San Joaquin County Public Works has been focused on improving its levy system for many years.

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After working for more than five years in Marin County, Calif.’s Public Works department during a time when the county was officially deemed a disaster area three times due to flooding, Tom Flinn knows how to revitalize an organization that relies heavily on public support.

Flinn joined San Joaquin County Public Works 20 years ago, and has been director for the past seven years, he says. While working in Marin County, he gained experience working with the federal government performing relief work, and places a high level of importance in flood control issues.

“The two hottest areas of our organization today are related to water resources,” Flinn explains. “We need to secure new supplies of water for the county, and the other issue is to ensure people are protected from flood flows when there’s too much water.”

Since Hurricane Katrina, he says, more emphasis has been placed on waterways and flood control issues – particularly in San Joaquin/Sacramento Delta areas such as San Joaquin County, located east of the San Francisco Bay Area. “The county sits right on the edge of a delta here, and the area has a lot in common with the delta where New Orleans is located,” Flinn says. “We have levies that surround the metropolitan area, and if they were damaged, the area could be covered in up to 12 feet of water.”

Gaining Public Support
The organization has been focused on improving its levy system for many years, and developed a group devoted solely to discussing flood-control issues. “We worked together with our cities, flood control agencies and Reclaimation Districts to develop a list of common goals, and we’ve been able to put together some funding to upgrade the levies,” he says. “FEMA has been very happy with the way we’ve responded.”

However, whenever the organization embarks on a new venture or project, it does not move forward without the concurrance of the community.

“We work very hard to make sure the constituents understand what is being done, and we listen to their views and try to incorporate those into the project as best we can,” Flinn explains. “That’s a real strength of our process. This is the department of public works, and we’re here to service the public. We always try to keep the citizens needs in mind. We promote that throughout the organization, to make sure our employees remember who is our customer.”

When the organization first began updating the county’s flood maps, it put together a series of newsletters that were sent to the public. “We will also set up a number of community meetings throughout the county,” Flinn states.

Infrastructure Funding
The biggest problem today is that the services provided by the public works departments nationwide are often taken for granted.

“The public expects to turn on the faucet and have water be there, and they expect no potholes in their roads and no traffic delays,” Flinn says. “What many people don’t realize is that all these things that we provide are not free.

“I think our fathers and grandfathers’ generations had the discipline to properly invest in infrastructure but, starting in about the 1960s, we started disinvesting in not only improvements, but also maintenance in bridges and roads,” he continues. “As a nation, we have not made the investments in infrastructure that we need to make.”

Although Congress has allocated more funding for bridge repair and maintenance since the I-35 bridge collapse in Minneapolis, there is still a long way to go, Flinn says. “We are always trying to educate the public, to get them to understand the importance of infrastructure funding,” he explains. “All too often, we expect the government to provide services, but we don’t understand the relationships with the citizens to the whole process.”

The organization plans to stay ahead of the needs of the community, while educating the public on important issues as much as possible, Flinn explains. “We always try to be at the forefront of where issues are going in the county, while making sure we serve the public as best we can,” he says.