Floodplain expert to Decorah audience: "Do to people downstream as you would have people upstream do to you"
Posted: Tue, Jun 26, 2018 1:19 PM
The Director of the Center for Energy and Environmental Education at the University of Northern Iowa, Kamyar Enshayan, spoke to a crowd of just under 100 people at Luther College Wednesday night about floodplains, floods and zoning.
Enshayan served on the Cedar Falls City Council during the floods of 2008, then worked to revise the City of Cedar Falls' zoning ordinance regulations concerning floodplains. The new ordinance protected more land around the Cedar River.
Enshayan says many communities view floodplain land as "idle pieces of land not doing anything." But when Cedar Falls realized how much money the flooding of 2008 cost the community, it passed an ordinance which banned new housing subdivisions on land within the 500-year floodplain boundaries.
He told the audience at Luther College that Iowa's climate is changing, getting rainier. "The maps we created in the past are not as useful to us," he said. That led his community to come to the conclusion that "we shouldn't infringe on the floodplain."