Officials had known for decades that the Pajaro River levee that failed this weekend — flooding an entire migrant town and trapping scores of residents — was vulnerable but never prioritized repairs in part because they believed it did not make financial sense to protect the low-income area, interviews and records show.
“It was pretty much recognized by the early ‘60s that the levees were probably not adequate for the water that that system gets,” Stu Townsley, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers’ deputy district engineer for project management for the San Francisco region, told The Times on Sunday.
And despite having studied it on and off for years, in terms of “benefit-cost ratios,” it never penciled out, he said.
“It’s a low-income area. It’s largely farmworkers that live in the town of Pajaro,” Townsley said. “Therefore, you get basically Bay Area construction costs but the value of property isn’t all that high.”
This cost-benefit analysis is a recurring theme of spending on infrastructure, and it's one that disserves communities like Pajaro, an unincorporated community of just about 3000 residents that sits south of the river in Monterey County, while the city of Watsonville, population 50,000, sits north of the river in Santa Cruz County. Indeed, some coverage of the Pajaro disaster has observed that Pajaro has effectively been sacrificed to help save Watsonville. Though both are relatively poor and home to many farmworkers, Watsonville is home to a larger population and more commercial enterprises. In other words, a Watsonville flood would be even more costly than the Pajaro flood is proving to be.
Low-income neighborhoods and communities have always historically been ignored by state and federal governments.
The story of Pajaro is exactly that. There was a lack of commitment by our federal and state governments. The residents have never felt they had that kind of support, knowing that the danger, the risk, has always been there.
Alejo further noted local communities like Pajaro and Watsonville are unable to pay their part of the millions it costs to improve levees, funds that are required to match the Army Corps' federal funding. In fact, state funding had recently been secured to bolster the Pajaro levee, but it didn't come in time.
In 2021, Sen. John Laird (D-Santa Cruz) authored a bill requiring the state to completely fund the [Pajaro River] project. This past fall, Laird and others held a ceremony celebrating the funding of the levee project.
“I said some version of ‘I hope to God it doesn’t rain before this gets done,’” he said.
Laird has worked for years to get funding to repair the system. He said he was a county staffer in 1995 when the river flooded and spent several nights at the fairgrounds “where many of the same families that are being evacuated this time.”
At a press conference in the flood-stricken Monterey County town of Pajaro on Wednesday, Gov. Gavin Newsom talked up a plan, paid for by the U.S. Department of Agriculture and managed by United Way, to provide financial aid to farmworkers affected by floods and recent winter storms.
“There's not a state in America, not one state, no other state that does more for farmworkers than the state of California,” Newsom said. “I want folks to know … it's important to reinforce today, March 15th, the United Way was able to get $42 million from USDA, and they're starting to send out $600 checks for farmworkers, regardless of their immigration status.”
Newsom was not referring to a new program for farmworkers who are in financial straits due to recent flooding and severe weather. Rather, as KAZU, KQED and The California Newsroom have learned, Newsom was referring to a $42 million farmworker grant managed by United Way that was announced in October of 2022, and has nothing to do with economic hardships due to recent storms.The existing $42 million grant was created to provide “a one-time direct relief payment of $600 … to qualifying frontline farm, grocery, and meatpacking workers for expenses incurred due to the COVID-19 pandemic,” according to the USDA’s website.
Newsom’s office confirmed the $42 million he referred to in the press conference was in fact from the Farm and Food Workers Relief Grant Program, which is funded under the Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2021.
When asked whether waivers would be granted to flood-stricken farmworkers who do not meet the pandemic hardship requirements, USDA spokesperson Marissa Perry reiterated that the FFWR program was specific to those suffering COVID-related economic hardship.
You can read (or listen to) the rest of the story for more details, but the bottom line is that no new state or federal funds have been set aside to assist the victims of the Pajaro flood, who have not only lost their homes but will lose access to work in the coming months as fields must lie fallow for a period following the flood. Further, the pandemic-related funds will not be distributed immediately, and they will not provide relief to all who need them.
Postscript: The San Jose Mercury News explains in this March 19 story how levees get funded. The feature by Lisa M. Krieger and Harriett Blair Rowan features Hamilton City, population 1759, in Glenn County, an hour or so north of Sacramento.
Like Pajaro, Hamilton City lives on the edge of a volatile river. Like Pajaro, its residents are largely low-income Latinos. Like Pajaro, it repeatedly sought federal funds to fix its levee, and was repeatedly rebuffed.
But there are differences, and that’s what saved Hamilton City. A group of six farmers, most of them now dead, started the construction campaign decades ago. It stayed unified and relentless in its focus. Volunteers, supported by homespun “Levee Festivals,” made 15 trips to Washington, D.C., knocking on doors in Congress to win the hearts of political heavyweights such as Sen. Dianne Feinstein, former Sen. Barbara Boxer and others.
But who deserves protection? While the responsibility to prevent floods lies with local communities, the funds to replace levees come largely from state and federal budgets. The government can’t afford to replace every levee. With fierce competition for money, projects must be prioritized.
To win funding, a town must prove that for every dollar spent on the project, there is at least a dollar of benefit. While the impacts of six factors — healthy and resilient ecosystems; sustainable economic development; floodplains; public safety; environmental justice; and watershed — are weighed, a community’s economic value weighs heavily, because it is easy to measure and compare projects, he said.
“The methodology measures: ‘How much is it going to cost? And how much are we going to save?’ ” said flood expert Scott Shapiro of the Sacramento law firm Downey Brand, who serves as general counsel for the Central Valley Flood Protection Board.
This cost-benefit approach is much more equitable than the historic tradition of “earmarking” funds, where powerful members of Congress steered money to their pet projects, he said. But it favors more prosperous areas.
All of this is helpful context for a news story from December 2022 when the first atmospheric river of the season hit California, striking the Central Valley particularly hard and flooding Wilton, an agricultural community south and southeast of Sacramento: the standards for levees in rural areas like Wilton, where the Cosumnes River flooded, are lower than for those in urban places.
Postscript: Here is an LA Times story out of Allensworth, another disadvantaged California community facing flooding in light of the unseasonably rainy winter.
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