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Kossuth County board weighs adding $20,000 riprap repairs to Pac 1 ditch project
Summary
County board members discussed whether to add repairs to the Pac 1 ditch project after staff identified failing bank sections that may require roughly $20,000 in riprap; staff said a contract change order is needed and homeowners could do prework only with county requirements; no formal vote was taken.
At a board meeting, Kossuth County members discussed whether to add repairs to the Pac 1 ditch project after staff identified failing bank sections that could require riprap material estimated at about $20,000.
The discussion matters because the county would need a contract change order before any additional work and because the failing sections sit downstream of private properties, meaning repairs or inaction could affect neighboring landowners and project costs. Committee members also raised whether the county should coordinate a joint decision with Palo Alto County.
The meeting opened with a brief procedural announcement: the Chair said, "We're back from closed session where no decision was made in session or out of session," and asked the board for direction on a same-day open records request. The substantive exchange that followed focused on field observations and next steps for the Pac 1 ditch repairs.
A staff member told the board that any additional work would require a contract change or change order and that formal approval is not required until that change order stage. The staff member said crew evaluations since the flood three years ago show some repair sites are worse than originally scoped and warned that "some of these spots that we don't do anything about will continue to get worse." He estimated material costs, saying the bank repair "would be down to almost $20,000 worth of riprap."
Board members asked for more precise location information. The staff member identified the site as just south of County Road 18, downstream from nearby private land, and offered to join Palo Alto County representatives for an on-site coordination call next week to align engineering and contracting decisions.
The transcript also recorded a landowner question relayed by a committee member about hiring private work crews to fill a washout before the county places riprap. The staff member said the county is not planning to backfill the hole and then cover it with riprap because that approach would "dramatically increase the project cost"; instead, crews would typically reshape the bank. He added that a landowner could hire someone to perform prework only if they meet county requirements for compaction and do not alter the design cross section: "You can't just dump loads of loose dirt in there." The staff member said he would bring any proposal to the board for approval rather than unilaterally authorizing the private work.
No motion or vote on adding the repairs to the contract was recorded in the transcript. The committee member and staff agreed to coordinate with Palo Alto County and to pursue engineering follow-up the next week; the staff member said he would be in Evansburg and could join a meeting with Palo Alto County officials.
Next steps recorded in the discussion: staff will coordinate with Palo Alto County officials, prepare the engineering details needed for a potential change order, and return to the board with a formal change-order recommendation. The board did not take a formal action during the recorded exchange.
