Flood plan will damage local farmland

Woodland has been my home for 88 years. If the Woodland Flood Risk Management Project passes, as is, it will destroy my home, my livelihood, and the farm our family has built and maintained for four generations. My husband and I have farmed, paid taxes, and raised our family here. Now two public agencies, The City of Woodland and the U. S. Corps of Army Engineers, have developed a plan that would destroy all that we have built.

The design of the Flood Plan arbitrarily places a levee 100 feet wide and 6 feet high diagonally across our 40 acres just west of County

Road 98. The levee isolates our irrigation well on the northwest corner of the 40 acres. The diagonal design of the levee creates uneven lengths for furrows making field cultivation impossible.

Construction of the levee will bring in soil and gravel, thereby ending the farm’s organic certification. Heavy equipment used to build the levee will compact the soil adjacent to the levee. All these factors make farming what is left financially impossible. The only compensation will be a “fee title” (no less than 35% of the average cost per acre) for our land that will be taken and converted to non-agricultural use for the levee. My way of life and income will be destroyed.

The Army Corps levee design supposedly leaves our 100-yearold historic home and farm structures on the “dry side “of the levee but it is not dry. Their levee will trap the field runoff during heavy rains along County Road 98, flooding my house and buildings. The Army Corps and city of Woodland will not be required to reimburse our family.

The city of Woodland is putting a great financial burden on the citizens of Woodland as they will need to fund the floodwall through taxes, while denying the citizens their right to accept or deny the project by their vote. Seven (sic) members of the Woodland City Council will decide. As it is they have spent millions generating the feasibility and environmental impact reports for a project the citizens rejected in 2014.

There is no excuse for what the city and the Army Corps of Engineers will do to our family, and to the citizens of Woodland. These agencies are disregarding the will of the community when they resoundingly said “No” to the floodwall in 2014. Our survival as a community (rural and urban) will be relying on the final vote by the members of the Woodland City Council to vote down a “PLAN,” and if approved the agricultural community and the citizens that will pay the heavy price through destruction of our land and taxation.

Sally Oliver, Woodland