The Fargo‐Moorhead Diversion: Flood Protection or Sprawl Promotion?

ABSTRACT Urban growth and development opportunities are needed worldwide, but growth and development must be hazard‐aware and should follow smart‐growth principles. The 2. 89 billion Fargo‐Moorhead Area Diversion Project was designed to provide flood protection following damaging floods on the Red River of the North. But the project has quadrupled in cost and shifted from protecting existing infrastructure to promoting sprawl across ~200 km 2 of previously connected floodplain. We modeled three scenarios—offering divergent visions of growth—and found that expansion onto the floodplain is not required for continued development. All scenarios allowed for a doubling of the region's population, and both no‐Diversion scenarios better served low‐income, high‐vulnerability portions of the Fargo‐Moorhead area. Our scenarios do not reflect all available planning and policy tools, but they test key assertions in project justification and implementation. The Diversion project contrasts sharply with flood protection built upstream in Grand Forks, ND after 1997 flooding, which utilized wholesale buyouts, levee setbacks, and other “Room for the River” principles. Changes in the location, scope, and design of the Fargo‐Moorhead project seem to reflect local political and economic self‐interest, at the expense of bedrock principles of floodplain management and planning. The Diversion project did not begin this way, and we explore the potential role of “path dependence” in this and other suboptimal outcomes. Another pressing issue raised by this project is cost equity, where financial burdens are borne by all taxpayers, whereas benefits accrue to developers and jurisdictions that enabled that development. The Diversion project illustrates the thorny tradeoffs between opening development of floodplain land and, in the process, violating this “Prime Directive” of floodplain management.