An estimated $349 million in new flood mitigation projects in a 577-square-mile watershed area have been recommended in a four-year study that Georgetown and several Central Texas partner agencies are close to finalizing. The majority of those projects are located within Georgetown’s city limits or extraterritorial jurisdiction, or ETJ. Doucet + Chan and Schiebe Consulting, both of Austin, completed research and analysis for the Georgetown-San Gabriel River Flood Protection Planning Study, which was developed through a partnership among the cities of Georgetown, Leander and Liberty Hill as well as the Texas Water Development Board and Williamson County. The study should be finalized by the end of May, said Ivan Ortiz, a mitigation specialist with the Texas Water Development Board. Ortiz said flood-risk studies help communities understand where their flood-prone areas are located and can often provide more current information than flood plain maps updated by the Federal Emergency Management Agency. “Communities grow so quickly these days, and they have so much increased impervious cover that they end up with a lot more runoff in their watershed they anticipated five years earlier,” Ortiz said. Meanwhile, FEMA issued a preliminary flood insurance study report and a flood insurance rate map March 6 that reflects proposed flood hazard determinations within Williamson County, including the cities of Austin, Cedar Park, Coupland, Georgetown, Hutto, Leander, Round Rock and Taylor. FEMA’s report and map should be finalized in spring 2019. The San Gabriel River study’s area covers 175.5 miles of rivers and streams and accounts for about one-quarter of Williamson County’s total land area and about one-fifth of Burnet County’s land area. About 66 percent of land in the study area is undeveloped. The watersheds included in the draft study have seen continued flooding problems ranging from localized storms to Tropical Storm Hermine in 2010. Flood-risk consultants proposed 62 mitigation projects to address flooding issues in the watersheds and puts a total construction cost estimate for all of the projects at more than $349 million. Of those projects, 46 are located in Georgetown’s city limits and ETJ. Georgetown-specific projects account for $229 million of the study’s total estimated project costs. Wesley Wright, systems engineering director for the city of Georgetown, said he was initially surprised at the total price tag for all projects recommended in the study. But he said a large percentage of the proposed projects involved roadwork such as bridge construction and roadway improvements as opposed to work related to streams and waterways. “When you look at it, a lot of projects were actually roadwork projects,” Wright said. The 100-year flood plain model developed for the study mirrors in many ways the city of Georgetown’s existing flood plain model that was developed about two decades ago, Wright said. Wright said he found it surprising that despite the surge in development growth over the past two decades, the city’s flood mitigation and drainage system has not eroded to a significant extent, although expanded development has brought some impact, Wright said. A lot of the proposed projects will not be funded right away, and some may never be funded, he said. When it comes to funding, the study should help cities and counties by providing analysis and data to back up project recommendations that could be eligible for grants, said Mike Segner, manager of the flood-mitigation planning department for the Texas Water Development Board. “A lot of these studies turn into leverage [for cities] to apply for federal grants through the federal mitigation assistance grant program,” Segner said.