By Rob Moritz
Arkansas News Bureau
LITTLE ROCK — When excessive rainfall caused a breach in the old Skaggs Ferry levee system along the Black River in late March 2008, hundreds of acres of farmland upstream from Pocahontas flooded.
Randolph County Judge David Jansen initially thought it was the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers’ responsibility to fix the break, but he soon determined that a levee district board was in charge of maintaining the eight-mile stretch of levee along the Lawrence and Randolph county line.
Jansen also learned that the board no longer existed.
“In the late 1960s or early 70s, the board members, they got tired of getting chewed out, basically, by the Corps of Engineers for not maintaining or operating the levee district, so they just quit,” he said.
Worried that the same scenario could play out across the state, with disastrous results, the Legislature this year adopted legislation requiring an accounting of the status and funding of each levee district in every county.
The assessment is part of a larger effort to shore up the state’s earthen dams, some of which officials believe potentially pose a threat.
A 2008 study presented to lawmakers this spring concluded that without repairs, many levees, particularly in northern and eastern Arkansas, could fail during heavy rains, resulting in catastrophic flooding. The finding is particularly disturbing with many areas of the state experiencing record rainfall this year.
To address Jansen’s problem in Randolph County, Rep. David Cook, D-Williford, sponsored legislation during this year’s legislative session that created a new board to oversee the levee district and renamed it the Running Water Levee District.
However, the measure did not address the larger question of how many more old levee districts around the state have dissolved and who is responsible for the abandoned levees.
“If it’s not a levee we operate or maintain, there’s not a whole lot we can do,” said Elmo Webb, levee safety program manager for the Corps of Engineers’ Little Rock District.
The district, along with districts in Memphis, Tenn., and Vicksburg, Miss., are responsible for inspecting more than 100 levees in Arkansas. But a number of small levees across state are unaccounted for, Webb said, because they are supposed to be maintained and operated by districts or were built privately.
“There are many levee districts across the state that are very active,” said Sen. Robert Thompson, D-Paragould. “Some of them are not and they are ticking time bombs. (Breaks) could happen again, with the all the rain we’ve been having.”
Landowners and farmers are concerned, “because if we had a bad flood it would effect everyone,” Rep. Johnny Hoyt, D-Morrilton, added.
At the request of the Arkansas County Judges Association, Thompson sponsored separate legislation this year designed to account for each of the small levee districts across the state that are not part of the Corps of Engineers system, and to determine who is on their boards.
Hoyt was the House sponsor of the bill that became Act 403 of 2009.
Under the measure, each levee, drainage, irrigation, watershed or river improvement districts are required to file a survey with their county clerk or county court by the end of this year.
The report is to include, among other things, the name of the district, the date the district was formed, the statutory or other legal authority under which the district was formed, a description of the district’s boundaries and a map of the district, and the names and addresses of the district’s directors and officers.
The district must also provide the clerk or county clerk with the time, date and location of the district board’s next meeting.
The district must update the information every year.
“We’re doing this to get a handle on what is going on,” Hoyt said. “We’re concerned about what has happened to some of these old levees.”
Some are in disrepair and the federal government does not want to give providing the funding to fix them, Hoyt said.
“We’ve got to find out what we have, how much damage they are in, before we can just jump in as a state,” he said. “The state can’t really take care of them either, but we might be able to, possibly through an organization like (Arkansas Natural Resources Commission), go back and request grants to get them fixed that way.”
The 2008 study found that an inventory of levees and levee districts could not be obtained, in part because Arkansas Code prohibits the Arkansas Natural Resources Commission from requiring reports from levee districts.
City and county officials also have no authority over levee districts, even when levees within the district may affect the residents of the city or county, state auditor John Spencer recently told the Legislative Joint Auditing Committee.
The report said levees in local levee districts, but not part of the federal levee program run by Corps of Engineers, are monitored only by the board of the local levee district.
The audit suggested the Legislature consider changing state law to give the commission more authority to ensure levees are properly maintained.
It recommended revising state laws to require the commission to inventory levees and levee district, develop procedures to approve the construction of any new levees and standardize levee maintenance and inspections.
Auditors also recommended the state mandate ANRC to develop uniform reporting requirements for levee financial information and create rules for merging levee districts that do not comply with federal accreditation requirements to ensure national flood insurance is available to all affected areas.
Thompson said he would review information gathered in the ongoing assessment of levee districts before considering an attempt to expand state authority over the levee districts in the 2011 legislative session.
