An Appeal-Democrat reporter asked if the meeting was public and was met with confusion from DWR officials. At first, three Yuba City councilmembers and three Sutter County Supervisors left the room as to not violate the Brown Act; some visibly upset as the city posted that it was public. In the end, the Appeal-Democrat was welcomed into the room for the public elected officials briefing.]]
The hour-long briefing addressed a handful of concerns from Yuba-Sutter's elected officials, ranging from inundation maps to compensation to communication. Though elected officials thanked DWR for helping host the meeting and answer questions, as a whole, they voiced their discontent with the lack of communication.
Jason Banks, mayor of Live Oak, was troubled by the lack of public trust in DWR.
"We stood there the Friday before the evacuation and said, 'it's alright, you can trust DWR,'" Banks said. "Y'all made liars out of us. We need to be able to see it before we put our name on it that it's OK ... We need to understand what the rationale was in telling us one thing and doing another."
Yuba City Economic Development and Public Affairs Official Darin Gale said this briefing was the first direct contact the city had had with DWR.
"There was zero communication between the city and DWR," Gale said. "We request a seat at the table."
Yuba City Fire Chief Pete Daley asked that moving forward, DWR needs to clear up which inundation maps would be most accurate for the city to use from a public safety standpoint.
Erin Mellon, communications and outreach advisor for the California Natural Resources Agency, said DWR is working on setting up a public viewing platform as well as "dam cams" that will feed live video of the repair work onto the website and into the Visitor's Center.
Christy Jones, acting deputy director of security and emergency management program for DWR, spoke to the minute-by-minute changes in the situation.
"We were basing everything on a forecast," Jones said. "We expected a peak of 160,000 cfs… and we got 194,000 cfs."
Jones said the department was also fighting the eroding hill as the spillway was spilling over, and their emergency response plan counted on a "sunny day dam failure," not a spillway failure.
But DWR officials pointed to the "silver lining" of the emergency spillway incident, given it was the wettest year on record and there weren't any major levee breaks.
The plan, the department said, is to get the spillway operationally back to the status prior to the evacuation by Nov. 1, before flood season hits the area again.
Local officials stressed the importance of transparency and communication going forward.
"This community suffered greatly during this evacuation," said Sutter County Supervisor Mat Conant. "I just hope this fix is done in a way that this doesn't happen again."
*See Thursday's paper for a story covering the rest of the community meeting.
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