Episode Transcript
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Good afternoon. Welcome to the April 16th, 2026 meeting of the
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Sacramento Area Flood Control Agency Board. Would the clerk
please call the roll? Director Desmond. Director Hume. Here.
Director Kennedy. Here. Director Hedges. Here. Director
Munoz. Director Jennings. Director Kaplan. Here. Director
Pluckybaum. Director Holloway. Present. Director Johns.
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Director Hill. Here. Director Baines. And Director Stevens.
Here. We do have an eight-member quorum. Great. Will
you join me in the Pledge of Allegiance?
I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of
America and to the republic for which it stands, one nation,
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under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.
Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. This meeting of
SAFCA is being broadcast live and will be cable cast on
metro14live.saccounty.gov and will be recorded and
re-aired on Saturday, April 18th at 4 PM and available on
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SAFCA's website within 48 hours after the meeting. Thank you.
Thank you. At this time, are there any members of the public
would like to address the board of an item that is not on the
agenda? I have no cards and I'm seeing none. So, then, we
will adjourn into closed session. Recess into closed
session.
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Okay, we'll come back to order. Will the clerk please call the
roll? Director Hulme. Here. Director Kennedy. Here. Director
Hedges. Here. Director Munoz. Here. Director Kaplan. Here.
Director Holloway. Present. Director Hill. Here. And
Director Stevens. Here. We do have an eight-member quorum.
Thank you. Council, is there anything to report out of
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closed session? Uh nothing to report. Alright, next item.
Next item are consent matters and items one through five are
in order. Any questions from the board? Discussion? Move
consent. Okay, we have a motion. Do we have a second?
We'll second it. Motion to second. Is there any member of
the public? Hearing is I've not received any cards. Okay. All
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those in favor of consent? Aye. Aye. Opposed? Abstain? Next
item. And the next item is the executive director report.
Just waiting for the presentation. He's gonna stare
at us. Jason Campbell, executive director. Uh good to
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see you all once again. Uh just give it a quick update in
regards to our federal funding. Uh as we've discussed in the
past, twenty-six budget. Uh we have good funding for our dam
raise and American Recommended Futures projects. They were
fully funded under the bipartisan budget act in 2018.
The projects that we still need funding for is primarily with
the Natomas Basin and fortunately the fiscal year
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president's budget for twenty-seven uh came out on the
third and we were very surprised and gladly uh
surprised that 80 million dollars has been allocated by
the president to the Natomas Basin project. What this does
is it allows us to help the core continue to finish the
project of the 42 miles around Natomas and ultimately we need
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to be able to move forward with that very soon in order to make
sure that we're meeting that 2030 deadline as well for our
ULOP certifications. Along with that too we have seen a number
of things coming out of the administration. One of the key
things I think which made Natomas a little bit different
is that this is a continuing project and they are looking to
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make sure that they're finishing projects and making
sure that they're doing it efficiently. So, we had made a
request of about 40 million dollars to our congressional
members as well as our senators and we were again very
pleasantly surprised to see that there's double that in the
in the budget. Moving on we have uh DC advocacy and a number
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of uh folks up there I'm sure are going to cap to cap. We
also have a number of folks on our side over here and the
staff heading out to cap to cap to represent our uh different
interests in flood and a little bit of water control uh water
management. Sorry, I don't know that we're controlling any
water uh but the ultimately we're uh also doing the double
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dip on the trip because we have a national waterways conference
that we typically um attend in March. It was rescheduled to
the same week. So, we will be doing uh both events and
catching hopefully all those uh folks that we want to talk to
in headquarters as well as uh other uh individuals that we
like to meet with when we go to the national waterways
conference. Uh additional meetings are set up for us to
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have conversations with ASA civil works as well as USA's
headquarters to talk specifically about our
projects. We have a few conversations that need to
happen in regards to our common features 2016 project. Of
course, a big thank you for the Natomas uh funding but also we
have a number of items going on up at Folsom Dam and on a few
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things out on the we're in yellow bypass and we'll get
into the yellow bypass a little bit here in just a second. So,
uh as far as the local funding component, we're keeping an eye
on our federal and state uh partners fiscal status.
Obviously, uh they have a big impact on our budget itself.
Uh we're evaluating our uh need going forward. So, we're seeing
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that there might be some strategic reductions in our
annual requests for appropriations and we're looking
to make sure that we're supporting those needs and then
we're focusing on our uh contributions uh to our uh
federal projects because there's some of those can be
fairly substantial as you can imagine. So, again, we are
looking at our strategic spending plan going forward. We
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have a few options out there in regards to mitigation credit
purchases for the projects as well as some in kind work that
might be strategically pushed into the uh federal project
program. Along with that, we have uh need to take a look at
our five-year funding plan. So, as I've mentioned in prior
months, you know, we keep a good eye on our assessment
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districts as well as our development impact fee and our
state funding sources. So, as we project our cash flows for
the next 5 years, we've identified that we probably
need a little bit more than just a regular pay as you go
funding setup. So, we've been talking about the the bond
uh proceeds uh and amounts and that we might wanna need for
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the next 5 years and you know, those primary needs are again
associated with Natomas, Folsom, and American River
Common features. So, with that, we have the bond refunding uh
discussion that we've talked a little bit about but again,
we're moving forward with the documents, refunding, pepper
preps, you know, moving along very well. The Natomas Basin
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uh assessment district, we're anticipating doing a refunding.
The max principle looks depending on what the market's
gonna turn out about 35 million for that refunding plus a
little bit of additional dollars uh to help the
projects long and then on CC82, we have about a 300. We're
estimating it might be about a 315 million principle amount.
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It's not an insignificant amount. Most of that is
refunding but we do think we want to try and get 50 million
dollars out of this uh effort to make sure that we can cash
flow our projects and meet our obligations. So, the
preliminary official statements are being prepared. We
anticipate coming back in May and targeting the authorization
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of the resolutions to be able to move forward with the bond
sale. So, again, uh we have six traditional projects. We have a
number of activities on those projects. Uh you can see in
Natomas, there's a bunch of little gold stars around it. I
did not put anything in there for the new allocation from the
president's budget but again, uh over on the east side of the
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system there. Uh the uh hopefully F and G reaches F and
G projects will get moving forward. Uh design is
completely as I said. We've got erosion identified uh on the
American River and we also have some erosion on the Sacramento
River just around the pocket area and then of course up at
Folsom Dam, you can also see that there is a big star up
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there because we have a number of uh big things going on and
along that line, here we have the Folsom Dam race. This is
again, I think I've shown this picture five times in a row
now. Uh this this month, I I just wanna remind everybody
about the the scale of this. So, the project, those tainter
gates that we're looking from the water side of course. Uh
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you can see the daylight up at the top. This project is
intended to seal those top seals so that as the lake fill
fills up, the reservoir fills up that there is more space
above those gates so that we can handle a larger storm. So,
as the project's going on, the the modifications to where
those gates are are uh necessary. So, uh the first
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gate is a what they call a proof of concept. That proof
of concept has been moving for a couple of years now and uh on
the right, you can see that there is a hinge for that
tainter gate sitting on a a beam. That hinge weighs about
twenty-six thousand pounds and you can see in the uh photo up
on the top, you can see where that would be modified and
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where that may have come from or going to and then down
below, you can see the sketch or the the drawing just kinda
give you a schematic what that might look like from the side.
So, there are two of those up at Folsom currently. Uh again,
both of those are sitting on the ground waiting to be
installed and as you take a look, you know, there's a
little bit of crane work and some scaffolding. Uh very
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interesting stuff going on. It's just a very tight
confined uh location. So, uh it just doesn't go as fast as
some of the levee work does but again, extremely important
to the blood protection of our community. So, as we continue
to move forward, we have uh some changing uh policies also
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moving forward with the uh the Corps of Engineers. So, the ASA
has made some modifications to their uh uh I guess uh call uh
to action but basically, it's building infrastructure and
not paperwork. So, the ASA has pushed out a number of memos
and part of those memos are being are coming out to. Sorry,
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nobody got the irony there.
Yeah, I'm glad you got that. So, yeah, the uh the ASA has
moved forward with a number of prioritization efforts. Uh one
of those is, you know, working forward uh wanting to make sure
that they're uh getting these studies done faster. So,
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jumping into that, I don't wanna go too far into what the
ASA said but you can always look at those memos. The the rapid
process is being implemented and one of the first projects
that this is going into is actually our Yolo
Comprehensive Study. So, the infrastructure piece uh is now
being required to be designed to a 35% level during the
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study. So, that's a new piece to this and again, the proposed
changes are intended to make sure that the process is faster
and more comprehensive to this extent that they get better
estimates as they're moving forward and not necessarily
spending a bunch of money on studying things but actually
getting it into what will become a project. So, we have a
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kind of a really good example here with our Yolo Bypass
Study. So, I just wanted to kind of talk about that a
little bit. So, as we were moving forward with the Yolo
Bypass Study, the intent was that it was gonna be done for
you know a little less than 14 million dollars and it was
gonna take something like 6 years. So, as this is going
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forward and it's in progress, we get these changes from CORE
headquarters regarding this new directive to get to 35%
design. So, the Yolo study then was being a good model for
everybody across the country and we are able to work with the
CORE and identify how we can make this work and this is
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turning out to be a very good example. So, two alternatives
for the Yolo Bypass were presented instead of doing a
bunch of drilling and design and other efforts to kind of
figure out which one is better. There has been a not a specific
design process but just a qualitative assessment that the
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CORE is going through and what that means is they're doing
this rapid process that they think that will make it so that
these decisions can be made faster and better and get the
real dollars into what is the project rather than paperwork.
So, of course, this study we're really a champion of as we've
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had conversations with our Yolo County partners across the
river as well as you know our partners that are signatory to
these agreements but we are you know guesstimating at this
point in time but it looks like it could take some time and
some money in this study process and as I've said before, we
think that this one will be the first one out of the gate and
hopefully we can be the first one across the line and help
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the CORE really set this standard for the rest of their
studies going forward. So, we're happy to be able to make
this work but this for the CORE but it also is working right
here in Sacramento for this study and again, those rapid
planning pieces, you know, the alternative one that we were
just showing there is real and it's part of what we're working
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on. Our director of planning and our deputy director have
been in many meetings on these pieces just to make sure that
we're getting these alternatives right and getting
that qualitative information squared away under this rapid
plan process but ultimately, I think what we're going to see
is you're going to coming this fall, we would like to bring
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something forward so that we can give you a much better
briefing as to where we're at with the actual Yolo study
versus just this quick presentation on changing policy
at the CORE of headquarters but again, we are very pleased to
be on the front lines of this and hopefully, we can get this
across the finish line soon. Any questions?
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Questions? No. Thank you. Thank you, sir. Alright, that takes
us to the end of our meeting. Our next meeting is on May 21st.
We're adjourned.
Thank you.