Glenn: Improving dam safety as Midland and Sanford rebuild - Midland Daily News

More than nine months after floods devastated Sanford and Midland, we’re still banding together and bouncing back, but the signs of lingering damage and ongoing recovery are everywhere.

Many families are still living in hotels, couch surfing with relatives and friends, or moving back into houses without functioning kitchens. Streets are lined with homes in mid-repair – getting new siding and flooring but with front yards still caked in mud and debris.

The Sanford Veterans Memorial Monument – a powerful symbol of the community’s civic pride and spirit honoring our military heroes – is being rebuilt after being washed away by the Tittabawassee River. The restoration is a powerful symbol of our community’s unity and perseverance as it recovers from floods that caused more than 10,000 evacuations and $200 million in damages.

My duties and responsibilities as your state representative in the Michigan House gives me a unique perspective on this rebuild. From helping with the cleanup in the flood’s immediate aftermath to assisting rebuilding projects to delivering pizzas to hungry families, I have witnessed your resilience – and it strengthens my resolve to help the state improve its system for inspecting and repairing dams. We must do all we can to make sure what happened here last May does not happen anywhere in Michigan ever again, but especially here.

Speaker Jason Wentworth, who represents Gladwin County – also damaged by the dam failures — entrusted me this session with chairing the Appropriations subcommittee responsible for writing and overseeing the budget for the state’s Department of Environment, Great Lakes and Energy (EGLE). It’s an extremely important department touching our lives in many ways, including dam safety.

Last year, I worked hard to bring home already-budgeted state disaster relief funding to help clean up and rebuild from this catastrophe. The support included a $6 million allocation.

Additionally, EGLE dam inspectors will in the future actually visit and inspect dams, an obviously important change. Before the failures of the Edenville and Sanford dams, the department did not do actual physical inspections. They only read reports about them. At my insistence and others, the department is now hiring more inspectors who should be on the job in the next several weeks.

Work recently began to lower water levels in and around the Edenville Dam Tobacco River spillway – a project to increase safety and reduce the risk of flooding in the future. This comes with a safety warning for residents to stay off the ice in the area until further notice.

I’m also reviewing the governor’s latest budget proposal last month to add a one-time appropriation of $15 million to create a new dam safety fund.

While I obviously appreciate any effort to improve dam safety, we must ensure our tax dollars are invested wisely and effectively. The governor’s administration says the fund would be used “for emergency response” in instances where “dam owners are unwilling or unable to mitigate hazards caused by dam malfunction.”

The governor proposes this as a one-time only investment, and the language raises questions about whether it’s intended only for situations in which a dam has already failed. As budget negotiations begin, I will push for permanent, ongoing funding for maintenance and inspections to prevent dams from failing again in the first place.

I’ll also be reviewing recommendations included in the recently released Michigan Dam Safety Task Force Report, which echoed my call for greater investments in preventative maintenance and other steps to prevent a repeat of what happened to our community last year.

Michigan has about 2,600 dams overall, and the state has records on 1,861 of them. More than two-thirds are at least 50 years old. We must do more to inspect and maintain them, and I’ll continue to lead that effort for the sake of homeowners and businesses not just in Midland and Sanford, but in every riverside community across our great state.

Please let me know your thoughts on this or any other issue involving our state government at 517-373-1791 or AnnetteGlenn@house.mi.gov.

Rep. Annette Glenn represents the 98th District in the Michigan House of Representatives.

Published On: Fri, 12 Mar 2021 10:07:30 GMT