Levee study findings revealed

COEUR d'ALENE - Changes to Coeur d'Alene's Rosenberry Drive flood levee were the main topic in a joint meeting of leaders of North Idaho College and the city Thursday night.

Coeur d'Alene City Engineer Gordon Dobler presented the findings of a recent study that has been done on the flood control levee, and outlined some of the issues that will have to be addressed in order to certify the facility.

"So where are we at now? We completed our assessment of the trees and vegetation," Dobler told the NIC Board of Trustees and the city council. "We inventoried over 1,000 trees, and somewhere around 350 of them will have to be removed because they are either dead or dying."

About 100 of those "trees" are actually bushes, he clarified. Dobler's report was considered good news compared to the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers' order to remove them all two years ago.

The Corps of Engineers began the process of re-certifying levees nationwide after Hurricane Katrina destroyed the flood protection levee around New Orleans in 2005.

When the Corps finally began inspecting the flood protection levee around North Idaho College and the Fort Grounds neighborhood, the agency ordered the removal of all the trees growing out of the levee, claiming the roots compromised the integrity of the structure.

But halfway through the Corps' process in Coeur d'Alene, the agency decided get out of the levee certification process nationwide and placed that burden on local governments. Cities are now required to hire third-party engineering firms to certify their flood control systems.

Ruen Yeager & Associates has the contract to do that for the Coeur d'Alene levee, which is commonly referred to as the Dike Road.

The city of Coeur d'Alene and NIC split the bill on the $500,000 study that will be used in the process. That study was designed to identify the deficiencies in the structure, and now the city is developing a proposal to address those deficiencies.

The proposal will be sent, as part of Ruen Yeager & Associates certification process, to the Corps next month for approval. Dobler said he expects that approval process to wrap up sometime this fall.

If the plan is approved, he said repairs and tree removal should begin in the spring of 2015.

Aside from the tree removal, which will cost "a few hundred thousand dollars," the city is going to have to deal with parking on the Dike Road, because automobiles are causing erosion of the levee structure.

"The issue of parking on the levee was in the Army Corps evaluation of the levy," Dobler said. "When cars park off the asphalt, you start to get deterioration on the top of the dike, and that has to be fixed."

The city's Dike Road ad-hoc committee started discussing that issue at its last meeting. The committee is considering three options: Continue the parallel parking and add curbs and a sidewalk on the NIC side of the road, modify the dike to add diagonal parking, or finally ban parking altogether.

Dobler said currently there is enough room for 127 parallel parking spaces on the Dike Road, and diagonal parking could triple that number.

But there are trade-offs and costs associated with each of the options. Diagonal parking would require widening the dike and removing some additional trees. The parallel parking would require curbs and a sidewalk and banning parking obviously would be controversial.

NIC Trustee Judy Meyer asked if there was a way to limit the diagonal parking to preserve more trees.

"It doesn't have to be diagonal anywhere, or we can do a mix. My sense of it is that diagonal parking will only be incrementally more expensive than parallel parking because of the sidewalk issue and you don't have to have the sidewalk with diagonal parking," Dobler said. "We will be looking at all of that."

Paying for the improvements was also discussed.

"What is all this going to cost and who is going to pay for it?" asked Councilman Ron Edinger.

"We will know the cost in the next few months, and the second part of your question, you get to answer that one," Dobler responded.

Dobler said the city is looking at possibly forming a Local Improvement District in the Fort Grounds neighborhood because residents there benefit from the Dike certification, but the city could also consider a possible bond levee to pay for it all.

"The dike improvements are for the protected zone," he said. "That was the logic."

Ultimately the council will have to make that decision and NIC officials asked to be a part of that decision-making process.

In other business, the group discussed how NIC fits into the master planning process for the "Four Corners area," how NIC could work to resolve enforcement issues associated with guns on campus, how they could collaborate on additional gymnasium space, and NIC's priorities for training the regional workforce.