Our contractor, partners, and Technical Working Group have been working to identify, define, analyze, and rank elements to reduce flood risk and restore habitat. Once the elements have been evaluated, they will be packaged into alternatives to be modeled to further flood protection benefits. We anticipate the Alternatives Memorandum, which explains the process for selecting elements and packaging into alternatives for modeling, will be posted to the website and ready for public review the first week of May.

The Memorandum and its findings will be presented at a public meeting of the Flood Control Zone #1 Advisory Board on May 7th, 6:30-8:30 p.m., at the Novato Fire Protection District Board Room, 7025 Redwood Blvd. Meeting materials will be posted to the Program website as soon as they are available.

Once public review is completed, the contractor will begin the modeling process, which will take most of the summer. A second community meeting will be scheduled this winter to review modeling results.

Flood Control 2.0 is a project of the San Francisco Estuary Partnership via a grant from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.  The Novato Creek watershed is one of its three focus areas.

The goal of the project is to develop a set of innovative approaches for bringing environmental benefits and cost-savings to flood protection infrastructure along the San Francisco Bay shoreline.

Through an interdisciplinary team linking regional science expertise with on-the-ground flood control agencies, the project will advance channel redesign to restore wetland habitat, water quality, and shoreline resilience through demonstration projects at three creek mouths: lower Novato, San Francisquito, and lower Walnut creeks.

For the Novato Watershed Program, Flood Control 2.0 convened a science technical review team meeting in 2013 to develop lower Novato Creek/bayland concepts, and has conducted an analysis of the historic ecology of lower Novato Creek. The historical ecology analysis will be presented at the May 14th community meeting; the report will be posted on the Novato Watershed Program website when it is finalized in late May. In 2016, the grant will fund modeling and final design of one project alternative.