Decertification of the levee could drive up flood-insurance costs for properties behind the levee.

The city is responsible for maintaining the levee, and the corps is responsible for building and inspecting it. But the city is not paying for the current work.

Instead, the Macon Water Authority stepped in because its Lower Poplar sewage treatment plant would suffer most from losing flood protection, said Macon Mayor Robert Reichert.

Some authority officials called it “being a good neighbor” to the city, but authority board Chairman Frank Amerson was more blunt.

“We spent money on the levee because the city wasn’t doing it,” he said. “We cannot let the Poplar Street plant get out from under FEMA protection.”

That would leave water and sewer customers holding the bag for millions of dollars in replacement costs if a flood destroyed the low-lying plant, which serves many local industries as well.

Authority project manager Randy Smith said the authority is paying $278,600 to contracting firm Phillips and Jordan to remove the trees, stumps and roots, then repack the levee and rebuild the slope on the river side.

The contract covers about 4,000 feet of the levee that borders a privately owned farm where the tree cover is heaviest, Smith said.

Amerson and Reichert agreed the city will be responsible for maintaining the improvements once the authority has paid to clear the levee.

“But at least this will keep it in the program,” Amerson said. “I think we’ve shown the corps we keep our word. ... The city’s got to make some decisions and keep it up and do their job.”

The authority met repeatedly with the corps this year to make sure the work would satisfy the agency’s concerns, Amerson said.

Billy Birdwell, public affairs officer for the corps’ Savannah office, said in a recent interview that the corps delayed its annual inspection of the levee, usually done in the fall, until January to give time for completing the tree removal.

Macon allowed trees to grow on the levee for decades with no complaint from the corps during annual inspections.

But the agency began requesting changes in the 1990s. Those requests turned to demands after a round of inspections following Hurricane Katrina.

At that time, the corps indicated that Macon had the only major levee in Georgia that might not hold back a “100-year” flood.

Such a deluge has a 1 percent chance of happening each year.

Former Macon Mayor Jack Ellis’s administration wanted the corps to conduct a broad study of options for the levee, ranging from raising it to abandoning two-thirds of it.

If only a small levee were left to protect downtown Macon, city leaders had suggested, a berm or dike could be built to protect the Lower Poplar sewage treatment plant. Amerson said engineers investigated that possibility after the historic 1994 flood but determined it wouldn’t work because of the water table and soil type.

Birdwell says the corps has not pursued a study because the city has not agreed to pay half the costs after the first $100,000. Similar studies have run more than $1 million, corps officials say.

Reichert said he favors a basic assessment of what levee options should be considered — potentially including, for example, breaching the levee south of downtown.

But he says he wants federal funds for the basic assessment before the city commits to the full study.

“I think it’s a hard sell to anybody, much less City Council, to say: Would you pay half of an unknown amount for an unknown project?” said Reichert, whose first day in office was dominated by a corps ultimatum about levee improvements.

The Telegraph archives contributed to this report.