RIVERDALE, IOWA (August 13, 2025) — The next meeting of the Quad Cities Flood Resiliency Alliance will be held on Thursday, August 21, 3PM, in the City Hall Community Room, 110 Manor Drive, Riverdale, Iowa. The Alliance is open to the public and is a forum for timely and educational information on flood prevention, mitigation, flood insurance, and floodplain management. The agenda for the Augst 21 meeting includes:
Presentation by Jason Conn, State of Iowa National Flood Insurance Program Coordination, Iowa DNR, “Importance of Conducting Substantial Damage Determinations in the Disaster Environment.”
Jason Conn Bio: Jason Conn is Iowa’s State National Flood Insurance Program Coordinator working for the Iowa Department of Natural Resources. He is a certified floodplain manager. Jason graduated from Western Illinois University with a Bachelor’s in geography in 2003.
Presentation by Ray Wolf, retired from the National Weather Service in Davenport, Iowa, “Reflections on the Need for a Duck Creek ALERT System.”
Ray Wolf Bio: Ray Wolf retired in 2022 as the Science and Operations Officer for the National Weather Service in Davenport, Iowa. Before living in Davenport, Ray worked at the NWS office in Denver, Colorado as a forecaster, as well as serving as an agricultural forecaster in the MidSouth. Ray graduated from Iowa State University with a Bachelor’s in meteorology in 1982 and a Master’s degree in agricultural climatology in 1985.
About the Alliance: At River Action’s October 2018 Upper Mississippi River Conference, a workshop launched a new initiative for the greater Quad City region within the Mississippi River watershed. The Quad Cities Flood Resiliency Alliance kicked off with many local river cities, towns, and villages showing a keen interest in flood prevention, flood damage-mitigation, and floodplain restoration. Quarterly meetings followed, starting in November 2018.
The Quad Cities alliance includes parts of Scott, Clinton, Muscatine, and Louisa counties in Iowa, and Rock Island, Whiteside, Mercer, and Henry counties in Illinois. It provides a forum for river stakeholders to share information, resources, flood prevention or mitigation policies, and to get to know river neighbors for assistance before, during, or after flood events.
About 75 communities comprise the alliance footprint, but out of the Quad City communities, only three are currently enrolled in the National Flood Insurance Program’s Community Rating System.
The CRS encourages a wide variety of creditable activities that communities can undertake as they continually strive to improve their ratings. The base rating begins at ten, and a variety of activities take the rating toward the best rating of one, which earns the largest flood-insurance discounts.
The activities themselves provide benefits to the community in reduced or avoided flood damage, quicker recovery, and stricter floodplain regulations to continue these benefits into the future.
Moline, Davenport, and Rock Island County are rated eight, seven, and seven, respectively, and currently earn modest discounts on flood insurance premiums.
Goals of the alliance include educating communities on the CRS program and assisting with application and enrollment, training certified floodplain managers to eventually have one in each community, and establishing pre-disaster communications and relationships between communities to enable sharing of resources and assistance around flood events.
Meetings are held quarterly. Admission is free and open to the public. For more information, contact River Action at 563-322-2969 or e-mail kwine@riveraction.org.
