A presentation at the stormwater management workshop displayed pages from The Record-Courier reporting flooding events through the decades on Wednesday.
"What's our next headline?" Stormwater Program Manager Courtney Walker asked. "Another flood event is coming."
Douglas County has a list of active $12.77 million in active grant applications that will require $1.9 million in matching funds. Only two of those grants have actual funding, including the Pamela Place detention basin. The $8 million Hot Springs Buckbrush Control System's grand match is partially funded.
County Manager Jenifer Davidson presented a $69.95 million laundry list of projects that don't have funding, including the $24.3 million Fish Springs Pinenut Creek Dam.
Douglas County has obtained basins at Redhawk and DenMar along the drainage of Pinenut Creek.
"We still have a large list of unfunded project," Davidson said on Thursday. "Everyone in this region is competing for the same pot of federal funds and we're not sure what the future of that grant funding is going to look like."
In 2019, Douglas County commissioners ordered that $1.1 million be dedicated to stormwater maintenance.
The first four years were spent bringing the county's stormwater division into operation. But costs just to operate the division have exceeded the $ 1.1 million and are expected to hit $1.56 million by fiscal year 2030-31.
"This is an untenable situation," Davidson said. "It is not fiscally sustainable."
That amount doesn't include any capital expenditures or $250,000 a year to maintain the flood basins.
"We would have to cut the services we just stood up and are providing today," she said. "I would think most people in this room would agree that is a step in the wrong direction. The work these guys are doing -- the football fields worth of rock, the community center worth of dirt, will sit where it was, unattended and is not being maintained. That is not a position you want the county to be in."
Davidson said that coming up with a funding source for stormwater could result in the county redirecting money to the roads.
Two options presented at Thursday's meeting included establishing a stormwater utility in the county that would charge based on impermeable surfaces. Where a home would be counted as one, a Walmart or similar structure might be 500, she said.
With an estimated 56,917 equivalent units in the county, $6 a month would generate $4 million a year.
The other option would be to implement a quarter-cent sales tax that would generated about $2.9 million, which isn't sufficient to cover the entire cost.
Commissioner Mark Gardner, said there was another option, that was to eliminate the division and move the $1.1 million to roads.
"I'm not advocating for that," he said. "I don't see that as an option. If we don't do something, our general fund is not going to solve this issue."
Retired UNR Cooperative Extension Water Resource Specialist John Cobourn, who has studied the Carson River watershed, said he prepared his first publication in 1995 after two years of Johnson Lane flooding.
Cobourn said that the mountains around Carson Valley are subject to intense thunderstorms in the summer that flow out onto the alluvial fans where residents of Johnson Lane and Ruhenstroth live.
He said he had pictures of 3-foot diameter boulders that rolled down the west side of Hot Springs Mountain in the 2014 flash flooding.
"Just having a good plan, while it's wonderful, we need to fund it," he said. "We know those projects need to go get estimates but with no way to fund them we won't be able to protect people."