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In St. Peters, city officials touted a in their Premier 370 business park. The maker of Lysol and other consumer products plans to build a 700,000-plus-square-foot warehouse in the long struggling industrial park in the Mississippi River flood plain and surrounded by a levee paid for in part by taxpayers through a tax-increment financing district.

The industrial park is a monument to the misinformed way of thinking in St. Louis that says: We can control the rivers. Trust us. When the next flood comes, we build our levees higher. Then we find more undeveloped flood plain and start the process all over again.

Valley Park. Chesterfield. St. Peters. Maryland Heights. Rinse and

in St. Peters (never mind the fact that Interstate 70 was under water for a day during the recent flood) that their levee will hold, that city officials are once again talking about tryinnty to erase its very thoughtful ban on building houses in the flood plain.

Note to St. Peters: That’s not going to happen.

That’s because when it comes to the intersection of floods and tax incentives, there is no better informed elected official in the region than .

Ehlmann is one of the reasons why it took St. Peters so long to develop its flood plain business park. When it was proposed to be built using tax incentives, an environmental group, the sued. St. Charles County joined in. Eventually, the city won, but not until Ehlmann, a Republican, secured a signed agreement that there would be no housing built in the project. Later, he got the Legislature to pass a law that said there could be no tax-increment financing districts used to encourage development in the flood plain in St. Charles County.

Last year, St. Peters officials met with Ehlmann and the County Council to try to persuade them to back off the residential ban. They failed. Now they say they might try again.

Bad idea.

“We just don’t think it’s a good idea to build houses in a flood plain,� Ehlmann told me.

It’s not just the obvious safety concerns that bother Ehlmann. It’s about how the entire flood control system, especially when local tax breaks are added in, encourages the wrong behavior.

The , for instance, will pay damages on a house in a flood plain that gets damaged by floods over and over again, as long as only 50 percent or less of the house is damaged, rather than offer better incentives for the owner to move the house. Ehlmann keeps a database of the homes in St. Charles County with the highest flood claims. The top four are all homes with a market value of less than $130,000. At least 10 claims have been paid on all of them — 24 on one house — with total payouts between $265,000 and $400,000. Taxpayers are footing that bill.

“Flood after flood after flood, people make the claims,� Ehlmann said.

Add the incentive of a tax-increment financing district into it, which causes school districts to lose potential tax growth so the money can go to the development instead, and the process really gets out of whack, Ehlmann says.

“It’s a system that encourages shenanigans,� Ehlmann said. “If you let the market decide, people aren’t going to build on the flood plain. They’ll build on the hill.�

St. Peters officials will fail in their effort to get Ehlmann to budge. But that doesn’t stop the developers in St. Louis County, who want to build homes in the flood plain protected by the Howard’s Bend Levee, for instance, from making the same bad decisions.

We as a region are less than a month removed from one of the worst floods in recent St. Louis history, with the bill for the flooding not yet calculated, and some of our leaders are already working toward the next catastrophe. As we were in 1993, we remain slow to learn our lessons.

The debate here isn’t about development or no development. It’s about where that development goes. If the St. Louis market needs housing, it’s going to get built. The question Ehlmann asks is this one: When the next big flood comes, how much are we going to pay to rebuild it once again?