Mayor seeks drainage fixes to fight flooding
Turner will ask for $10 million to clear ditches, other modest steps to ease storm drainage
Mayor Sylvester Turner, responding to the city’s recent pummeling from severe storms and the resulting torrent of flooding complaints, will ask City Council to put $10 million toward two dozen quick drainage fixes.
Mayor Sylvester Turner, responding to Houston’s recent pummeling from severe storms and the resulting torrent of flooding complaints, will ask City Council on Wednesday to put $10 million toward two dozen quick drainage fixes.
These local projects to repair collapsed culverts and drainage pipes, replace old inlets with larger ones, and regrade, clean or mow more ditches are not intended to make the next Tax Day Flood seem like a sprinkle.
They are aimed, however, at lessening the risk of flooding for some residents and preventing water from sitting in clogged ditches for days after each rain.
The initiative, dubbed the Storm Water Action Team, or SWAT, is arguably the first concrete initiative advanced by the city’s “flood czar,” engineer and former councilman Steve Costello, whom Turner hired shortly after taking office a year ago. The program would use citizens’ 311 complaints and other data to identify candidate projects.
“If we get a consistent, all-day torrential rain, the water doesn’t have any place to go. The drains back up, and the homes flood,” said Karen Dollahon, a civic leader in Braeburn Valley West, where one of the initial 22 projects — two for each council district — would occur.
That repair would replace a faulty drainage pipe that is eroding the bank of adjacent Keegan’s Bayou, threatening to eat away at residents’ backyards along floodprone Tooley Drive.
“Anything that helps the water drain more efficiently and gets it down the bayou as quickly as possible means it’s not getting into houses and businesses in these neighborhoods,” said Councilman Mike Laster, the district representative to whom Dollahon sent photos of the faulty pipe.
Turner’s office declined to make the mayor, Costello or Public Works officials available for comment before the mayor’s Wednesday rollout of the program, but Turner spoke about it at a Monday
meeting of civic clubs.
He compared the initiative to a pothole program he launched last year, which saw more than 95 percent of all citizen-reported potholes repaired within 24 hours.
“It won’t eliminate it, but our goal is to do everything we can to mitigate it,” Turner said of the city’s flooding issues, adding that his staff has identified about 60 quickfix projects. “And once we tackle these 22, then there will be another 22 coming on board, and we’ll keep at it and keep at it. That’s going to be a strong emphasis of 2017.”
Funding source
Public Works typically spends about $35 million to $40 million a year on stormwater maintenance, though the rising cost of workers’ salaries and benefits have in recent years eroded the number of employees in the field and the miles of ditches they have cleaned.
The $10 million on this week’s agenda would be in addition to $43 million already budgeted for the current fiscal year.
“The dollars allocated for maintenance are not as substantial as I would like for them to be,” said Councilman Larry Green, who chairs the council’s infrastructure committee. “With this new funding, we’re able to move a few of these projects up in the pipeline and get those completed.”
The money for the SWAT program would come from the city’s general fund reserves, meaning there would be less on hand to help cover a projected deficit for the fiscal year that starts next summer.
City Finance Director Kelly Dowe told council members at a Tuesday hearing that he expects to finish the fiscal year with about $225 million in reserves, $70 million more than the minimum level.
Using the funds for the SWAT program aligns with city policies, he said.
Ed Browne, a member of Residents Against Flooding, a westside group that is suing the city over flooding issues, gave the idea a cautious thumbs-up.
There are plenty of worthwhile small fixes, Browne said, but the program would not deliver needed large improvements.
For the detention pond nearest his home, Browne noted, it cost $8 million just to buy the land.
“It’s less than half a million per project. While you can cut swales and things like that with that kind of money, it’s really not big projects at all,” he said. “It’s a good idea, but I don’t want people to lose sight of the idea that it’s a BandAid and not a fix.”
Backs projects
Browne’s representative, Councilwoman Brenda Stardig, said she believes the two projects slated for her district would be beneficial.
One, on Briarwild Lane, would clean out roadside ditches and replace collapsed or undersized culverts and grade them to drain correctly.
“I was at the dry cleaners the other day and a gentleman told me his house was within inches of flooding during the last major event on Briarwild,” she said. “These are areas where we’ve had continuous feedback from community leaders about the issues with drainage, and it does impact a number of homes.”
While SWAT would not be a cure-all, Stardig said, combining small projects with broader city and county efforts can make a dent in local flooding problems.
Becky Edmondson echoed that assessment. The Westbury civic leader said neighbors have told her a recent project to replace four collapsed drainage pipes — the sort of repair the SWAT program would target — has improved their drainage.
“I think they realized that doing local drainage projects were a way to come in and get some real work done on the ground while these large capital improvement projects are languishing on the books,” Edmondson said of Turner and Costello. “For neighborhoods with aging infrastructure, sometimes expedient repairs are helpful.”