The city has a water problem: the southwest side floods during rainstorms—and the bigger the storm, the bigger the flood. The county has a solution: spend $8.6 million to dig three water retention ponds along Scio Church Road. The proposal goes to council in February, but even if approved, it may be five years before the city comes up with the money.
Jen Lawson, the city’s Water Quality Manager, knows the need. “On March 15, 2012, the southwest side caught the tail end of the Dexter tornado. Three to six inches of rain fell in less than an hour. The ground was still frozen and wasn’t absorbing water, and in some places leaves were clogging catch basins and keeping the storm water on the streets and in the yards … A handful of neighbors had water coming in through their basement windows.”
In the storm’s aftermath, the city inspected all the storm water pipes in the area. “We didn’t find anything major,” Lawson says. “So the question became, can we get water into pipes quicker or should we retain the water somewhere in the neighborhood other than in streets and yards?
“When those houses were built in the ’60s and ’70s, there were no storm water requirements,” Lawson notes. “Whole neighborhoods were built without a retention pond to be seen. So the next step was to look for opportunities to hold the storm water. City council asked us to work with county on this because they’d already done a Malletts Creek study.”
Malletts Creek “drains half of the city,” explains Evan Pratt, the county’s Water Resources Commissioner, “and when you put 1947 aerial photographs of the area on top of current photographs, you can see all the large pipes were laid in creek beds—and that’s exactly where the worst flooding was.”
Various solutions were debated at six public meetings. “People asked why we can’t pop in bigger sewers,” Pratt says. “The answer is that it would cost $40 million to $70 million and would mean ripping up every street involved. Besides, pushing the water downstream just makes the flow larger” there. “So really detention as close to the source as possible is the best and cheapest solution.”
They ultimately picked three locations to hold stormwater: an underground basin on city property next to Lawton School plus three open basins on Scio Church: two in Eisenhower-Churchill Park just east of I-94 and the third in the woods at the southern end of Pioneer High School. “If we do all three,” says Pratt, “we will not have water on the streets.”
The challenge, Pratt says, is that “there’s no [outside] funding for water projects these days.” That means the cost will have to be covered “100 percent by the city’s storm water utility or general fund.” But there are already too many calls on the general fund, and according to Lawson, “the storm water fund is tapped for the next five years.
“The fund only has $6 million in revenue per year,” Lawson explains, “and $2 million of that goes to administration and funding scheduled maintenance, so only $4 million goes to capital improvements. And road projects take a lot of that money because every road project has a storm water component. For the upcoming Stone School Rd. project from I-94 south to Ellsworth, the storm water component will cost $1 million because there isn’t any storm water management on that road now.”
So when might the southwest side’s storm water basins get built? “I don’t know,” Lawson replies. “We do a new ranking every year, and that could change their place in the line, but we have to look at citywide impact.”
