Fantasy Island
by Adam Lynch
Photo by Jaro Vacek
May 24, 2006
Developers are cheering and environmentalists are jeering as the Lefleur Lakes (“Two Lakes”) project gains momentum, helped along by political support from men like Mayor Frank Melton and Gov. Haley Barbour, who seem poised to rubberstamp the development despite concerns from residents and environmentalists.
Oilman John McGowan, who owns McGowan Working Partners and developed the Two Lakes plan, warns that with the amount of development now underway in Jackson’s sprawling northeastern corridor and in Flowood, a flood like the infamous 1979 flood would drive the region into near bankruptcy, with prices running easily “over $1 billion, with a ‘B’.” He says the plan would reduce flooding by 11 feet in North Jackson and five feet in downtown Jackson.
Developers boast that the new waterfront property will compare to the multi-million dollar development along the Ross Barnett Reservoir, in Madison County, but they emphasize that exploding property values are only a happy side effect of the plan. They say the project’s real goal is to provide a means for the city to combat its recurring flood problems and finally assert control over the fussy Pearl River.
“Jackson needs flood control,” environmental planner Barry Royals of Waggoner Engineering told the Jackson City Council last year. “Right now, the city is unprepared for another disaster like 1979. This plan will address that problem.”
Meanwhile, environmentalists, concerned city residents and emergency officials predict that a new lake extending from the spillway to south Jackson will be an environmental tragedy for the Pearl wetlands and aggravate water drainage problems already prevalent in the city—and may well not stop the flooding.
A Simple Plan A plan to flood the green space between the Pearl River levees has been on the drawing board since 1995. Private investors, such as McGowan, want the federal government to partially fund the project through the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, but the corps initially blanched at the idea, citing high costs and environmental damage.
Then about two years ago, Waggoner Engineering and the Pearl River Basin Development District contracted the Corps of Engineers to take a more serious look at the environmental impact of putting the wetland areas between Rankin and Hinds Counties permanently underwater, and in July, the corps’ environmental feasibility study will tell both supporters and detractors alike how much the project will cost, whether or not it is a practical means to address flood control in the city, and how much environmental damage it will do.
Local city leaders, eager to drag in vital tax revenue and development, have expressed enthusiasm for the project. Ward 1 Councilman Ben Allen said: “I’m all for that plan. I think it would be a mistake if we didn’t approve of the Lefleur Lakes plan. The economic benefits of it are too great." Other city leaders, like Ward 4 and Ward 5 Councilmen Frank Bluntson and Charles Tillman, say they would simply like to see the city’s streets stay above water.
Heroes and their shovels The Rankin/Hinds Pearl River Flood and Drainage Control District is working in conjunction with Waggoner Engineering and other interested developers like McGowan and Mississippi Development Authority Director Leland Speed to end Jackson’s flood problems by caging the river.
The project is currently known as LeFleur Lakes, though some residents knew the project as Two Lakes or Twin Lakes, as developers have called it through the years. The current plan, similar to past versions, calls for two underwater dams beneath the Pearl, one almost directly under I-55 and another beneath Interstate 20, which would flood the shallow wetlands and create two lakes. Developers would also like to dredge the river mud, deepening the proposed lakebeds and dropping the resulting dredge in the middle of one lake, forming an island that McGowan says will bring in remarkable lakefront development. The plan also features bigger levees intended to protect the endangered floodplain.
McGowan has considerable faith in the project, having gone so far as to buy property along what could potentially be the Jackson side of the upper lake, in the northern portion of the city.
“Jackson is in serious need of new business, and this project would be a windfall for it,” McGowan said. “The city has been sitting by while businesses go to the suburbs and I, for one, would like to change that. The island inside the top lake, by itself, will be a magnet for development. You’ll see that area explode with development where there wasn’t any before. Who wouldn’t (see the benefit in) that?”
The Rankin/Hinds Pearl River Flood and Drainage Control District has big aspirations, and with many wealthy parties taking an interest, it has big money as well. The two-year Draft Environmental Impact Study with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, which was funded by the organization, cost $2.8 million, but McGowan says the whole project is affordable.
“I think it would cost about $130 million,” McGowan said. “For what it accomplishes, I think it’s a great investment.”
Less conservative estimates submitted by McGowan put the project at $173 million, but Robert Jones, a biologist at the Mississippi Museum of Natural Science, says any figure submitted so far is “only a small part of the whole possible cost.”
“I’ve heard that this thing is going to be substantially more than that. He’s probably just talking bout the dirt work. When you look at all the things that are going to have to be moved, including highways and pipes, an old city landfill, and other things, then $130 million is going to be pocket change compared to what will really be needed,” Jones said.
“What’s interesting to me," Jones continued, "is that you’ve got a lot of backers for the project, but a lot of the people pushing it stand to make substantial financial gains by owning the island. Why would the Corps allow private ownership of property within one of their boundaries? They don’t do that normally. In fact, the Corps is good for taking land through eminent domain for their projects, not handing it over to private owners.”
Mayor Melton stands behind the project, however, regardless of cost. In late March, he told a South Jackson neighborhood association that he plans to cure the city’s drainage ills with the lake project.
“There’s no doubt in my mind that this is a great project, and I’m backing it 100 percent,” Melton said. He told the Jackson Free Press in an April interview that he intends to let the engineers hash out the details.
Other local government officials are not so confident. Hinds County Emergency Management Director Larry Fisher said the LeFleur Lakes project takes little account of backwash pouring back into the city’s creeks, many of which are already at the same level as the Pearl River at its current depth. A taller river means taller creeks.
Fisher recalls the 2003 incident when Town Creek swilled down Irby Construction.
“The river at that time, even though it did a lot of damage, still was not at the height that the engineering firm working on this lake project is planning to make it,” Fisher said. “And as far as I know, they’ve only considered Town Creek, but we’ve got other creeks draining into the river. You’ve got Hanging Moss Creek, Eubanks Creek and so on. They’ll get higher if the river becomes a lake, and if we’d had a lake in 2003, downtown would’ve been a flat-out catastrophe.”
Installing backflow dams and station pumps in creeks all over Jackson would be expensive. The Corps said in 2005 that such pumps were not an economically practical method for relieving flooding of creeks.
McGowan argues that the creek issue can be resolved without expensive pumps.
“That’s all done with improving the water conveyance,” he said. He believes the lake will actually take “15 feet of flooding off those creeks.”
The Reluctant Corps So far, the Corps of Engineers has been unhelpful to developers. Corps officials, soon after submitting the environmental feasibility study for the 1996 levee plan, were cool toward the lake idea, rejecting it as an economic development project outside the purpose and scope of the Corps. The Corps, which is as single-minded as a hammer, had a job to control flooding in the city, not to build lakefront property.
“The Corps came out with a levee plan back in 1996, but there just wasn’t any local support for it really,” said Gary Walker, senior project manager with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. “There has to be a federal sponsor and a non-federal sponsor. The federal sponsor is the Corps, but there has to be a non-federal sponsor, a local unit of government that’s willing to adopt the project, and nobody stepped forward at the time.”
Local sponsorship seems to pivot on whether or not money is to be made from the project.
Cash has been an issue in the past, with Corps officials declaring the entire lake venture too costly for the federal government to plunk down tax dollars on it. Developers have faith in the new environmental feasibility study coming out in July, however, saying private developers will foot the enormous bill if the Corps will only sign off on the fundamental design in July.
New Money, Old Idea William McDonald, director of planning and special programs at Waggoner Engineering, said plenty of private money has interest in investing in the project. In addition, Jackson city planner Jimmy Heidel said recently that new legislation pushed by Reps. Chip Pickering and Bennie Thompson would re-open the possibility of federal money helping out with building costs.
Heidel said the legislation means that the Corps “shall”—which means it’s mandatory—"accept the adopted local plan, which takes it out of their hands."
“It’ll be our (local developers’) plan, and they shall adopt it,” he said. “We’re going to have to do the environmental assessment. We’ll have to do mitigation land for replacement of the wetlands we’re taking out, but this bill is going to be significant because it opens up many more areas of funding for us to go after instead of an appropriation through Congress to the Corps of Engineers to do this project.”
He added: “Also, this opens up USDA funding, HUD funding, a lot of other funding sources of the federal government instead of that one appropriation made to the Corps of Engineers.”
Paul Crowson, president of the Pearl River Basin Coalition, says he has countless major concerns about the project.
“If you remove the natural water retaining function in this area by developing it, it’s a common sense conclusion that this is going to aggravate flooding downstream in places like Columbia and Monticello,” Crowson said. “They want to replace the forest and wetlands with homes and streets and impermeable surfaces, so we’ll have more rapid run-off, which will increase the stream flow. The more rapid the run-off, the more water gets into the river quicker. Sure, it gets out of Jackson OK, but it only goes down the river and increases erosion downriver. Landowners down the river won’t be happy about that.”
The flooding Crowson describes relates to the Jackson floodplain as a buffer between the northern river and the southern river territory. Flood water tied up in an unpopulated Jackson swamp is not barreling out of the city and sweeping into communities further south along the river.
Trouble Downriver Monticello Mayor Dave Nichols was eager to speak about the project.
“If this project goes forward, it’ll put more water to the southern area below Jackson,” Nichols said, adding that the current situation was bad enough.
“We’ve already seen it happen. Look at all the development that’s taken place on Lakeland Drive. It has made the water move quicker, and if you come south, you’ll see all the sloughing that’s happened along the riverbanks. There’s a house just above Monticello; during the last big rain about a year ago they lost about 20 feet of the embankment. They had to vacate the house because the river is right up at their house now. I can show you another house where the bank has sloughed away about 16 feet, and there are other places all over. And it’s all because of increased development. So now we’re going to go and put this big island in the middle of the river and all this retail on it and probably a casino and I hate to think of what will happen.”
McDonald said he believed the Army Corps of Engineers had so far determined there would be no complications further downstream from the development.
“The flow in the river will not be changed as a result of this project,” McDonald said.
Environmentalists disagree, however, and point to the city of Jackson as an example of how development can cause flooding.
Crowson said Jackson was a victim of upstream development in 1979. Much of the Yockanookany’s upper course through Choctaw and Attala Counties had been straightened and channelized prior to the 1979 deluge. The rainwater, pouring into the Yockanookany, tore through this heavily processed corridor and came into Jackson with all the power that gravity could give it.
Former Mayor Dale Danks personally witnessed the destruction that year, telling reporters that he’d never seen the floodwaters coming. The river began rising on a day the skies above Jackson were clear and blue, almost tempting one to think that the city had dodged the bullet.
Danks got a lesson that year on hydrology, though the message might have dried up with the water. After watching the Pearl swallow the fairgrounds, he later approved the construction of The Oaks apartment complex on Ridgewood Road—well inside the river’s floodplain. When the apartments inevitably flooded in 1999, Danks represented the apartments' residents and won a $1.1 million settlement with the city.
Tom Pullen, a private contractor who does work with the Corps of Engineers, says the Corps is caught in the middle.
“The Corps did evaluate an initial version of the Lefleur Lakes plan and didn’t think much of it, but since then the politicians have gotten involved, and they’ve been directed to go back and study it. The question I would ask is: Once all these engineering studies are done, who is going to do the independent technical review of all this? The Corps process used to require an independent review of everything from an unrelated organization,” Pullen said. “It still should.”
The Corps is responsible for the preparation of the (EIS) Environmental Impact Statement, but Waggoner Engineering is supplying part of the work used to in compose the document. McDonald insists Waggoner has no influence over the resulting environmental statement.
“We do part of the work, but they’re obviously ultimately responsible for the document,” McDonald said.
What Have We Got to Lose? Cathy Shropshire, of the Mississippi Wildlife Federation, said the project should be about more than just the economy. Many developers, she says, are not taking into account the environmental loss the new lakes would mean to the metropolitan area.
“The forest and the wetland here provide natural filtration of the water as it runs off, but it also provides a buffer to noise pollution and it beautifies the city,” Shropshire said. “This is something that a lot of cities our size don’t have, and it would be a terrible loss to our children and future residents.”
Crowson said the Pearl River, with its abnormally low flow-rate and indigenous life, is too unique to put at further risk.
“There’s probably only a drop of a few feet between the head of the river and where it empties into the gulf, and the water doesn’t move very fast,” Crowson said. “Finding a comparison to this kind of development in a similar river is difficult. The ultimate conclusion is that we’ve searched high and low to find a comparison to a similar project, but there really isn’t one, which ought to say something about the value of this river.”
Any visitor who has hiked the trails in the LeFleur Bluff State park, along Hwy 55, knows that the park offers serene vistas, with ancient cypress trees, colorful birds and the occasional “plop” of a turtle or young alligator dropping off a log and into the water. Even the bald eagle, which has taken up residence in the Ross Barnett reservoir area, could stand a chance of extending its territory further south into the city-side green space if given a chance.
“Along this area, you’ve got some endangered species like the sawback turtle and the gulf sturgeon, and both are very rare. The sawback turtle can only be found in the Pearl River. It doesn’t even live up in the northern tributaries. It’s endangered, and this territory is one of the few spots where you have a significant population,” Jones said.
“You’re not going to find any other major cities in the entire country that have what we have in this state park and along the Pearl River. What you’ve got here is fairly old-growth forest, not virgin perhaps, but there are some big trees down here in the park and you don’t get that sort of thing in any major cities. And they want to put it all underwater.”
The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has a say when it comes to endangered species habitat loss, but Connie Dickard, public affairs specialist with the Fish and Wildlife Service, said the department was withholding any comment until the Corps of Engineers offers a preferred alternative plan, which will be released with the EIS feasibility study.
“We’re not out to stop anything. We want to work with project organizers to minimize the impact of the species affected, but we’ll wait to see the study before having an official position,” Dickard said.
Crowson predicted that if the river is left alone, what is now a shallow flood valley at the edge of Hinds County will become a green area in the middle of an exploding metropolis in the coming decades.
“This area will one day be like New York’s Central Park. Ask anybody in New York if they’d destroy their Central Park, and they would look at you like you were crazy,” Crowson said. “Go to the Mayes Lake section. Back in the woods, along the nature trail, you don’t smell the diesel fumes coming off the highway. This wide swath of natural forest and wetlands in the middle of the metro area serves this function. If we destroy it we’ll be more like Houston, Texas, where they’ve destroyed all their rivers and the air quality is terrible. People hate to live there.”
Jackson Endangered, Developers Dither? In the meantime, the Corps-approved levee plan of 1996 remains unfinished, leaving spots in North and South Jackson and Byram unprotected. The vulnerability of those areas was apparent as recently as three years ago.
“I had at least five inches of water in my house,” said North Jackson resident Denise Cami, who lives along Hanging Moss creek, which crosses beneath neighboring Ridgewood Road—a creek that she didn’t even know existed until it came out of the woods behind her backyard and came in to visit.
Young neighborhoods near Cami, on the east side of Old Canton Road, come dangerously close to the Pearl River. Some boast names like River Glen, River Cove and River Road. The names offer a clue to the insurance requirements for home ownership in that area, with many houses taking in water directly from the Pearl River when the river crested near 35 feet in 2003. Flood level is considered 28 feet.
Residents fear some of these homes will remain exposed and defenseless until some kind of plan is adopted by local sponsors—who seem to be holding out for the more costly but development-friendly Lefleur Lakes plan.
“Well, they’re going to have to pick something,” Jones said. “Because right now, we don’t have any flood control at all in some places.”
