Plan a risky gamble that city will lose

Recent advice for Everett’s Riverfront Project planners to revisit their “century flood” figures was right on (June 19 letter, “City must seriously revamp flood plan”). But the writer was flogging a dead horse. The riverfront project today is driven more by visions of tax dollars than by flood-hazard concerns.

My own “heads-up” to Everett on mounting river dangers was submitted in 50 pages of photos, graphics, documentation and personal descriptions of river behavior at Lowell over the past 70 years. It got the regulation denial that the river was a growing danger, or that a plan revamping to river-integrated, flow-through systems was warranted (Plan Option No. 3).

As it now stands, the Riverfront Development Plan is a gamble in which future lives and properties are placed at certain risk for near-term dollars. Is this the legacy that Everett’s administration really wants history to record? One wouldn’t think so.

Everett has never had much luck playing poker with the river. I regard the present plan as the second-worst mistake in Everett planning history.

The worst occurred in the 1890s. Whereas the current plan merely under-appreciates the river, early Everett tried to shut it off entirely (Everett Herald, Jan. 25, 1894). Jetty Island is the plan’s tombstone.

ALEX G. ALEXANDER

Everett