Alviso sits at the foot of San Francisco Bay, where Coyote Creek and the Guadalupe River wind through sloughs on their way to the sea. San José annexed Alviso in 1968, all because of the sewage treatment plant that was necessary to support the growth of the future “Capital of Silicon Valley.” While the larger city gained control over its destiny, those in the smaller community it absorbed have never believed that they received the benefits that being part of San José was supposed to provide.

Alviso has been flooded numerous times throughout its history, perhaps most notably in 1982 and 1983, when El Niño storms combined with a tidal surge to put the community under 10 feet of water. Rescuers evacuated people by boat. Homeless children took baths at their teachers’ houses. Residents and business owners lost everything.

The Santa Clara Valley Water District (SCVWD) has been responsible for flood protection in the county since it was formed in 1968, taking on that responsibility from the county government. Last month it broke ground on the Upper Guadalupe Project, the culmination of a $500 million effort to manage flooding along the entire river. The lower Guadalupe section was completed in 2004, and reaches from Highway 280 to Alviso. This work, according to the SCVWD, provides protection for a 100 year flood event, an event so severe that it has only a one-percent chance of occurring in any given year. This protection applies equally to downtown San Jose and to Alviso.

This past Wednesday evening, the SCVWD held a public meeting at George Mayne Elementary School in Alviso about another project, the Alviso Slough Restoration Project. This is the culmination of another process—a years-long series of meetings between the District and Alviso residents aimed at restoring the condition of Alviso Slough to what it was prior to 1983. The goals of the project are several:

• Improve the community’s ability to pursue navigation, public access, and aesthetics to allow for the expansion of boating and other recreational and/or tourism opportunities;
• Maintain (my emphasis) one-percent flood protection in Alviso Slough;
• Reduce mosquito nuisance; and
• Promote the integration of the Alviso Slough Restoration project with the South Bay Salt Pond Restoration Project to re-establish the saltwater connection to the Lower Guadalupe River.

The Water District staff prepared five so-called “action alternatives” (a “no project” alternative is always required by state environmental law and is the “environmentally superior alternative” in this case.) The preferred alternative, based on equal weighting of community preferences and engineering criteria, is also the most expensive, a $22 million project that

would include vegetation and root mass removal to a depth of 4 feet over 15.3 acres, and additional dredging over 9.7 acres to a 10 foot depth, for a total project footprint of 25 acres between the Gold Street Bridge and the Alviso County Marina. This work would result in an open-water channel width and depth that would replicate slough conditions of the early 1980s along a 0.6 mile length of slough.

The channel would continue to silt up, of course, and dredging would have to continue every 5 or so years, costing millions of dollars every time.

Dredging the channel would make it possible to take boats out on Alviso Slough, a pastime that long-time residents remember fondly, but which has been impossible for years as vegetation has narrowed the channel. According to the SCVWD staff, however,

Extensive removal of vegetation/root mass and the increase of the channel cross-section area by dredging, would result in higher flows being conveyed to the slough downstream of the Alviso County Marina during high flood events. This additional flow could overbank the levees along the east side of the slough between the Alviso County Marina and the Bay, and threaten the Alviso community by flooding the salt ponds and New Chicago Marsh just north of Alviso.

Part of this alternative, therefore, requires a link to a nearby salt pond, Pond A8, which would take the overflow in the event of a large flood.

The Alviso Slough Restoration Project represents a significant departure for the Santa Clara Valley Water District, a project that neither augments our drinking water nor increases flood protection, but, instead, provides recreational amenities to a community. As was crystal clear at Wednesday’s meeting, the residents of Alviso feel betrayed and abandoned by local government, and believe that they deserve this project. I estimate that over 100 people attended the meeting, and of the over 50 people who got up to speak, only two expressed any reservations about the project. The rest said things like “This county owes it to the people who have boats,” and “Alviso always gets the short end of the stick,” and that Alviso has suffered “environmental injustice.”

However, what they also said, every one of them, was that they believe that this project will make them safer, and that it is necessary to prevent a repeat of the floods of 1983—this despite the explicit description of how dredging only part of the channel would actually increase the flood danger. As Beau Goldie, the District’s Guadalupe watershed manager, said in Saturday’s Mercury, “They aren’t grasping the concept—whether it’s from our poor description or their not wanting to accept it. This project is to maintain existing flood protection. This project isn’t going to provide more flood protection.”

The residents of Alviso have gotten the short end of the stick, repeatedly over the years. But it is unclear to me why the Santa Clara Valley Water District is on the hook for $22 million worth of reparations in the form of recreational amenities unrelated to its mission of water supply and flood protection. Except for the glaring fact that the District is the only public entity that has $22 million to spend on a project like this. But that’s $22 million that won’t get spent on other projects that are part of the District’s core mission; the SCVWD has not yet identified which priorities would be reshuffled or dropped should it proceed with this project.

How much do Santa Clara County residents owe to the residents of Alviso? Every county resident has a stake in this. The draft environmental impact report and engineer’s report are available online here. Public comment is open until 28 July; you can mail comments to the SCVWD, or send an email to [email protected].

Comments to this post, while welcome in the spirit of open discussion, will have no impact on this project. If you want to have your voice included in any consideration of this project, you must submit a comment to the Santa Clara Valley Water District.