Faces of the Diversion: Jason Benson

Jason Benson: [00:00:14] Hi, I’m Jason Benson, the executive director for the Metro Flood Diversion Authority. As the executive director, I’m responsible for all of the administrative and leadership roles within the project. That means managing both our full-time employees and all the consultants that work on the project, and collaborate with all of our contractors, the Corps of Engineers, and other elements. I report directly to the board of authority and the chair of the board to make sure that their goals are met and that the project continues to move forward to completion.

[00:00:43] In 2010, I attended my first meeting and it was actually an engineering meeting to discuss moving the project from the Minnesota side around Dilworth to the North Dakota side, going around West Fargo and Horace and Harwood. A thing that stood out to me then was we started sketching out on the whiteboard what these aqueduct structures would have to look like, and all of us as engineers sat around the table just looking at this whiteboard thinking, “How are we going to build this?” And now we are.

[00:01:21] Up until about 2020, the Diversion Authority didn’t have a full-time executive director and engineering staff, so the local engineering staff from the counties and the cities really provided that technical expertise that our elected officials relied on. Cass County Commissioners and board members really relied on me as the county engineer to be that person from the technical side to sit in on meetings with the Corps of Engineers, with FEMA and other agencies, to make sure that it was going to meet the standards and provide the protection at the lowest cost for our taxpayers.

[00:02:10] In 2017, Governor Burgum called me and asked if I would sit on the Governor’s Task Force. That was very important and it was a critical turning point for me and my experience with the diversion project. I was really the only technical representative that had been on the project for some time, so it was a big challenge because I knew that throughout the Governor’s Task Force… technical concepts would be thrown up as options, and a lot of those options had been discussed back in 2011, 2012 and had been dismissed because they just weren’t viable.

[00:02:51] So in 2017 I had to be the technical expert at the table to defend why the project as it was designed at that point was the best project, and why the options that other folks were throwing against the wall to try to see if they would stick wouldn’t work. I was the person that had to support the governors in making sure that we got the project… to where we’ve got a project that’s in construction today.

[00:03:24] The number one thing that I think is important for the public to know is that this is a very robust project. Unlike sandbag levees, unlike just earthen levees and flood walls, the diversion project gives us an extremely robust project that provides the flexibility to where we can cover and handle a 100-year flood event passing 37 feet of flow through town, but then we can also fight up to a 500-year flood event passing about 40 feet of flow through town. In comparison, the 2009 flood, we fought nearly a 41-foot flow through town.

[00:04:16] That type of robustness gives us the confidence, as things change, as you hear about devastating flood events, hurricanes and other storms doing damage in other parts of the country, you don’t have to worry about that here. We’ve got you covered. The community can continue to go about its daily business between the citizens and the business owners, that we’re going to be a viable community and continue to grow with the knowledge that we don’t have to worry about throwing sandbags.

[00:05:14] For me when I look at the impact of this project and what it means to me, it’s really important. Senator Hoeven at the opening of the Red River Structure said, you know, this is protecting a community of over 250,000 people now, and it could be up to a half million people in 20, 30 years. Knowing that this is a multi-generational project that’s going to protect the future generations of Fargo, West Fargo, Harwood, Horace, Moorhead, Dilworth… to be part of something like that that brings long-term protection to the community is really exciting and really important.