Fixing the Creeks Ordinance

By Jesse Townley

I think the short answer of what needs to be done is this: The City Council should immediately appoint a stakeholders committee made up of creeks advocates, homeowners, engineers, other experts, and members of the community, as suggested repeatedly by the Urban Creeks Council and others. The City Council should not delay- we're wasting time during which people with different interests and experiences could be meeting and coming up with novel ideas with which to solve the points of contention.

Here are some of the points of contention and some of my ideas of how to deal with them.

1. Property owners should be allowed to rebuild after a disaster on their property, but not within 30 feet of the centerline of an existing creek or culvert. The only exception is if there is nowhere else on the property on which to fit a house with a similar footprint/square footage of interior space. Temporary building permits for sturdy post-disaster shelter should be granted after an emergency, but permanent construction should go through an expedited yet still regulated process. The overbuilding which happened in the Oakland Hills is a negative situation we should learn from in order to make sure something similar does not happen in Berkeley after the next disaster. The temporary structures- perhaps prefab housing?- should be re-approved every 6 months during the rebuilding process to ensure neighborhoods aren't stuck with such temporary housing permanently. Based on the statement written and spoken at City Council meetings this spring and summer, it's clear to me that our city government wants no part of a "taking" of private property. Post-disaster, the city will have enough costs and problems to deal with.

2. Restoring open, existing creeks and repairing crumbling culverts should be additionally seen as disaster preparation/disaster avoidance activity. Flooding, mudslides, sinkholes, and sewage leaks are caused by overflowing creek and culvert channels, as well as damaged culverts and blocked creeks. Sewage lines are also being overloaded by the decaying culverts, which means there are occasional rivers of raw sewage in the hills- a clear public health danger. Private property over decaying culverts will sink into culverts if those culverts are not repaired/replaced, meaning much more costs in the future.

3. Private culverts and creeks are currently the responsibility of the property owner. Public culverts and creeks are not. Creeks on private property can certainly be tended/restored by volunteer creek activists (and are currently, which is wonderful!), so culverts are the more pressing problem. Since many property owners cannot afford a few hundred thousand dollars to replace a section of culvert, perhaps there's ways in which the City can help. Since about half of the existing crumbling culverts are on public land and therefore the city's responsibility, a straight subsidy, even of a % of the total cost, is not realistic. However, the city could help residents get low-interest long-term loans or other fiscal help through bundling together neighborhoods in need.

Perhaps more lucratively, the City could take the approach of point #2 and go for FEMA/disaster prevention grants and treat the crumbling culverts under private property as impending disasters. The culvert where Strawberry Creek emerges behind the Strawberry Creek Lodge is a perfect example of a deteriorating situation. The chunks of concrete and the massive erosion of the banks is currently undermining North Valley Street and is clearly visible from street level. The 8 properties directly over that culvert will sink into that culvert over time. Do we use a decent amount of monetary prevention now or do we wait and deal with entire properties destroyed by sinkholes, erosion, and flooding? Also, much of the areas involved are in officially designated flooding areas, which apparently helps with their eligibility for disaster aid.

In the meantime, we need to fix public culverts for the same reasons and possibly with similar methods.

4. Realistically, creeks in culverts are not going to be opened any time soon because it costs too much to do so correctly. The only exceptions will probably be when there's outside money (as in the UC Hotel project) or when a collapsed culvert is judged worth converting to an open creek by the property owner. That said, the long-term view of creeks demand that, for reasons ranging from beautification to flood control to pollution control, the more culverts which revert to being open creeks the better off our city will be. We should therefore continue to treat culverts as buried creeks for zoning/rebuilding purposes.

5. Property values are a concern for selling homes- in part because many property owners who bought houses over culverts had no idea that they were over a culvert at the time of sale, let alone about the dangers of the current crumbling culverts. A culvert which is now required to be revealed to prospective buyers will assumedly lower the home's value- but not revealing it and having the home collapse 5 or 10 years later is not fair to the buyers. It's as if an earthquake fault had suddenly appeared under a home- except earthquake faults are not repairable. Culverts are, and if the issue of rebuilding after a disaster is handled appropriately by the City Council, there is minimal damage to sale value if a culvert is replaced or repaired or opened up to daylight. Heck, if a creek is opened up to daylight that should greatly enhance the property value!