Bureaucracy At Its Best

Update: Read about bureacractic ineptness and body-collecting here.

This may be hard to imagine in our modern age, but let's say a river overflows and some homes are flooded. If this were to occur, one would expect that government agencies would want to quickly make some fixes so the situation won't repeat itself.

Wrong. In the wonderful world of government bureaucracy, little fixes create big problems. The San Jose Mercury News reported last week:

Good news and bad news for the residents of 1,700 homes flooded in the deluge of February 1998, when San Francisquito Creek jumped its banks as it ran through Palo Alto, Menlo Park and East Palo Alto.

The good news is that the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and local congressional delegations have thrown their support behind a $6.6 million, four-year study to figure out how to alter the 45-square-mile watershed that stretches from the Santa Cruz Mountains to San Francisco Bay to avoid a repeat. The bad news is that the actual work on the creek is still many years away.

Stop a second. That's four years just to do the study. Then the engineering, the environmental impact reports, the funding ... residents better pray for a dry decade. But wait, as they say in the infomercials, there's more.

In the meantime, it's unlikely that small "fixes'' at specific spots on the creek will go forward, officials said Wednesday night at an unusual meeting of elected officials from three cities and two counties.

Officials cited two reasons for avoiding minor fixes, such as installing flood walls at certain spots along the creek or raising the small bridges that cross the creek and hinder the flow of water when it runs high.

First, preventing the creek from overflowing in one spot pushes the water to jump the banks further downstream. "If you plug something up, the water's going to pop out somewhere else,'' said Greg Zlotnick, a board member of the Santa Clara Valley Water District, who represents Palo Alto.

Second, making small improvements could harm the chances of getting the larger project funded, said Cynthia D'Agosta, the executive director of the San Francisquito Creek Joint Powers Authority. Reducing the property damage that could result from a flood might alter the cost-benefit ratio of the larger project, causing the Corps of Engineers to have second thoughts about funding, she said.

Got that? Federal funding methods actually penalize protecting people until the big project with the proper cost-benefit ratio can be approved. And imagine this: People expect government to protect them!