Mayor Adrian Fenty’s administration has agreed to pay $2.5 million to accelerate construction of the 17th Street levee, it was announced Wednesday.
Fenty hopes the plan will keep downtown insurance premiums from spiking in the wake of a new federal plan that drastically widened D.C.’s flood plain.
In a news release, Fenty couched the public funding as “a partnership” with the Army Corps of Engineers and the Federal Emergency Management Agency and promised to meet with those agencies within 30 days to draw up a plan to repair the levee.
Although short on specifics, Wednesday’s plan avoids further confrontation with the federal government. As first reported by The Examiner in February, FEMA expanded D.C.’s flood plain in a new map, over the objections of businesses and homeowners who complained that they would be subject to higher insurance rates and costly new anti-flood regulations.
But FEMA said that D.C.’s 70-year-old levee system had critical weaknesses — including a gap at 17th Street near Constitution Avenue — that exposed the nation’s front yard to catastrophic flooding.
D.C. Councilman Phil Mendelson, D-at large, said the city had to do something to address federal flood concerns, but he said he wasn’t sure that the mayor had thought out Wednesday’s proposal.
“Waiting around for the federal government to do something might not be productive,” Mendelson said. “Where the mayor is going to get the money, I don’t know.”
The city is facing a nearly $100 million budget deficit this year, and Fenty has promised to curb public spending.
The corps had proposed a concrete sill to shore up the 17th Street levee but said it didn’t have the money to start construction.
William McClain, a professor at the University of the District of Columbia law school, said that FEMA was “burned by what happened in New Orleans” and wasn’t about to risk another disaster to a major American city.
“I would never find myself saying I have any sympathy for FEMA or the Army Corps,” McClain said. “They’ve been disgraceful. But that flood plain downtown — that’s the Lincoln Memorial and the Mall. If all that was lost or damaged, you can imagine the recriminations.”
