Flooding and Fragmentation: How Physical Features Structure Political Conflict Over Flood Control in California’s Pajaro Valley

Abstract

The Pajaro River on California’s Central Coast has flooded repeatedly over the past 40 years, causing millions of dollars of flood damages. The original levee system, expanded and rebuilt in 1949 by the U.S. Army, was designed based on insufficient hydrologic data, and local efforts to reconstruct it and maintain the flood channel have been tangled up in inter-jurisdictional discord. The chief political boundaries between the four counties in the watershed are based on physical features: the river itself and the mountains created by the San Andreas Fault. The four counties in the watershed all have different stakes in flood protection and different geographies of taxation, hobbling efforts to prevent further flooding. The unusual geography of the watershed resists efforts to structure an equitable taxation scheme, further illustrating the problem of managing rivers that serve as political boundaries. Efforts to build consensus about taxation schemes within the basin will likely be more successful if they focus on the ecosystem services provided to the upstream counties by flood control measures in the downstream counties.