The Los Angeles County Flood Control District has a message for the federal government: Thank you, but we’ll take it from here.

The keepers of more than 500 miles of the Los Angeles, San Gabriel and Rio Hondo rivers — mostly concrete passages steering storm runoff away from homes and streets into catch basins and ultimately the ocean — want to take over about 40 miles of channels owned and operated by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.

By a unanimous vote of the Board of Supervisors on Tuesday, the district and the county Department of Public Works were directed to lobby Congress and negotiate with the Army Corps to hand over to the county the federally owned pockets intertwined within these SoCal rivers.

The county is not expecting the transaction to cost anything, said Michael Kapp, communications director for Supervisor Hilda Solis.

If successful, the county will have ended what is nearly a century of the Army Corps’ presence in Los Angeles County. It was the Corps from the 1930s to the 1960s that built many of the flood control channels which keep 10 million or more residents safe during storms.

It also built the 62-year-old Whittier Narrows Dam which needs $600 million in upgrades to prevent a failure that would affect 1.25 million people in the event of a 1-in-1,000 year flood. In a separate motion, the county joined with Rep. Grace Napolitano, D-El Monte, asking Congress to allocate the money and expedite the project.

One river, many jurisdictions

Why should anyone care who owns land on the banks or inlets to the L.A. River? River ownership is not exactly foremost on the minds of 10 million people in Los Angeles County. They just want to see water in the channels and not in their homes — or in some places, rain water greening the river banks by supporting reeds, cattails, fish, frogs, shorebirds and even kayakers.

But maintenance, stormwater capture and even the greening of the L.A. River have become more complicated when multiple jurisdictions are at play, said county officials and many supporters who testified Tuesday in favor of the move.

Representatives from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers could not be reached after-hours for comment.

Homeless an issue

For example, homeless residents build encampments along federally-owned inlets. These become a problem during an El Niño or atmospheric river event, when water gushes through narrow mountain canyons, down the rivers and often over their banks, placing the homeless in danger of drowning.

The county already controls 14 dams and 500 miles of open channels. By allowing the county to control all the nooks and inlets, the county Sheriff’s Department can clear out these encampments without needing “an act of Congress,” as some put it at the Board of Supervisors meeting in downtown Los Angeles.

Getting an act of Congress

A few years ago, the county became worried about flooding in the Glendale Narrows section of the L.A. River, owned by the Army Corps, and had to ask Congress for an emergency allocation to protect nearby homeowners from a mere 20-year storm event, said Mark Pestrella, director of the Department of Public Works.

“Sometimes, their priorities are not the priorities of L.A. County,” he told the supervisors. “We can optimize this for both flood control as well as water conservation.”

The county says it does a better job than the federal agency, is more responsive and has more resources, especially since passage of Measure W, which will raise about $300 million a year for clearing debris from channels, cleaning up dirty runoff and building more water-capture plants.

Feds don’t have the money

The Army Corps needs about $193 million a year to address deferred maintenance just in L.A. County. But this year’s federal budget includes only $17 million for local needs, Pestrella said.

Being unable to clear debris has added to the flood risk of many county residents, the supervisors said in a motion, “putting millions of people in peril” while adding to their flood insurance costs.

Pestrella said he’s already received a thumbs up from President Donald Trump and staffers in the White House and many members of Congress who said they like the idea of returning federal lands to state and local governments.

Solis said the chance of passage is good because members of a Democratically controlled Congress are also amenable. “I think they (Army Corps) have not given these area enough attention over the last few decades. Now there is a bigger voice for us in Congress,” she said during an interview.