By Colton Dodgson

The Chronicle

The process for the Chehalis River Basin Flood Authority to find local projects to fund for the 2021-2023 biennium is set to get started later this month.

The deadline to submit is scheduled for 5 p.m. July 8. All proposals need to be filed with Scott Boettcher, a member of the Chehalis River Basin Flood Authority’s staff.

On July 16, the flood authority will review the projects, before the Chehalis Basin Board conducts its review on August 6 and the flood authority approves its recommendations to the board on September 17, according to the flood authority’s schedule.

Boettcher said this is the fifth time the local projects evaluation process has happened, having gone through four biennia — or eight years — of recommending projects to receive funding from the state legislature.

“Initially, in our early years, most of the local projects seemed to be about protecting local infrastructure, infrastructure that would be needed post-catastrophic flood,” Boettcher said. “Increasingly, we’re approaching projects that are bigger in their geographic scale and have a mixture of flood protection and habitat benefit.”

In the past, Boettcher said projects that focused on protecting public investments, such as wells and wastewater treatment plants, from the impacts of flooding were emphasized. Now, projects such as meander placement in China Creek, a similar project in Aberdeen on Fry Creek, and flood protection on Keys Road in Grays Harbor were all funded for the current biennium.

“I think the trend is to increasingly move towards more of those broader scale, multi-benefit kinds of projects,” Boettcher said.

In terms of funding for the projects, Boettcher said local projects can cost anywhere from $700,000 to $3-$5 million, funded over multiple years.

He continued by saying between 10 and 15 project proposals are submitted from communities around the Chehalis Basin are submitted during each review process. Some of the proposals are centered around a community’s desire to research a particular issue in an effort to further understand the problem and any possible solutions.

“After a study, we’ll fund a kind of design phase, let’s design it and get it permitted, then lastly we’ll fund a construction phase,” Boettcher said. “Sometimes, we can fund a study and a design together, or sometimes we might fund a design and a project together.”

According to Boettcher, the flood authority is now asking communities to not only submit project proposals, but to be thinking ahead to the future and assessing how big the local project need will be then.

He said it’s new for the flood authority to ask for that forward-thinking input during this process.

“We reach out and say give us your ideas, people give us their ideas for the next two years, but I can’t really tell you what’s beyond that,” Boettcher said. “So, we’re asking communities to help us think strategically about what’s the future demand for this program.”

An important aspect of the process is making sure the impact of a project doesn’t extend to negatively affecting a different community. Boettcher said the flood authority doesn’t want to fund a project to harm another group.

He also pointed to the long-term nature of some of the Chehalis Basin Board’s proposed solutions, such as a water retention facility near Pe Ell, and the value of projects that are focused on assisting the basin in the short tem.

“In the meanwhile, we will have more floods,” Boettcher said. “It’s important that we have taken measures to help protect our communities in those intervening years before the full strategy plays itself out into implementation. These projects are an essential ingredient in the big mix.”

For more information or to propose a project go to: www.ezview.wa.gov/site/alias——1492/37642/2021-23-local-projects-recruitment-process.aspx.