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The La Conner Emergency Management Commission is wading through short-term options to mitigate flood threats on the La Conner waterfront and in low-lying residential neighborhoods, embracing a multi-tiered plan of attack ahead of next winter’s king tides.

The Town is in contact with the Upper Skagit Tribe to secure permission for placement of flood barriers on its south-end property between Caledonia and Sherman streets.

A walking tour led by Public Works Director Brian Lease to strategize barrier placements on La Conner’s north end, has been scheduled for July 25.

Lease is compiling cost estimates for sandbags and Ecology Blocks that can be used as retaining walls to withstand a 14-foot flood event like what the town experienced last December.

Borrowing from the decades-old real estate mantra, it is location, location, location that will influence where flood barriers are sited, Lease advised commissioners during their nearly one-hour June 27 session at Maple Hall.

“We have to make a decision,” he stressed, “where we’ll place flood protection walls that won’t hurt other properties.”

“We need to do an analysis for a short-term plan,” said commission chair Bill Stokes, “and send a recommendation to the (town) council.”

The town’s perimeter diking system must also be addressed as part of crafting long-range mitigation plans.

“We had a 14-foot event that topped Sullivan Slough,” he said, “but didn’t come across farmland. We got lucky there.”

Stokes cautioned that any effective long-range flood plan will be costly.

Commissioner Jamie Throgmorton said climate change adds another layer of complexity onto long-range flood protection efforts. She said the present concept of a 100-year-flood is based on events and conditions from the past couple centuries.

“I don’t think we’ve begun to deal with the rapid change we’ll see in the next 20, 50, or 80 years,” she said.

Nor are local short-term remedies without challenges, Stokes said.

“It’s much more complicated on the north end than the south end for a 14-foot event,” he said.

Throgmorton also raised another immediate topic within the commission’s purview – planning for operation of public cooling stations ahead of projected summer heat waves.

“We’re coming up on our hot season,” she said. “Maybe we need to get more specific now before the heat hits.”

Stokes said there are several identified cooling station locations – the school campus and La Conner Swinomish Library, among them – but without generators they offer little comfort if there is an area-wide power outage.

“If the power were to go out,” he lamented, “we’d have to move to a shady place in the park.”

Town Administrator Scott Thomas recalled 2021, saying, “Two years ago we had a heat wave and about a dozen people a day – perhaps a few more – came to the school. But last year we had no one.”

With much of the leg work completed on short-term flood protection plans, commission agreed to meet once rather than twice monthly.

The panel will now convene on the fourth Tuesday of each month, at 4:30 p.m., prior to the town council’s 6 p.m. meeting.