The Two Lakes Plan now stands as a private enterprise entirely independent of public funding. Our job over the next year will be to provide accurate comparisons of the Two Lakes Plan (which includes three inexpensive highways) and the Rankin-Hinds Flood and Drainage Control District (Levee Board) compromise LeFleur’s Lake Plan (which does not include funding or permitting for a lake, but does for levees and the Airport Parkway stack). This and future information reports, are to enable the metro areas’ private and independent minded citizens a way to make up their own minds and have a say in what plan prevails. Our plans are to distribute accurate information by all means possible in order to reach every interested person in our area.

This should be very interesting to everyone wanting to make a choice. But first, we believe anyone wanting to understand the two opposing plans must have some knowledge of the decade long history that has lead up to the two opposing plans.

HISTORY OF EVENTS

We proposed the Two Lakes Plan more than 10 years ago because the levee plan developed and sponsored by the Corps of Engineers as the solution to flooding for the metro Jackson area had not been funded by the state Legislature. Our plan (Two Lakes Plan) was intended to replace this levee plan. The Corps of Engineers, some Rankin County mayors, and the Pearl River Basin Development District (Basin) resisted the Two Lakes Plan and continued to support their levee plan. They reasoned that they had spent too much time and money on their plan to abandon it.

The Two Lakes Plan was so well received by the community that the people opposing it reluctantly commissioned a feasibility study of the Two Lakes Plan. To our amazement, the study by Greenhorn O’Mara came back showing our plan to be unworkable. The report was clearly inaccurate. Even the engineers advising the Basin Board told them that the study was erroneous. We asked the Basin Board not to certify this study. They certified and released this condemning report anyway.

We carried this inaccurate report to the supervisors of both county governments who, along with many others in the community forced the basin to admit that this report was erroneous. This took over a year. Then, our congressman forced the same reluctant mayors and Basin Board to order another study; this time by the Corps of Engineers who did this study in connection with URS-Greiner, a large engineering firm used by the corps.

The URS report came back showing that our plan would not work hydraulically and that it would cost $375 million. ($240 million more than we said it would cost.) Once again we went to the Basin and to the corps to show that this report was grossly wrong. We asked them not to issue it. They refused and said they would stand by their report. The corps, along with the Basin, reinstated their levee plan and attempted to force it on the community. Once again, we went to the supervisors of Rankin and Hinds counties and their engineers. The errors were so clear that most supervisors were offended; so was the general public. A meeting was held to explain the URS report that included the Rankin and Hinds supervisors, the area mayors, the Jackson City Council and the corps. During the meeting some Rankin mayors, the Basin and the corps fought to continue funding the levee plan but they were overridden and the result was that the Two Lakes Plan was chosen as the preferred flood control plan.

Since the Basin Board elected not to support the Two Lakes Plan, we then asked the Central Mississippi Planning and Development District (CMPDD) to look at the plan. This nonprofit group coordinates planning for the municipalities and county governments of Hinds, Rankin and Madison counties. The result was a resolution signed by thirteen (13) municipalities, the Board of Supervisors of Hinds, Rankin and Madison counties, and the Jackson City Council that called for the CMPDD to join with the Levee Board to study the Two Lakes Plan, and to apply for necessary permits to build the project. The CMPDD was to “….provide technical and management assistance to the Drainage Control District…..”.

THe Levee Board then entered into a contract with the corps to evaluate the project and provide another feasibility study. Cost of the evaluation was estimated to be $2.8 million dollars with $1.4 million being provided by the Board of Supervisors of Hinds and Rankin counties, and the other half by our congressional delegation. The contract called for the Levee Board to perform half of the work including the engineering design, environmental studies and write the environmental impact statement. This study was to be completed in 2 1/2 years.

Two Lakes Plan supporters on the Levee Board retired, leaving on the board the original opponents of the Two Lakes Plan who now became responsible for the study. I was called to a meeting of some Rankin County mayors on the board who requested that I discontinue public involvement. One mayor insisted that he would go back to the levee plan if I refused.

Present at this meeting was a group of engineers that the mayors had chosen to do the feasibility study, thereby replacing CMPDD. Consent of the supervisors and municipalities to change engineers was not sought by the Levee Board.

After the 2 1/2 years allotted for the study had passed, we began to receive information that convinced us the feasibility study for the Two Lakes Plan (renamed the LeFleur’s Lakes Plan) was being done almost entirely by the corps. We believe the plan was being intentionally altered in such a way as to make it appear infeasible. We began writing letters to the Levee Board pointing this out and trying to persuade them of the inappropriateness of the changes. Our letters went unanswered. When we realized that they intended to release another report with an unfeasible lake plan we reinstated our original Two Lakes Plan as a private project, along with the three bridge proposal. The three bridges are essential to add enough value to pay for a private plan.

The corps’ LeFleur’s Lake draft feasibility report was distributed (1 1/2 years late) to the Levee Board by the corps as a confidential document. Some members of the board began disclosing only the most condemning elements of their report to the public. Someone leaked a copy to the Clarion Ledger to assist in condemning their own plan. We sent a letter asking for the document so that we could refute it (referencing the Freedom of Information Act). The corps refused, quoting legal reasons.

Information we have been able to see indicates that the feasibility study is almost entirely the work of the same corps members who created the previously discredited URS report. But our Two Lakes Plan refused to die. We had already begun experiencing remarkable success with our private approach to the Two Lakes Plan. This concept created problems for the Levee Board, its engineers and the corps. They were afraid they might lose control of their lucrative public project.

Faced with the prospect of losing control of a project, the Levee Board and corps hurriedly cobbled together what they now call the compromise plan. Under this plan, five members of the Levee Board voted to reinstate the original corps levee plan. (They did not even change the 1993 dates on the worksheets in this latest plan.) The corps levee plan is the only thing funded publically. In order to make it appear that lakes have anything to do with it, they say that private developers will materialize and spend $200 million of their own money to create a small shallow lake in the floodway between the levees; shallow enough to preserve the lowest part of the LeFleur’s Bluff nature trail. Two small islands, located completely away from downtown and the airport stack would have to pay for it. This amounts to over $1 million per acre for a pile of sand to a height capable of withstanding over 21 feet of flooding. Additional extra money will be needed for access bridges. Permits are not guaranteed and environmentalists we know are already calling this lake their next battleground.

The cost for the LeFleur Lakes in this latest report is $1.4 billion. Somehow the same people at the corps believed the same plan would only cost $375 million, $1 billion less, seven years ago. We can only conclude that the corps intentionally added cost to the project to make it unfeasible and again reinstate their levee plan and kill any use of lakes for flood control.

Much of the leadership in our community is being enlisted to support this plan believing a lake will be built. They do not realize there is probably no one who will build such a thing privately. This doesn't matter to the Levee Board, remember the board is controlled by mayors one of whom never really wanted lakes for flood control; he has always wanted levees. (By eliminating lakes entirely from the publically funded part of the plan the Levee Board has secured support from the corps which they hope will provide funding and permits with less objection from environmentalists.)

After 11 years we are actually back to only two plans, the original levee plan, supported by its original advocates and the Two Lakes Plan, supported by its original supporters. Our job is to make sure people truly understand what the choices are, and to give people a way to assert their preferences. As for us, we will continue to pursue the Two Lakes Plan privately. We are not going anywhere.

John McGowan is a Northsider.