Flood thy neighbor: Who stays dry and who decides?

Eureka and an improved flood warning system across the region. But these were stymied by a new law, backed by environmentalists and the Reagan administration, which added another condition: The Corps had to find a local funding partner for these projects.

Only city leaders in Valley Park were willing to pay their share, $3.7 million, to clinch the deal to put a levee between the Meramec and their city of 3,200 people.

Over the years, the $11.8 million price tag, which the Corps had so carefully figured into its cost-benefit calculations, began to climb. A Corps spokeswoman cited multiple reasons, including cleanup of contaminated soil found during construction and lawsuits from landowners in the levee’s path who didn’t want to sell their property to make room. In 2000, Congress passed a bill that funded the levee at $35 million. In 2003, federal lawmakers upped the funding to $50 million.

Valley Park was on the hook for a quarter of the cost as it grew. Still, its support did not waver. The city issued a series of bonds and diverted tax revenue to pay for the levee, at one point prompting a lawsuit from its school district over lost tax money. The final price for the city was just over $13 million — more than the entire project was supposed to cost.

The Corps’ original reservoir solution for the Meramec would have protected more than a dozen communities. The estimated cost of that dam in 1929 was $6.6 million, an amount equivalent to roughly $70 million by the time Valley Park got its $50 million levee.

Instead, the Corps had its hands tied so tightly over the decades that all it could build was a single levee, benefiting one small city.

“It’s Not Going to Affect Anything”
From Valley Park, the levee’s slope resembles the inside of a grassy bowl, around 20 feet tall. Water caught behind the levee is guided out of the city by a system of drain pipes. Steel gates let traffic in and out through several road and railroad crossings. When the