Butte County Grand Jury
• 2024-2025
• Agency Response
Ditches, Disease, and Delay: Palermo's Flooding Failures*
⚠️ Translation Notice: This content has been automatically translated. The original English text is the official version. Translation may contain errors.
⚠️ Este contenido ha sido traducido automáticamente. El texto original en inglés es la versión oficial. La traducción puede contener errores.
Findings and Recommendations 2 findings
F5
solve the flooding in Palermo, including an excellent study by West Yost. Response: The respondent agrees with the finding. Butte County Public Works has grant writing expertise but sometimes must also rely on outside grant
No recommendations for this finding
F6
writers with its implied additional expense. Other county departments rely mainly on outside grant writers but would favor using county grant writer staff who are currently overworked. Response: The respondent disagrees with the finding. The Department cannot specifically confirm the expertise of Public Works' staff and whether or not other County departments rely mainly on outside grant writers for grant procurement activities. The Department does have staff with grant-writing expertise, and depending on the timing and level of effort, staff may prepare and submit grant applications. The Department also has on-call professional and engineering services contracts with consultants that can provide grant support services.
Related Recommendations (1)
R6
The Grand Jury recommends that the Butte County Board of Supervisors establish a Palermo Task Force by October 15, 2025. Response: The recommendation will not be implemented by the Department of Water and Resource Conservation because it is not warranted. The Department has conducted several public meetings and workshops for the Palermo Clean Water Consolidation Project, Palermo Drainage Master Plan Project, and the Wyandotte Creek Groundwater Sustainability Agency (GSA) Regional Conjunctive Use Project, a project intended to use existing irrigation and stormwater conveyance facilities to transport surface water supplies to agricultural users in the subbasin. The meetings provided status updates for each of these projects. Notifications of the meetings were provided via press releases, mailed flyer notifications, the Department's listserv, social media, and banners located at key locations within the Palermo community. In addition, the Department has coordinated with other County departments including Administration, Public Works and Environmental Health regarding Palermo matters related to drainage, groundwater, and infrastructure concerns. The Department provides regular status updates to the Board of Supervisors, Water Commission, and Wyandotte Creek GSA Board of Directors. The Grand Jury recommends that the Butte County Board of Supervisors establish a Butte County Flood
* This report's PDF did not contain easily extractable text and required Optical Character Recognition (OCR) for analysis. There may be minor errors in the extracted findings and recommendations due to OCR limitations with scanned documents.