Ashland city administrator Ken Eftink saw bad
planning create multimillion-dollar headaches for his hometown of Cape
Girardeau, he said, and doesn’t want the same thing to happen to
Ashland.
At Southern Boone County High School last night, Eftink told an
audience of about 20 that unregulated development around creeks and
watersheds not only destroyed natural areas, but helped flood Cape
Girardeau’s downtown and wash away homes in the late 1980s and early
1990s.
The presentation was hosted by the Community Storm Water Project, a
collaboration between Show-Me Clean Streams, Boone County and the city of
Columbia. Project education coordinator Tami Brunk, who introduced Eftink,
said this morning that many cities have experienced similar problems when
developers failed to take natural geography into account.
"When you have large areas of impervious surface like parking lots
and rooftops, and you destroy riparian corridors - the green spaces around
streams - it means that rain does not return to the ground
naturally," Brunk said. "Rather, it runs off into creeks in much
greater quantity, creating erosion and sometimes going places you don’t
want it, like people’s property."
"The years of everybody doing whatever they wanted eventually led
to disaster," Eftink said, showing aerial photos of Cape
Girardeau’s flooded downtown in 1986. He said the city had to invest $10
million to create storm-water channels and basins, aided by the U.S. Army
Corps of Engineers.
As a rapidly growing city, Eftink said, Ashland must not make the same
mistakes.
Eftink recommended several ways the city could build around natural
geography, including building codes and subdivision regulations. Green
space around roads and subdivisions not only aesthetically improves
development, he said, but also minimizes erosion and flooding.
Zoning is a major component of Eftink’s proposals, and the Ashland
city council is expected to pass an ordinance Tuesday creating two new
zoning categories specifically for the land around Columbia Regional
Airport. The categories of Airport Planned Commercial Districts and
Airport Planned Industrial Districts would apply only in the 840 acres of
land that Ashland annexed last August, an annexation that stretched a
finger of Ashland territory to and alongside the airport
