Flooding in Elk Grove demonstrates how the city council, city staff often disregard informed residents concerns




Most people have heard the saying You Can't Fight City Hall. While regular citizens on occasion will score a victory, especially if donors have no involvement in the topic, the expression endures because that is often the case. 

Yesterday's Northern California Atmospheric River weather event demonstrated a case where residents' concerns were not only routinely dismissed by city officials; those concerns came to fruition. Ironically, as you can see in this video, residents expressed these exact concerns less than two weeks ago at the October 13 meeting of the Elk Grove City Council.



In this case, city council members and city officials for over 15 years were dismissive of citizens' concerns regarding the Silverado Village subdivision located on the northwest corner of Waterman and Bond roads in Elk Grove. The development has a long tortured history that includes a shady sweetheart sale of public land to developers, toxic waste on the site, and not surprisingly to the residents of the adjacent Quail Ranch subdivision, poor drainage, and accompanying flooding concerns.

As if the weather gods were making a point to the city council and city staff for their dismissiveness, the atmospheric River storm yesterday validated long-held concerns of these constituents. Dirty brown water rapidly flowed from the recently graded Silverado Village to Bond Road, which was at one point was submerged, to the east side streets of Quail Ranch, which become strongly flowing brown water rivers.

Luckily there were no injuries and no significant structural damage, but many vehicles may have sustained damage. This time.

It's too bad the city council members were not able to experience this anxiety firsthand. Perhaps then they would not be so dismissive. 

As long as they are on the take from big donors and developers, the city council will continue to dismiss constituent concerns, and the city staff who know who butters their bread will happily go along. It is too bad they ignore genuine life-threatening flooding concerns from many informed constituents and accepted everything offered to them by their donors as Gospel.     

Is it too much to ask city council members to listen and act in the interest of constituents and not their donors? As this case show, it is.  



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3 comments

D.J. Blutarsky said...

All I need to see are a couple photo-ops with our leaders wearing hard hats and holding shovels for proof that they are on the job and taking care of us! Too bad Kubota wasn't up and operating, we coulda used them too!

Capt. Benjamin Willard said...

It is not hard to believe the city council would disregard the residents of Quail Ranch. Recall when the California Northstate University hospital was proposed, proponents and even some of the city council and professional staff tried to minimize the glaring deficiency that they want to construct that massive structure in a flood plain.

D.J. Blutarsky said...

See, BSA said that "all systems worked as planned".

Bobbie Singh-Allen for Mayor
Like This Page · 23 mins ·


Toured some of the sites that experienced localized flooding with City staff. All of the water has receded. All of the systems worked as planned. Thank you to our staff and police department for working round the clock to keep us safe

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