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HomeMy WebLinkAbout2005 10-18 Pre Meridian City Pre-Council Meetina October 18. 2005 The Meridian City Pre-Council meeting was called to order at 6:30 P.M. on Tuesday, October 18, 2005 by Council President Shaun Wardle. Members Present: Mayor Tammy de Weerd, Keith Bird, Shaun Wardle, Charlie Rountree and Christine Donnell. Staff Present: Anna Canning, Ted Baird, Bill Musser, Len Grady, Kenny Bowers and Will Berg. Item 1. Roll-call Attendance: Roll call. X Shaun Wardle X Charlie Rountree X X Christine Donnell X Keith Bird Mayor Tammy de Weerd Item 2. Adoption of the Agenda: Bird: Mr. President. Wardle: Mr. Bird. Bird: I move we adopt the agenda as published. Donnell: Second. Wardle: It's been moved and seconded to adopt the agenda as published. All in favor? ALL AYES. MOTION CARRIED. Item 3. Presentation to Discuss Preliminary Findings and Seek Public Involvement in the Planning Process for the All Hazards Mitigation Plan for Ada County with Toby Brown from Northwest Management, Inc.: Wardle: Toby if you would step to the podium. Brown: Weill wanted to thank you all for inviting me tonight. Just wanted to give a fairly brief about 20 minute overview of what the county is doing in regards to some All Hazards Mitigation Planning which incorporates the communities municipalities within the county as well. What we are doing here is called the All Meridian City Pre-Council Meeting October 18, 2005 Page 2 of 9 Hazard Mitigation Plan. I'm Toby Brown and this is my assistant Tyler, he's pushing the button on the slide show here to make sure we move along. What we are talking about with All Hazard Mitigation Planning is just like it states there, which is just trying to reduce or eliminate long-term risk to life and property from a variety of hazard events. Now the reason we are doing this - and take a look at what we can do in regards to policies, actions and tools to help do this. So were not just looking at asking people for money for new equipment. What we can do ourselves in regards to policies and actions in our own communities within the county to help prepare us for these things. Why we're doing this? As with many things it comes down to FEMA money and grant money. What this is is after the 1 980's and 1 990's which general federal response to hazards was always coming in afterwards and cleaning up the mess like we're doing down in New Orleans right now and paying for it. The stitch in time saves nine, those quite old fashioned comments that we have that we don't think about anymore which is sometimes a little bit of money in advanced to get things set up to save a lot of problems downstream as we like to say. So what FEMA has is several grant systems, one of which is the pre disaster mitigation grant and the other is the hazard mitigation grant and to be eligible for these grants funding counties have to have - is to put these together, every county in the country is required to have one to be eligible for these grants and it also makes you eligible for increase in funding if a disaster hits your county or area or city. So the hazards that we're taking a look at in this plan is wildfire, flooding, earthquakes and landslides and serve weather. We're doing this planning for a three county region, Elmore, Canyon and Ada County. We're actually contracted to the southwest RC and D, Bill Moore, is actually our contractor over sight and we are working with each county to form these policies. What we are doing is just a phase one just a hazard profile, where things fall out on a chart. For instance flooding and wildfires, historic impacted event, you've been impacted by wildfires and flooding in the past, frequency of occurrence happens quite often comes out in the high priority area. Say terrorism events, really haven't had historic impact of events but low frequency (inaudible) falls down here. In terms of 9 11 there's other issues involved with that now but we're not looking at terrorism. What we are looking at again is wildfire, landslides, flooding, sever weather and earthquakes. This was an article out of the Statesman just this September 2151 about Boise weather (inaudible) we were ranked second as the safest weather city, not Boise but the Boise area. So you see these kinds of articles in the paper and they make us think that hey this is what happens in New Orleans happens other places, doesn't effect us here. But if we look a little farther back in the record we do have fires in the foothills that affect us. Smoke fire (inaudible). We have flooding just down by Eagle and notice the first word here, unprepared for rising waters. These things happen even though we have the second nicest weather in the nation. These things still come up and affect us and are impacting us constantly. Not just if you live along the river, farther away, Park Center Road, it can affect transportation our infrastructure. As you watch what happened in New Orleans, one of the big things they talked about was all the Meridian City Pre-Council Meeting October 18, 2005 Page 3 of 9 infrastructure wiped out. You saw the interstates under the water and everything else. You couldn't get goods in, you couldn't get goods out. Floods effect more of the people that are build out of the flood zones. And with the Boise River running through here that's our major north south corridors. So if we loose those a lot of our water lines run across those bridges as well that would be compromised. Everyone says well we have dams; dams will stop the flooding of the Boise River. No those damns are there for a variety of reasons, one is flood control but they will not stop all floods or stop large floods. This is an article from the Statesman I believe it was in '98; I don't have the date right on there. But it talks about how that would occur and it talks about how the Bureau of Reclamation manages those damns and that flooding is possible even with the damns there. We've had flooding on the Boise since the damns have been put in. Weather, this was just in August 4th 2000, tornados, hail, lightning storm the valley. Fires, fell trees, power outages (inaudible) residents. One of the most common questions I asked of various communities and municipalities are how would you function for a week without electricity? How would you pump fuel for your emergency response vehicles? What would you do with your wellheads? Do they have alternative power? How many lift stations Meridian has? De Weerd: They don't like lift stations. Brown: There are 12 of them. As I understand only five have alternative generators. So if you lose power for awhile, you are going to have sections of town that has people are still using water, because you have big tanks water flowing in, you are could have sewer backing up in sections of town. What can cause powers to go out? Windstorms, flooding, electricity an earthquake. How would your city government function? How would your emergency function? All of these things are things that we don't think about as much now days because we are so used to having an electrical grid operate yet all these hazards can easily affect that. Speaking of earthquakes, here's Ada County right here, statewide we rank out as the high risk and a little bit is a moderate risk down to the South. This is based on underlined geology, the number of fault lines that run through the county. These are earthquakes that have happened that are higher than a 4.0 on the Richter Sale since 1996, most of them up towards the central part of the state over towards Yellowstone. Half of them with a fair frequency. You also have a paper just a couple weeks ago Cascade having earthquake issues. Those weren't felt down here and even though earthquakes aren't felt or right here in the county. Here's an earthquake that happened on July 25th centered in Dillon Montana it was a 5.6 on the Richter Scale. All these blue areas are various telephone zones where people had called in and said they felt the earthquake. All the way down here to Boise and Meridian. If you move to the next slide, people from Meridian called in saying that felt this earthquake from this zip code. 366 miles away from the earthquake epicenter, it was felt here in Meridian. Now that epicenter had been closer back to lets say the Challis quake when those were felt, back in 83, people remember those? They had large impacts. Not necessarily in this county but adjacent counties, there's a lot of Meridian City Pre-Council Meeting October 18, 2005 Page 4 of 9 wells stopped functioning after that earthquake. It affected their water supply. Lets go back to the previous slide. The other thing people forget is 1916 Boise was hit by an earthquake that dropped chimney's ruptured their gas mains, damaged the flow of (inaudible) irrigation ditches. This area has seen these kind of earthquakes, it's been awhile but they happen. You know New Orleans had never been hit directly by a hurricane before. Everybody said one day it could happen. We've been hit by earthquakes here we are in fault zones we have the damage here it can happen. Ok, so the FEMA plan. This is just what the FEMA plan requires; it requires adoption by local governments, county and city. When this plan is coming to (inaudible) we will come to the city asking the city to adopt the plan. We are meeting tomorrow morning at 9 am for a committee draft of the plan. We will go through two committee drafts of the plan. With a committee and members of your staff are on that committee. We will see it, review it, and add additional input. Will then come out with a public review period of that plan. When that public review period happens we'll bring a copy to the city for you all to review and look at. Give us your comments. After that what we do is go to the County Commissioners, who then say this looks complete, we are fairly comfortable with it and we send it to FEMA for what they call a pre-adoption review. No one's formally adopted it yet. They look over the whole plan to make sure it meets their requirements. Kind of a pre-grade. They send the plan back with any comments they have, we then incorporate those, go back to the committee, go back to the communities and say here it is, our final plan, what do you think? Any additions or tweaks? (Inaudible) looked at it with the overall information that is in there and ask you for formal adoption. When you formally adopt it, the city will get a letter saying you are eligible and your staff and departments are eligible to apply for these pre-disaster mitigation grants. Most of these grants are 75 I 25 matches. They could help to pay for a lot of things in infrastructure preparedness in getting your communities ready. So, multi (inaudible) planning, we identify all these hazards. We are going to look at that briefly here in a few minutes. We document the planning process, assess vulnerabilities; put all of these things into the plan, including monitoring the value and updating the plan in five year cycles, so they expect the cities to look at them on a five year basis, as well as a yearly basis. Implement through existing programs. This administration is very firm in that they don't want to see any knew divisions created and new employees and new kinds of things. They want to keep the structure that is there, not add any new overhead and of course, public involvement, which is why we held (inaudible) meetings around the county, which is why I am here tonight talking to you and keeping up with the public. On the committee are all these various departments and works and offices, along with Forest Service, BlM, Southwest Idaho RCND, and parks departments. We have invited everyone in the county who we felt had a stake in this and sit on the committee and provide comments. Public involvement; we did a public mail survey. We have gotten back 103 or 104 surveys that are incorporated in the plan. We asked a series of questions to people. How they have been affected? Meridian City Pre-Council Meeting October 18, 2005 Page 5 of 9 What their preparedness is at a personal level. We add those in and it is a good educational tool. We did public meetings around the county. We did five meetings, plus we are doing this one here today. Of course, the public will have a chance to review the draft plan when it comes out. I want to stress it's just a draft, not a final. The chance for the public to give comments, as well as comments here today; afterwards the questions, we will get that included and answer questions and put that all into the plan. Treatment categories. What we are looking at is just people and structures; policy at the county level. What are we doing in regards to preparedness and policy, be it Planning and Zoning. Planning and Zoning, reducing risks to people and structures. What can we do for infrastructure protection? Power lines, roads and bridges, gas and water lines or watersheds or well beds. Emergency resources and capabilities. Does the Fire Department have what they need to respond? Do we have the communication systems and radios? Do we have the equipment to the vehicles? Do we have fuel storage that we can run if there is no power? Those are the things that we are looking at with these resource capabilities. Federal, state and local land management recommendations. This is usually more pertinent to counties that have a higher federal or state presence of ownership in the county. Would they have primary access roads running through Forest Service land? And making sure Forest Service helps maintain those corridors. We really don't have too many of those kinds of issues here in Ada County. So, just some large scale maps - I have some paper ones of these and they are kind of hard to see so we are just going to whip through - some of what we review at the committee levels, of course, are just a high altitude aerial photography map. Just an ownership map of the county. Green is Boise. Garden City, Star, Meridian is here. It's a little hard to see with these colors. Blue, of course, is state lands; yellow is BLM. This is the map that was on the wall. We have a blow-up by each community. This is a map showing your basic hazards in the county. The blue are the FEMA flood zones, the flood rate insurance maps that have probably heard something about and people will have to usually if they are getting a loan, get flood insurance for. These that have been highlighted in blue is the Boise River. Again, here is the Meridian in this area along Ten Mile Creek coming through the area. It is kind of hard to see at this scale - we will blow it up closer. The red areas are landslide prone landscapes, which are soils of geological where you can expect slides to happen, either small or large. Boise foothills, of course, people in the past who have lived here remember the fires in the '50's and the slides that happened - the mudslides afterwards in those issues. Doug is well aware of the issues that he has along the foothills here as people build homes and come through. There are some breaks here along the old river edges that provide some issues with small landslide potential and it's hard to see on this map, but a little closer in you will see these yellow lines and these green and orange lines - those are all the fault lines that run through the county. This yellow line is the Trans Challis Fault Line, this is the earthquake line that slipped in '83 where the two boys got killed in Challis, Idaho. That fault line runs right into this county; runs right through the foothills. That is an active fault line. Meridian City Pre~Councii Meeting October 18, 2005 Page 6 of 9 These other fault lines are classified as being in the 130,000-year range, which geologically is considered an active fault line. Some of them are categorized as 1.6 million years. Those are considered low potential, medium to low potential and there is a 16 million year old fault lines, those are pretty much normal fault lines, not an issue. Fire prone landscapes - just a coloration map - yellow is kind of low impact for wild land fires, increased from orange to red of your higher impacts, just as we have seen in the past Boise foothills is some of your highest areas that are prone to burn, down around Meridian and in this area of course with the fields and agricultural burn and what we have done with the houses it's just not an issue for wild land fires and fire burning. We have all communities here - since we are in Boise and when I have time for question and answer we are just going to move ahead to the Meridian blowups, so here is Eagle, Star and Meridian. So, you can see some of these stripe lines coming right through the community. Those are our older fault lines. The orange ones here are 1.6 million year old fault lines, so they are not considered high, but they are considered kind of a medium to low. The green ones of course are the 16 million year old fault lines, so those are fairly low, not a big issue with those. Of course, the blue are your flood zones that run through the county and through Meridian. So, don't really have too much regards to soil movement and landslides just here along the breaks as you come down. Here is (inaudible). So, I have got a paper map that was on the wall, you could throw it back up so it is a little bit easier to look at sometimes. But, these are some of your issues. So, what I would like to call this preparedness is building the arc. What we are looking at is infrastructure preparedness, infrastructure resilience. This is not a disaster response plan. This is not who is going to go rescue whom from where. This isn't how we are going to respond. It's building the arc. It's God told Noah it's going to flood, get ready go build it. He didn't tell him who was going to be in charge of the arc, Noah or his wife - De Weerd: Or who gets on it. Brown: Or who gets on it or who is going to go down into the hole and shovel it out. That is the response plan. It's who is going to do it. I love this picture, but I like to think that the owner of this boat lived over here across the lake on the hillside and then when the fire started coming down the hill, they got into the boat and got the heck out of dodge. But, what did that take? It took having a boat. It took having a motor. It took having gas in that motor. It took knowing that it would run and how to run it. That's infrastructure preparedness, infrastructure results. That is building the arc. That is kind of what we are looking at, at a carry level and (inaudible---------). That is the presentation I had. Any questions, comments, concerns, ideas? Wardle: Council, any initial questions? Rountree: Mr. President. Meridian City Pre~Councii Meeting October 18, 2005 Page 7 of 9 Wardle: Mr. Rountree. Rountree: I am curious who our representatives are on the committee? De Weerd: John Shawcroft. Rountree: Yeah, John? Okay. Brown: And Anna gets invited and she has been on the list and has seen quite a few copies. We have been in touch with your Public Works, not land but some underneath them who helped me out one afternoon running through some things - your water system and sewer systems, so they all have been active. Rountree: Very good. Brown: Ken has been very active. Kenny has been very active when we started last year with the fire plan. Rountree: And remind me again the timeline. Brown: Tomorrow we are reviewing the first committee draft of the plan. We expect to have that out to committee review until November ¡th or the 13th. We will set a date tomorrow and we will then work on a second committee draft and incorporate all the committee comments and then we will come out with a public draft, hopefully sometime around mid-November so it will be available for public review for about a month from mid-November to mid-December. So, hopefully sometime after that we will be sending it off to FEMA, so hopefully - they have been a little slow with their reviews lately, most of their crews are down in the South, but we hope by January to have word back from FEMA and be able to come back to the cities and to the county with a plan ready for adoption. Rountree: Very good. De Weerd: Mr. Chairman. Wardle: Madame Mayor. De Weerd: The building, (inaudible) is more in minimizing that hazard. Brown: Minimizing the impacts. We are not saying we are going to stop them from happening. We are not saying we are going to stop fires from burning. We are not saying we are going to start earthquakes from having an impact, but how fast can the cities respond, can the county respond? How fast can we can back on our feet? How can we operate during that time period? Meridian City Pre-Council Meeting October 18, 2005 Page 8 of 9 De Weerd: So, but you said it's not a response plan, per se? Brown: Correct. De Weerd: It's maybe additional things if you are building in the flood plains things to do to help minimize the impacts and those kinds of things? Brown: Correct. De Weerd: Okay. Brown: So that when these things happen you are able to respond. Wardle: Thank you. Council, anything further? Bird: I have nothing. Wardle: Toby, I would like to thank you for bringing this to us and we look forward to seeing that draft out of the committee and any further comments or public comments? Is this a hearing that you would like me to open up to the audience? Brown: Yeah. Wardle: We will take this opportunity to take any additional comments on our item for the preliminary findings for the all-hazardous mitigation plan for Ada County. If anyone would like to comment, please step forward. Thank you and Council, any additional comments we can funnel through the Mayor's Office and Mayor would you like us to get those to your office or to Kenny directly? De Weerd: They can come through my office and we will get them to Kenny. Is that okay Kenny? Wardle: Thank you very much. All right Council that brings us to the end of our appointed agenda. I would entertain a motion to adjourn. Donnell: So moved. Rountree: Second. Wardle: It's been moved and seconded to adjourn. All in favor? ALL AYES. MOTION CARRIED. Meridian City Pre-Council Meeting October 18, 2005 Page 9 of 9 MEETING ADJOURNED AT 6:55 P.M. (TAPE ON FILE OF THESE PROCEEDINGS) APPROVED: I! / ZZ-¡ ¿;Ç" DATE APPROVED