June 14th Meeting Minutes

Board members in attendance: Bill Burrows, Mile Elliot, Len Karson, and Glenn Wiorek.

Mike introduced Glenn Wiorek our new 7th board member. He is our 6th ward representative as well as webmaster.

Glenn gave a quick overview of http://www.dpfloodaction.org the new DPFA group intern website. He also discussed where he wanted to take the website in the future. The plan is to build on the new site taking what we have now and offering many social networking features - interactive polling, discussion forums, calendars, better event tracking, comments, etc...

Len Karson gave a presentation on the results of the last survey. Many concerns where on Levee 37 and 51 and the heritage park water retention area. 70% said the DPFA group was also felt that we helped. 66% of the responses favored continuing with guest speakers. Action item while area dependant where helpful.
Ideas where: Pressure the city to step up drainage/sewer repairs, getting schools doing flood control studies , home buyout study, Clean river and reopen run off at turn off before Big Ben. Len suggest we do a survey related to these to see what to start petitioning. Suggest review the FEMA approved city flood action plan, Home buyouts study, would 3 inch lowering of big bend lake really help. Many had concerns as to why they didn’t seem to get any property taxes relief. While the assessed tax value went down the tax multiplier increased causing a tax increase. A member said that anyone south of Oakton should apply for tax relief for airport noise.

Bill Burrows gave a presentation of tracking of the river levels. Years of channeling of the river and years of construction without water storage compensation and dubious zoning changes that have allow business to bypass things. The last 35 years the level at flood levels at moderate or higher flood levels. Felt the two best options where to build flood walls or housing buy outs. A sub group of DPFA is studying the housing buy out in the big bend.

First action item is to pursue an engineering university doing flood control studies.

Second action item - We will be sending an email out to all with a quick poll based on the surveys and tonight's meeting. The survey will also be available on-line and it may be the main place to vote at the next meeting we will state the rankings, maybe take another vote and get the petitions rolling. This will let us know what the top things to pursue and base those petitions on.

Some of those items are -

A) A housing buy out study to compare costs between buyouts and other measures like flood walls.

B) Put pressure on Army core to step up their phase II plan,

C) Reviewing the DP Disaster plan and presentation to the city official to improve things during flooding - where sandbags are delivered, why they not filled with 2 auto fillers machines and other means to help to fill the bags. Also to police the sandbag areas as people from outside of Des Plaines have been taking our sand.

D) Is the 22 million worth it to lower big bend 3 inches when the water levels rise 6 or more feet above flood levels?

E) Keep the pressure on to try to speed up the water retention area for levee 37 in Mt Prospect.


It was also asked to find out if all the storm drains the empty into the river have check valves to prevent backflow.

Glenn Wiorek has permission to use the Riverside Flood group web site's government contact page and their template petitions/letters. He will be adding them to the website. He also plans to set up the survey on-line.