Cal. WAT § 12645 — California Code / Code wat / Division 6 / Part 6 / Chapter 2 / Article 2 / Section 12645
Section 12645
Status: in_force

The Legislature finds and declares all of the following:

(a) In 1911, the Legislature adopted a flood control plan for the Sacramento Valley, as proposed by the federal California Debris Commission, and created the Reclamation Board to regulate levees and other encroachments, and to review and approve flood control plans for the Sacramento River and its tributaries. The state’s adoption of a valleywide flood management plan was intended to create a unified plan of flood control and to reclaim lands from overflow. Six years later, California gained congressional authorization for the United States Army Corps of Engineers (Corps) to collaborate with the state in building and maintaining the Sacramento River Flood Control Project. The federal government transferred completed portions of the Sacramento River Flood Control Project to the state as portions were completed, and the state, in turn, passed responsibility for operation and maintenance to local districts organized to provide flood control within their boundaries.

(b) The state and federal governments have built or rebuilt levees, weirs, and bypasses to increase conveyance of flood waters downstream. The Sacramento River Flood Control Project and the federal-state flood control project in the San Joaquin Valley include approximately 1,600 miles of levees and other facilities to reduce central valley flood risk, now defined as the State Plan of Flood Control in subdivision (j) of Section 5096.805 of the Public Resources Code. The Corps often constructed federal “project levees” in both the Sacramento and San Joaquin River watersheds by modifying existing levees. The federal government transferred completed portions of the Sacramento River Flood Control Project to the state, as portions were completed, which in turn passed responsibility for operation and maintenance to local reclamation districts.

(c) In 2003, a state Court of Appeal in Paterno v. State of California (2003) 113 Cal.App.4th 998 (Paterno), held the state liable, in a claim for inverse condemnation, for failure of a levee that was operated and maintained by a local levee maintenance district. In settlement of that litigation, the state’s liability was substantial because homes and a shopping center were built behind the levee and suffered from the resulting flood.

(d) The Legislature has authorized funding for numerous flood control projects throughout the Sacramento and San Joaquin River watersheds. These statutory authorizations included varying provisions regarding responsibility and liability for operation and maintenance of the flood control facilities, and may or may not have incorporated the specified facilities into the federal-state Sacramento River or San Joaquin River flood control projects. After the court ruling in Paterno, the status of each flood facility became critically important to determining liability, and legal ambiguities led to questions about whether particular facilities were incorporated into a federal-state flood control project. In some cases, despite a location between two project levees, certain levees remain outside the jurisdiction of a federal-state flood control project, with local agencies retaining liability.

(e) In 2006, California voters approved the Disaster Preparedness and Flood Prevention Bond Act of 2006, which authorized the issuance of general obligation bonds in the amount of $4.9 billion for flood protection and defined the Sacramento River and San Joaquin River federal-state flood control projects as the “State Plan of Flood Control.” The following year, the Legislature passed a package of bills to reform state flood protection policy in the central valley. These laws required the Department of Water Resources to develop, and the Central Valley Flood Protection Board to adopt, a Central Valley Flood Protection Plan, which is broader than the State Plan of Flood Control, affecting the entire watersheds of the Sacramento and San Joaquin Valley. These laws included provisions intended to limit state liability to facilities identified in the State Plan of Flood Control. These laws did not specifically address the facilities described in this article.