Redlands, Martinez said.

"If you look at the Krikorian Theatre, and those places, you can see that off the street they're about this high, and the reason for that is to protect in case of flood," Martinez said.

"So is it prudent? Yes it is. Is it something that people can see right away? No, because it's underground. It's not like we're putting up palm trees. But this is kind of like our broccoli. We've got to eat it."

Martinez said he could not estimate how much the city will need to upgrade the entire flood control system serving Redlands. He said a city master plan addressing flood control is expected to be complete in February 2014.


Get more local news delivered straight to your inbox. Sign up for free Patch newsletters and alerts.

We’ve removed the ability to reply as we work to make improvements. Learn more here

More from Redlands-Loma Linda