Jersey Village looking forward to 2022 projects
City is wrapping up flood mitigation work on Wall Street Neighborhood site, berm around Jersey Meadow Golf Course
JERSEY VILLAGE — After a year of adjusting to COVID-19, restarting in-person meetings and moving forward with long-planned flood mitigation projects, Jersey Village is ready for 2022.
With 2021 coming to a close, the city is wrapping up two flood projects: the Wall Street Neighborhood project and the flood mitigating berm around Jersey Meadow Golf Course. Cleanup for the Wall Street project begins in February.
City Manager Austin Bleess said more flood mitigation plans are on the way in 2022, but wrapping up Wall Street and Jersey Meadow Village represent a large milestone for Jersey Village to accomplish.
“Most of the construction that’s left has kind of moved onto the golf course property,” he said. “There are going to be some things the contractor is still doing out in the streets, but from a residential homeowner standpoint the vast majority of that work is wrapping up. They’ve got some cleanup and stuff to do but for the most part residential life should be more or less back to normal, which is great.”
Bleess said the Hazard Mitigation Grant Program and FEMA funding allowed the projects to be completed with little impact to city finances.
Mayor Bobby Warren, who was elected May to the position formerly filled by Mayor Andrew Mitcham, said the new flood improvements have eased concerns of flash flooding and strong storms, assuaging concerns caused by Hurricane Harvey in 2017 and the Tax Day flood of 2016.
“You hope that you don’t wind up seeing another flood while you’re still waiting for this project to be done,” he said. “I’m definitely glad to see that it is almost completed. Really the only other thing is we were glad to get back to some sense of normalcy.”
As for 2022, Bleess said Jersey Village is looking forward to buying three homes in one neighborhood, tearing them down and rebuilding them outside of the floodplain. Seattle Street is also being reconstructed, with bidding for contractors slated to start in January.
Village Center, the multifunctional development including a new city hall and amenities for residents, is still in the works. Warren and Bleess said the project is still in motion and has not been abandoned, although COVID-19 has impacted the timeline significantly.
“With so much of what’s been happening with the economy and people still trying to sort through how it’s going to impact certain sectors like retail, that’s really been challenging to piece everything together and move forward with Village Center,” Warren said.
The mayor added his “hope for next year is that we start to make visible progress like that. It looks like it hasn’t gone anywhere, but really it has been more of a process of us responding to a lot of the change that has happened and will continue to come in a post-pandemic world.”
Warren said he and other residents are glad to get back to inperson meetings.
“Although the pandemic is not over, we spent about a year meeting as a city council virtually. Even though citizens still had an opportunity to speak at city council meetings,” he said, “I know a lot of citizens expressed to me a desire to get back to in-person meetings and have contact with city council they weren’t able to have before.”