BOARD01914

• Board Meeting Date: 12/4/1974
• Description: Agenda or Table of Contents, Minutes, Resolution
• Board Meetings - Doc Type: Meeting

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and the date..of hearing thereon shall be published." It makes better
reading. I think, and more sense. That is all I have. IYIr; Chairman.

Mr. Stapleton: All right. Mr. Ken Wright, please.

Mr. Wright: Mr. Chairman, my name is Kenneth Wright, a consulting engi.
neer, a partner in Wright-McLaughlin Engineers. Our work deals with
water resources and flood control matters. We do floodplain zoning
work and floodplain delineation work.

I, too. am laboring under the problem of not having seen the December 4
draft until just a few minutes ago. I did have the September 11 copy
sent and assumed then that no changes had been made from the original
draft by the staff.

I would like to turn to section 1.4 under definitions and specifically
to low hazard zones. The point I would like to make here is that we
need to be cognizant of the fact that larger floods do occur. The lines
that are set as low hazard zones in this model floodplain regulation,
or let's say the lines that will be set by the municipalities using
this model as their regulation, will in effect become encroachment lines.
I think over a period of time we will find the development of buildings
and fill encroaching up to the low hazard zone delineation line. This
does become au encroachment line in effect. I think that we need to
give special consideration to the fact that larger floods will occur and
we should keep that in mind. Because of that point and because munici-
palities and counties are regularly rezoning lands. whether they be
zone from industrial to high density residential. or from residential
to industrial, or from residential to commercial, I do believe that the
aspect of the regulation having two types of low hazard zone criteria
it is impractical. I think on a local level it will cause some degree
of confusion and over a period of time some chaos in administering the
floodplain regulation. I-feel that because local zoning does change
you should not have one type of definition for residential and one type
for nonresidential.

Relative to the establishment of these lines as in effect being encroach-
ment lines, I think you should also be cognizant of the fact that it
will be very difficult in the futu~~ to ever move the encroachment
lines outward, but they can move inl~ard very easily by merely an act of
the local legislative body. Moving outward once development is in there
is not practical. I think it would be very difficult to do once the
development had reached those encroachment lines.

The comments that were made on the September 11 draft, I don't remember
the date. maybe it was september 14 or so. I felt that the comments
made by staff at that time were good comments. I am somewhat disappointed
to see the change in the definition of a low hazard zone at this step
without providing the people, particularly myself, people who wished to
comment in greater depth, with facts and figures. I feel that there
is some problem with the public being given an opportunity to respond
to this very substantial change in the regulation.

Another point which I would like to make is that the floodplain

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