Dispute Rages on San Luis Rey Flood Control

Nancy Jakovac knows well the wiles of the San Luis Rey River. For the past decade she has lived on the ground floor of a stucco condominium building a few hundred yards from its coffee-colored waters.

Mostly, the river has been a peaceful neighbor, a babbling brook meandering between thickets of willows down the wide valley that forms Oceanside’s northeastern flank. But come winter, its personality changes.

During heavy storms, the San Luis Rey becomes a raging waterway, churning full as it cuts a serpentine path toward the sea. Those are the times Jakovac fears most.

Twice in 10 years the swollen river has surged over its sandy banks and pounded menacingly toward Jakovac’s home. Some nights, the 55-year-old grandmother has awakened to find rapids coursing through a normally dusty field a dozen steps from her front door.

“You go to bed and think it’s not too bad,” Jakovac said one day recently, gazing out at the plot now speckled with golden scrub grass. “Then you wake up in the dark and hear the river outside your window. I’ll tell you, it’s frightening.”

Like many of her neighbors, Jakovac fears that such nights are merely a portent of things to come. Should a massive rainstorm hit North County, they worry, many of the more than 4,000 homes and business bordering the river could be flooded, causing millions of dollars in damage and endangering countless lives.

As they see it, the San Luis Rey River is a disaster waiting to happen.

“If we get a really big storm, there’s no way we can handle it,” agreed Oceanside Mayor Larry Bagley. “We’re going to have a lot of those homes with their living rooms full of water.”

Fully aware of the problem, city leaders have pinned their hopes of taming the San Luis Rey on a proposed federal flood-control project. In recent years, Oceanside officials have made annual pilgrimages to Washington, lobbying congressmen in an effort to woo funds for the $45-million project.

Each time, they’ve come back empty-handed. Now, with prospects for project funding next year looking equally bleak, some local authorities have begun to talk seriously about abandoning the federal project and trying alternatives.

Chief among them is a proposal for a privately financed flood control project. The idea is being pushed by a group of riverside landowners led by industrialist Alex Deutsch, whose firm operates a massive electronics plant on the San Luis Rey’s southern bank near the municipal airport.

According to Deutsch, a private project could be completed for about $5 million. He and other large landowners along the river have already done much of the work, buttressing the river bank adjacent to their property with huge, protective boulders. Those levees could easily be incorporated into a unified project, Deutsch said.

But several city officials and residents maintain Deutsch’s plan amounts to little more than a piecemeal approach to a very complex problem. They contend his proposal underestimates the savage strength of the San Luis Rey and ignores environmental regulations designed to protect birds and small animals dwelling in the river area’s dense foliage.

“My feeling is that I’d just as soon go down in flames with the federal project until someone comes forward with a different plan that works,” said Councilman Ted Marioncelli. “I really don’t think that Alex’s plan, as it stands now, is workable.”

Despite such assessments, some Oceanside leaders--among them Bagley and Councilman Sam Williamson--seem to be leaning these days toward a private project. Moreover, Rep. Ron Packard (R-Carlsbad), the city’s representative in Washington, concedes the chances for any federal funding in the future seem slim.

“It seems like it’s time to look at other ways to get that river under control,” Packard said. “When you’re asking the federal government for $45 million, you’re asking for trouble.”

Pressure for a remedy has, if anything, increased in recent years as houses and condominiums have sprouted in the valley like so many tracts of toadstools.

Engineering officials have taken care to ensure that those developments are built safely above the floodwaters anticipated from the type of storm that theoretically occurs only once a century. But such practices were not always the standard in Oceanside. Indeed, several subdivisions along the banks of the San Luis Rey--most of them built more than 10 years ago--lie within the so-called 100-year flood plain.

According to Jakovac, many of the residents of such neighborhoods were unaware of the flood threat when they purchased their homes. Some didn’t even realize there was a river out back.

“A lot of these people, me included, bought here and didn’t even know they were, for all intents, in a river bed,” Jakovac said.

She recalls wandering out to the banks of the San Luis Rey with her husband, Ted, before they bought their home. It had not rained in weeks and the river was little more than a trickle, six feet wide and a half-foot deep.

“I didn’t see it as a problem,” she said. “But I soon found out I was wrong.”

The tangled question of how best to mute the forces of the San Luis Rey dates back long before Jakovac and most other residents of the valley arrived.

In 1916, several days of torrential rains caused catastrophic flooding. “Essentially, the entire valley was under water,” according to Dana Whitson, special projects director for the city.

Four people died, and there was extensive damage to buildings, roads and bridges. The city was cut off from the outside world for two weeks except by boat.

As the area was still relatively rural, efforts to find a permanent solution came slowly. In 1936, Congress ordered the Army Corps of Engineers to conduct a survey study of the problem. Although that report indicated a federal project was not economically justified, lawmakers ordered the issue restudied in 1951.

After a series of funding delays, the survey was finally completed in the mid-1960s, concluding that a flood-control project should be built. In 1970, Congress approved construction. Plans called for levees along the river banks from Murray Road on the eastern side of the valley to an area called “the narrows” west of the airport.

Nonetheless, money for detailed design work was not authorized by lawmakers until 1976. By then, several sweeping environmental regulations had been approved by Congress, pushing new roadblocks in front of the project.

In particular, officials at the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and other regulatory agencies were troubled because the water project would damage environmentally rich habitat that hosted numerous birds and animals.

Eager to appease such concerns, the Army Corps of Engineers agreed to alter the project. The revised proposal called for a three-mile stretch of the river between Douglas Drive and the narrows to be contained by a single rock levee on its southern edge. With only one barrier, the river waters could rise up onto the undeveloped north bank, which would remain in a more natural state.

While the single-levee plan won the favor of city officials, it irked Deutsch.

The electronics magnate owns about 350 acres just north of the San Luis Rey that he hopes to develop with industrial buildings and houses. If the single-levee proposal was built, however, he stood to lose about 80 of those acres. Calling it “an environmentalist land grab,” Deutsch launched his crusade against the federal water project.

During recent years, Deutsch has traveled to Washington many times to testify against the federal proposal, calling it a waste of taxpayers’ money and arguing that his own flood-control project could be completed at a fraction of the cost. Many officials, among them Congressman Packard, say Deutsch’s barrage was a key factor that helped shoot down the project year after year.

Others, meanwhile, have looked elsewhere, pointing to Packard as partly to blame for the project’s failure in Washington.

Until 1983, the congressman owned--along with his brothers and two other partners--more than 200 acres on the river’s northern bank. That year the group sold the land to a developer, but Packard still holds a trust deed on the property. Fearing a perceived conflict of interest, Packard has refrained from voting on the water project each step of the way. Nonetheless, the congressman says he has worked hard to convince colleagues to support it.

But some Oceanside officials and residents question how much of an effort Packard has made on behalf of the key flood-control proposal.

“As far as I’m concerned, Packard has been useless in helping us,” groused Marioncelli.

“He hasn’t lobbied too hard to get us what we need here,” Jakovac said, adding that she feels Packard never truly wanted a single-levee flood system.

Packard’s Democratic opponent in the November election, Joe Chirra, also has jumped on the issue. “This is just another example of Ron Packard’s ineffective representation of the people of this district,” Chirra said, stressing that he feels his opponent has “a glaring conflict of interest that works to the disservice of his constituents.”

While Packard acknowledges that he prefers a double-levee flood system from an engineering standpoint, the congressman insists he made every effort possible to elbow the federal single-levee project through Congress.

“I couldn’t have pushed it any differently or any better than I did,” Packard said. “Even though I couldn’t vote on it, everyone involved knew I was anxious to see it move forward.”

Bagley agreed, saying he felt the federal plan has been hurt primarily because of recent fiscal belt-tightening in Washington. And that mood isn’t likely to change any time soon, he noted.

“We’re going to have to take a good hard look at it,” Bagley said. “I think we’ll have to face the fact that we’re going to get a double levee or we’re going to get nothing.”

Such words please Alex Deutsch no end. For him, the battle over the flood-control issue has “become a point of honor,” one city official said.

In 1980, Deutsch’s electronics plant was flooded by three feet of river water, causing more than $2 million in damage. Figuring he had waited long enough for elected officials to act, Deutsch took matters into his own hands, hiring construction crews to build an earthen dike around his 22-acre plant site.

Then Deutsch went even further, placing riprap boulders along both sides of the river near his property, at times without the benefit of the required federal permits.

With levees on more than a mile of the river, Deutsch figures private property owners along the San Luis Rey have a good jump on a unified flood-control project. All that remains to be done, he contends, is improve some sections of the levees and extend the rock walls along those stretches of the river that are unprotected.

Deutsch insists that many riverfront property owners have agreed to go along with the plan. Those who haven’t can be convinced “if they have anything bigger than a peanut for a brain,” Deutsch said.

Despite such assessments, the skepticism remains.

Marioncelli said Deutsch’s solution ignores key aspects of the complex flood-control problem. In particular, Marioncelli points to the narrows area. The federal plan calls for purchase of the narrows--a steep canyon that clogs the river’s flow like the neck of a bottle--and extensive clearing of the sand bars that build up.

While Deutsch contends the tight stretch in the river has essentially been cleared and needs now only to be maintained, Marioncelli feels the more dramatic measures called for under the federal plan will be necessary.

Other opponents say Deutsch has failed to recognize that regulatory agencies are no more likely to embrace his privately funded double-levee plan than they did the similar proposal pushed by the Army Corps of Engineers’ during the 1960s and ‘70s.

“We’d love to build a double levee, but it just is not workable under today’s regulations,” said Dave Weaver, a project manager for the Corps of Engineers.

Moreover, among the birds that thrive in the lush vegetation growing along the river is the least Bell’s vireo, a small, gray songbird that is on the federal endangered species list. Because of that designation, wildlife officials are expected to be particularly cautious before granting approval for any large construction job in the San Luis Rey.

Environmental concerns, Deutsch maintains, would be eased under his proposal by allowing extensive stands of willows and other vegetation to remain in the riverbed. Instead of clearing the entire width of the 400-foot channel, only a 200-foot-wide pilot channel would be cleared, leaving 100 feet on either side to native trees and plants.

Other opponents, however, worry that a private project could pose a danger to human residents. Melba Bishop, a former councilwoman and longtime foe of Deutsch, argues that the federal plan would provide better protection while offering accountability if a problem occurs.

“If the city allows a piecemeal construction of flood control by this developer and that developer and there is a failure of the system, the city is left holding the bag and, ultimately, that falls on the taxpayers,” she said.

Finally, critics suggest that Deutsch’s rock levees are improperly engineered to handle the river, which they say can scour up to 20 feet below the channel bottom during peak flows. Deutsch’s levees now extend only about five feet below the river’s sandy floor.

Deutsch counters that under his plans, the existing levees on his property and elsewhere would be adequately bolstered to protect against 100-year floods. Where necessary, the foot of the structures would be extended to the required depths, he said.

While such debate rages on, residents like Jakovac continue to wait for something to be done. Like many others, she’s not optimistic.

“It’ll take a disaster before the federal government or anyone else listens to us,” she said. “We’ll have to be knee-deep before they do anything.”