Revisiting River Management Options: Stakeholders, Levees, and the Public Policy Controversies of Degraded Infrastructure

Abstract

The Army Corps of Engineers deemed the levees along the Portneuf River to be "unacceptable," leaving the city of Pocatello, ID, liable. Experts, policymakers, and stakeholders agree that something must be done before this flood-prone city faces another catastrophe. Yet, after 5 years of debate, the levees are worse. This project explores and compares stakeholder support for three competing levee policy proposals. This project should aid river management professionals to understand the motivations behind stakeholder support for flood control policy. Stakeholder preferences are driven by risk perceptions, personal beliefs, and economic interests.

The role of proximity in problem identification: risk of water scarcity in Texas

“…Finally, consistent with a long line of research examining environmental attitudes (e.g. Bies et al, 2013;Bromley-Trujillo et al, 2014) and water management attitudes (Stoutenborough, 2015a(Stoutenborough, , 2015b, we control for a common battery of demographic indicatorsmarital status, gender, education, race, political ideology, and income 4 . As the predictive influence of these indicators can vary from issue to issue, even within the same issue domain (e.g.…”

“…Risk assessments have seen a substantial increase in attention because of their consistent link to policy support (e.g. Lubell, 2002;Zahran et al, 2006;Lubell et al, 2007;Spence et al, 2010;Stoutenborough et al, , 2014cStoutenborough et al, , 2015Stoutenborough, 2015aStoutenborough, , 2015b. At its simplest, 'those who perceive the risk associated with something as high should be more likely to oppose policies that would increase that risk, and, conversely, support policies that decrease this risk' (Stoutenborough et al, 2015, p. 105).…”

Flooding by Design: A Look at the National Flood Insurance Program

“…In the long term though this development defeats the purpose of the NFIP as it results in yet more people being exposed to flood risk. Communities also may choose to not allocate funds for maintenance of flood control structures built by the federal government, which can lead to the degradation of said structures and enhanced flood exposure for the community (Stoutenborough, ). The designers failed to include preventative measures in the NFIP that would halt or harshly punish such behaviors by communities, either because they would be politically unpalatable (again falling into the Stargate Trap) or because they genuinely thought local communities would see it as in their best interests to fully participate in the NFIP and follow all of its tenets faithfully.…”

Creating Integrating Participatory Mapping Through a Web Application to Enable Public Involvement in City Planning: The Portneuf River Vision Study

“…The city of Pocatello is located on the southern edge of the Snake River Plain and is representative of medium-sized cities; it is surrounded by agricultural lands and wilderness regions. A series of large flooding events in Pocatello in 1962 and 1963 prompted the Army Corp of Engineers to expand the flood control program in 1965 by constructing a concrete channel (MILES, 2015;Stoutenborough, 2015aStoutenborough, , 2015b. The concrete channel and levee channelized approximately 4.1 miles of the Portneuf River waterway on the west side of Pocatello (Lipple, 2015).…”