Posted on February 20, 2018
By Tara Melton, Alamogordo Daily News
City Commissioners received an update about the ongoing battle to complete the McKinley Channel flood control project on Tuesday evening.
“Last time I was here in September, we gave you an update on the project status and we went back into a redesign update and I promised I’d come back with an updated cost estimate, so that’s why I’m here,” said Lt. Col. James Booth, Commander of the Albuquerque District of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.
During the last project update, the Army Corps of Engineers explained new federal regulations had disqualified the project’s funding. At that time, both the city and the federal government had invested about $50 million into project and it was estimated another $10 million was needed to complete the channel.
“Bottom line up front for my update is that we believe we’ve reduced the delta between the construction cost and the funds on hand,” Booth said. “When I briefed you last, it was somewhere around $10 million and now we’re down to just a few million dollars at this point with a redesign on the project.”
The McKinley Channel flood control project began construction in 1999, but the city of Alamogordo has been working on flood mitigation with the Army Corp of Engineers since the 1960s. Currently, the project is on its eighth phase.
Booth explained to the City Commission that in addition to funding issues, the other issue the project faces is the benefit to cost ratio.
“In 1998, it was 2:1 and in 2016, that ratio dropped to about 7:1,” Booth said. “Effectively, the cost of construction is more than the value it brings when it prevents a flood. The reason that occurs is because construction costs continue to increase. However, federal rules do not allow us to show increased infrastructure that may have been built subsequent to around 1995. Basically, the federal rules don’t allow you to get credit for continued development in a floodplain.”
Another challenge the project faced was encroached right-of-ways that forced the project to change the design of the channel from a trapezoidal channel to a U-shaped or rectangular channel.
“The trapezoidal was a lot less expensive, probably half as much as constructing the U-shaped channel,” Booth said.
The redesign that was recommended by the Army Corp of Engineers and approved by the city includes reducing the size of the initial sediment basins of the uppermost portion of the channel.
“It was designed a lot bigger than absolutely necessary for 100 year flood so that it wouldn’t have to be cleaned out and reduce some of the long-term maintenance cost, ” Booth said. “However, to make sure we could bring the cost down, we reduced the size of that about three acre-feet from 12.5 acre-feet down to 9.5 acre-feet. We went from a roller-compacted design on that to a heavier rip-rap, like you’d see on the sediment basin that’s established on the uppermost portion of the southern channel.”
Booth said the design went back to the trapezoidal channel from the rectangular channel for about 4,000, which saved a lot of money.
“The design would maintain a 100 year flood, we’d look to find additional right-of-way that would all us to transition into that trapezoidal and finally do the utility relocation,” Booth said. “However, we knew there was a high likelihood that we would not be able to stretch the dollar to get a complete and usable project with the funds we had available and that is still the case.”
With the funds they have currently, Booth said there’s still about 1,000 feet of channel the Army Corp of Engineers most likely won’t be able to construct or line.
“What we’ve done is we’re going to move forward with the contract, with the base portion of the bid, which would be everything except that 1,000 feet,” Booth said. “We’d put two bid options into the contract and that would allow us, if we got good bids, basically award that portion of the contract if the bids came in well. However, we’ve got pretty good cost estimates and we’re pretty sure that it most likely would not be awardable.”
As far as the few million dollars the Army Corp of Engineers needs for their redesign, Booth explained they will submit a work-package and it will compete with the rest of the FY18 federal budget.
“We’re also looking throughout the district, we think we have one candidate project, where there might be remaining funds on a civil works construction project that’s complete,” Booth said. “We’d submit for a reprogramming action, should Congress choose to approve that and we’ve got to get it through the (Army Corp of Engineers) chain of command too, as a backup option.”
While those funding options are still ahead of the project, Booth said there is still potential for the Army Corp of Engineers to run out of options and the city would have to make a decision about where to go from there.
Source: Alamogordo Daily News
