Belmont begins early levee protection efforts

Since the beginning of this year, Belmont officials have been discussing whether to join the levee project to help mitigate flood risk by including levee protection along Belmont Creek, under Belmont’s jurisdiction, and in the Island Parks neighborhood, which would allow the city to leverage existing funding and expertise as part of a larger regional effort.

The City Council approved a $208,000 contract to start early-stage engineering work “to allow Belmont to independently assess the feasibility, benefits and costs of including the Island Park neighborhood in the Regional Project’s levee system, while leveraging technical work already underway by Redwood City,” a staff report read.

The Island Park neighborhood is also high risk, as its current flood protection is primarily provided by privately owned seawalls, but adding levee protections would be extremely costly for the city to do on its own, according to a previous staff report.

“At completion, the project is going to accomplish putting the Island Park neighborhood from FEMA’s Zone AE back to Zone X, which means it will no longer be in the high-risk flood zone, so that’s the main goal of the project,” Senior Civil Engineer Elizabeth Wada said during the City Council meeting.

But the contract approved at the March 10 meeting is only committing the city to conduct preliminary technical work, she said.

“The contract we’re asking for approval for is exclusively for preliminary planning, community outreach and alternative evaluation. It is just to give the city and the Island Park community the technical information we need to determine how to move forward,” Wada said, adding that it “doesn’t commit us to any construction” and “just provides the foundation needed to decide if we want to move forward.”