Fillmore’s Decision Is Plain Wrong

The Fillmore City Council is on the side of developers and addicted to their money. The public is kept out of the process. There is a large group of the council’s constituents who consider its decision shortsighted.

It recently agreed to withdraw the city’s name from a county lawsuit aimed at halting the giant Newhall Ranch project in exchange for $300,000 from the developer. This financial settlement has been accepted to resolve the city’s concerns about traffic increases from the proposed 21,000-unit development, straddling the Santa Clara River at the county line 13 miles to the east. The payoff is to pay for traffic lights at three intersections on Highway 126.

A few traffic lights? It’s the Santa Clara River watershed, City Council!

The Santa Clara River is the last free-flowing river in Southern California. Fillmore has grown in the flood plain at the confluence of Sespe Creek and the Santa Clara. The Santa Clara and Sespe Creek are steeply sloped torrential “braided” streams carrying sediment to the sea from the mountains north and south of the Santa Clara. Braided streams are unruly “bad flooders.” At high flood stages there is one way to deal with them: Get out of the way!

To get an idea of the erosive powers of the Santa Clara, at the Fillmore sewage disposal plant in February 1998 the [anti-erosion rock breakwaters] were increased, under emergency conditions, from five tons (washed away) to 13.5 tons. That’s about as large a rock as can be placed.

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Since the 1980s, Fillmore has protected the flood plain on the east and north banks of the Sespe Creek-Santa Clara River with levees and has built (or is building) housing in the levee protected areas for up to a 100-year flood.

These levees are subject to failure or overtopping during larger floods. The sediment on which these levees are founded has potential for liquefaction during earthquakes.

Storm water management in upstream areas must avoid aggravating downstream flood problems in high hazard flood plains. The Newhall Ranch development is a poster child of bad land use decision-making that will act as a noose around the throat of the Santa Clara River Valley, causing mischief downstream.

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, after tracking floods for 70 years, has instituted a policy of paying people to move out of flood plains. It has rejected levees as undependable flood protection and prefers to restore the flood plain to its natural condition.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency and the state of California have discussed similar philosophies. California developers have resisted translating this philosophy into law both at the state and federal level.

The Newhall Land & Farming Co. proposes building a large sewage disposal plant on the north flood plain of the Santa Clara River, two bridges, concrete fill in adjacent drainage areas, “natural-looking” buried riprap or soil-cement riverbank stabilizers, and paving for 21,000 residences. This is the first step in concreting the Santa Clara River over in the 100-year flood plain.

Once the properties are built, you’d have to protect them from the river, under emergency conditions. The end result would be a Los Angeles River type of concrete channel. There is now a movement to restore sections of the Los Angeles River to their natural state.

The Newhall Ranch development has serious problems with water supply and depletion of the downstream aquifer on which the agricultural and domestic water supply of Ventura County relies.

In March 1998, we who live in the Santa Clara Valley memorialized the 70th anniversary of the St. Francis Dam disaster. The failure of the dam caused a flood wave to course down the valley 50 miles to the sea in 5 1/2 hours. About 450 people perished or were left missing. We now have 17 times the storage of the St. Francis Dam in four dams, in the seismically active upper watershed of the Santa Clara River. Mandatory releases of flow from these dams augmented the Santa Clara River flood in February 1998.

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Levee failures in California’s Central Valley in the winter of 1997-98 were caused by a similar chain of events. It does not require an upstream dam failure for a downstream area to experience augmented flooding.

The Newhall Ranch development is too large to be approved as a unit. Problems of water supply and downstream flood hazard loom in the future for the city of Fillmore, which has made decisions to protect people and property by an extensive levee system. This challenge to the Santa Clara River and Sespe Creek using 100-year flood protection, with Newhall Ranch, lurking in the background, is imprudent.

Remember, when you challenge Nature, “Nature bats last.”