Hall County will not participate in an inter-local ice jam prevention agreement with surrounding counties and two Platte River Natural Resources Districts.
The Hall County Board of Supervisors shot down the proposal Tuesday.
Under the proposal, Hall County would have joined five other counties, adding money to a fund totaling about $50,000 to prevent ice jamming.
"The board was really faced with a decision, do we pay money ahead of time in a just in case scenario, or do we hold our money and wait to see," Hall County Emergency Management Director Jon Rosenlund says.
Experts say ice jams lead to flooding in central Nebraska about once every five years.
"The water cannot get through, so it backs up, spreads out, floods roads, floods farm fields, floods homesteads," Central Platte Natural Resources District Projects Director Milt Moravek says.
Moravek says Hall County is often at the center of the problem.
"About 90% of them start in Hall County, southern Hall County," Moravek says. "There's an area down there along the Platte that evidently has a choke point and evidently that's where the ice jams start."
Those jams cause damages not just in Hall County, but in surrounding counties as well.
"It was very important for this group to have Hall County on board so the ice jam could possibly be taken care of and removed before it got so bad that it backed up for 40 miles," Moravek says.
The most recent jam, in December 2010, did just that. Moravek says it's the worst ice jam he's ever seen.
But Rosenlund says the county shouldn't have to worry about jamming this year.
"Certainly this year, we had a lot of water running, but we didn't have any freezing temperatures that created any problems," Rosenlund says.
Rosenlund says the agreement will likely continue between the other five counties and two Natural Resources Districts.
