Members of the Krizek Park Advisory Committee heard informally from an engineer May 31 during their second meeting at Ellsworth City Hall about the feasibility of backfilling the south detention basin and planting grass.

Brian Foster, an engineer with BG Consultants in Manhattan, said while he has both the original plans and the modified plans for the basin, he did not get a drainage report.

“Which is a major piece of this,” he said. “I just came here tonight to kind of understand what you guys are looking for, maybe see how we can help and offer some opinions.”

Foster said he has a couple of concerns.

“Obviously, whenever you fill something in and you take up capacity, you increase the frequency of whatever flooding you are trying to prevent,” he said. “There could be some things, maybe, to mitigate that.

Maybe you could increase storage somewhere else. Maybe you could increase the height of, basically, the dam.”

Another concern, which may or may not be related to the basin, involves increasing the area of downtown being in the floodplain.

“What it appears is that a substantial portion of the downtown area is now in the 100year floodplain,” Foster said.

“That’s going to require flood insurance and all those other things that go along with it.”

Foster said he wasn’t 100 percent sure if the plan for the basin was intended to mitigate that or not.

“Anything that is done from an engineering standpoint that FEMA (Federal Emergency Management Agency) is going to recognize has to be done through them, and there is a process they go through. You basically have to get a letter of map revision to do an engi- neered solution of moving the floodplain maps around. That could be a totally separate issue.”

Foster said if FEMA were to recognize the detention basin project, there would be the potential to reduce the amount of impact to the downtown area because the floodplain mapping appears to show the increase in area for downtown Ellsworth is probably coming from the north, and not the Smoky Hill River to the south.

Foster noted, however, he wasn’t sure if FEMA would recognize the project.

“That is a question that should be asked of FEMA,” he said.

“We are,” answered Ellsworth City Administrator Dustin Stambaugh.

Foster said if FEMA doesn’t recognize the project, then they are not going to change their floodplain maps.

“You can still do improvements to mitigate against actual flooding, but those people in that area will have to get flood insurance,” he added.

“It’s not just the FEMA insurance that is my concern,” Stambaugh said. “The other concern about that too is it will pretty much halt all of the future improvements.”

Foster said BG Consultants could provide the group with an opinion on backfilling the south basin.

“Obviously, it was filled in before and it wasn’t a problem then,” he said.

While it is a very dry time now, Foster said it’s hard to say in a wet year how much the water table is going to rise.

He recommended getting a geologist involved.

Foster said what he talked about at the meeting could be two different projects. First, a project to aesthetically fill in the south basin, and second, a project to mitigate the flooding of the flood map in the downtown area.

After some further discussion, the consensus of the group was to get a geology report and continue working with Foster on the process. In addition, a ballpark estimate will be figured, with an eye towards budgeting for the project, and an application for FEMA grants will be completed.

“It’s a good start,” board member Michael Walsh said.

The group tentatively plans to meet again in three weeks for a goalsetting meeting.