When it comes to flood control, it’s best to take the long view | McClatchy Washington Bureau

The United States was fighting World War II when lawmakers first wrote Merced County flood protection into law. It’s been there ever since.

On Thursday, the Senate extended the legacy.

In one small but regionally significant part of a much bigger bill, the Senate approved authorizing flood control studies along Merced County’s Black Rascal and Bear creeks. The action underscored the federal government’s long reach, in both time and space.

“We can get things done around here,” declared Sen. Barbara Boxer of California, the senior Democrat on the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee.

Boxer helped shepherd the Water Resources Development Act of 2016 through its Senate passage Thursday on a 95-3 vote. The straightforward Senate approval pressures the House of Representatives to complete its own version, possibly next week, so that lawmakers can negotiate a final compromise.

The overall Senate bill authorizes some 30 Army Corps of Engineers projects nationwide, as well as funding for safe drinking-water efforts in beleaguered Flint, Michigan. As initially passed by committee, the overall bill would cost $10.6 billion over 10 years.

“A sound infrastructure is essential to our nation,” Boxer said Thursday. “You can’t compete in a global environment with a crumbling infrastructure.”

Some notable differences, though, still separate lawmakers, such as how much to spend on Lake Tahoe restoration. The Senate bill authorizes $415 million over 10 years to support Tahoe-area forest management, invasive species suppression and other work, while the House bill does not yet do the same.

“Our bipartisan bill maintains the federal government’s commitment to Lake Tahoe and its role in the important collaboration between federal, state, local and private-sector partners,” Democratic Sen. Dianne Feinstein said Thursday.

Merced County flood control, on the other hand, already unites the two sides of Congress, whose members could get around to voting on a compromise package in a post-election lame duck session.

Both Senate and House bills authorize $1.55 million in federal funds to study improving levee performance and reducing the risk of levee failure along Black Rascal Creek and Bear Creek. Local, non-federal project supporters would provide an additional $1.45 million.

The proposal for additional improvements follows severe floods that did millions of dollars of damage, including flooding in 1998 that the Corps of Engineers estimated caused $10 million in damages throughout Merced County and in 2006, which the corps estimated caused $12 million worth of damage.

“There is a continued threat of major flooding and its associated damages to public facilities and infrastructure, agriculture, residential, commercial and industrial properties in the city of Merced and surrounding areas,” the Corps of Engineers said in a September 2015 assessment.

The state’s Central Valley Flood Protection Board, as well as Merced County officials, had backed the study. In a lobbying document circulated on Capitol Hill last May, Merced County officials warned that “more flooding will occur until the Black Rascal Creek flood control project comes to fruition, adding several degrees of urgency to this matter.”

The study, in turn, will lead to a so-called “Chief’s Report” from the Corps of Engineers, which, if positive, must be followed by further congressional authorization of the project itself. It will take time, as has the entire flood-control exercise.

Boxer, now 75, was 3 years old when Congress first authorized an initial round of $1.3 million for Merced County flood control work as part of a 1944 water projects bill. Then, as now, lawmakers stressed the pressing need.

“Hardly a week goes by but that you read in the paper of destruction caused by floods, so I do not look at this expenditure as money wasted,” then-Rep. Alfred J. Elliott, a Democrat from Tulare County, said during a May 8, 1944, debate.

If constructed, the Merced County projects are estimated by officials to cost about $30 million.