DAVENPORT, IOWA (November 18, 2019) — The next meeting of the Quad Cities Flood Resiliency Alliance will be held on Thursday, November 21, 2019, at 1:30PM in the City Hall Community Room in 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 November 21 meeting includes:
Cost-sharing for water-resource projects — Jim Homann, US Army Corps of Engineers: Continuing Authorities Program, Planning Assistance for States, Floodplain Management Services projects
City programs, incentives and reduced fees for improved management of storm water — Andy Parer, City of Rock Island: Rock Island’s storm-water-management program and Amy Kay, City of Davenport: Davenport’s storm-water-management program
Certified Floodplain Manager Training course and exam are planned for January 2020; details will be available shortly.
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, and 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 only three are 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 strive continually to improve their ratings. The base rating begins at 10, and a variety of activities take the rating toward the best rating of 1, 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, eight, 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 email cdowney@riveraction.org.
