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Board: Upper Bear Creek flood-control project cleared to resume after federal review
Summary
Madison County supervisors announced five-minute-old approval from USDA-NRCS allowing the $26.3 million Upper Bear Creek flood-control project to resume construction and contract payments.
Madison County supervisors announced during the May 5 meeting that the Upper Bear Creek flood-control project has been cleared by the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS) to pay outstanding contracts and resume construction.
The board received an on-the-record message from county staff that the NRCS had authorized continuation of the project “for the life of the contract.” The project — described in the meeting as a roughly $26.3 million flood-control effort serving parts of Madison, Gluckstadt and Canton — had been paused in January 2025 pending federal review. The board was told the pause had passed through multiple federal review steps, including OMB and USDA, and that the project may now proceed.
County officials said the project will remove several hundred houses from the floodplain in some phases and that design and construction teams should move quickly now that federal approval has arrived. Board members credited recent lobbying and outreach by county representatives and federal delegates for the clearance.
The announcement was delivered during the public-business portion of the meeting and recorded as a staff update. No specific next-step schedule or construction timeline was presented in the meeting minutes; supervisors urged engineers to accelerate work where possible.
