State, Business Officials Back Plan to Get Federal Flood Alleviation Money

Local officials are stepping up their efforts to alleviate flooding in the Passaic River Basin.

“It’s a crisis problem. It’s a new normal and that new normal is crippling this area,” said Assemblyman Scott Rumana, who was flanked by several local business leaders at a press conference Thursday.

“It’s a problem that’s so massive that needs real attention and needs real money and we have to get our federal officials motivated to bring the money here to solve it.”

Officials have put a petition online urging President Obama to prioritize alleviating flooding in the Basin in his Fiscal Year 2013 budget. (The petition can be found at: http://www.floodpetition.com.) A hard copy of the petition has been passed around the Basin for several weeks. Officials said they would send all of the signed petitions to Obama in the next few weeks, before he sends his 2013 Fiscal Year budget to Congress for approval.

Rumana said that in the past 110 years, five of the eight worst area floods have occurred since 2005.

Area businesses have been hard hit by flooding in the past six years, especially since March 2010, especially in the Mountainview Section of Wayne and in Pompton Plains and Pequannock.

“We’re going to see a very troubling economic death if we don’t find a way to solve the problem in the region,” Rumana said. “You’re not going to solve this by buying out a couple of homes in the most devastated areas. That’s not solving anything.”

Rumana said that, according to the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, the area has sustained $3 to $4 billion in economic losses since 2005.

Bryan Hekemain, executive vice president of Hekemian & Co., Inc., which owns Plaza 23, a strip mall on Route 23 North with A&P, HomeGoods, and TJ Maxx. Hekemian said 42 inches of water seeped into the stores during the flooding caused by Hurricane Irene in August. He said his company is still working on opening the three anchor stores. The stores were rebuilt in 2010 and have had to been rebuilt again this year.

Gill Bankstow, general manager of Willowbrook Mall, said the mall was closed 13 days this year due to flooding.

Bankstow said the mall lost “tens of millions of dollars” in sales due to Hurricane Irene.

“If you lose a certain number of tenants you fall below a threshold, if we lose too many tenants, the anchor stores can pull out. If the anchor stores pull out, we’ve got no mall,” Bankstow said.

In total, the mall and the surrounding businesses pay approximately $8 million annually in property taxes, Rumana said.

Bankstow said that no stores have threatened to move out of the mall, perspective tenants are told how much the area has flooded and how severe it has gotten. No tenants have left the mall due to flooding, but a few new ones almost pulled out of their deals.

Officials said that two solutions to the flooding have been proposed: Constructing flood walls and a system of levies or installing a drainage tunnel that would transport floodwater out to Newark Bay. Several local and state officials have proposed the tunnel as a solution for years. Rumana said officials estimated the tunnel to cost about $1.9 billion.

“We are putting very little dollars into solving the problem,” said Little Falls mayor Mike DiFrancisci. “For all the mitigation efforts that we have made we still have not solved the problem.”