Democracy on the Front Lines
City Administrator’s Blog
Walter Denton
May 8, 2008
It rained again today. This is not breaking news, but it is significant for city government. Every time it rains, I think about the many residents who have contacted us about drainage problems in their neighborhoods.
At the Public Works Committee meeting last week, we listened to six residents about their drainage problems. They were from different parts of town and had varying degrees of severity. Although we are aware of many of the drainage problems in the City and can pretty well identify why the problems are occurring, solutions do not come as easily.
The drainage complaints generally fall into two categories: (1) Flooding comes from the front yards from the street and/or drainage ditch or; (2) Flooding comes from a drainage ditch or creek that runs through their back yard.
Let’s start with flooding in the front yards. This type of flooding is mostly found in the oldest parts of town near downtown with drainage ditches rather than curbs and gutters. These neighborhoods are extremely flat and drain poorly. In addition, the homes were built many years ago before people gave much consideration to stormwater detention and drainage. As a result, the situation becomes quite complex because one homeowner’s drainage problem is actually a subset of a much broader challenge of fixing drainage for an area containing several blocks and many houses. It is difficult to fix one home’s problem without affecting the drainage for the entire neighborhood.
The City began addressing this stormwater problem several years ago with the Stormwater Master Plan. The plan identified areas of flooding throughout O’Fallon and provided recommendations on improvements. Twenty-three projects were listed in the plan that totaled $12 million. However, the plan only considered drainage issues on City rights-of-way and drainage easements. Flooding along private property was not included because the City does not have authority to make drainage improvements on private property (such as backyard swales, creeks, and open farm fields).
This brings us to the second kind of flooding problem in O’Fallon, that being flooding from backyard ditches and creeks. Although the water going down the ditches/creeks come from streets, storm drains, and other houses, the City has no jurisdictional authority to do anything in people’s backyards. The City has no right-of-way and few easements specifically dedicated for drainage in backyards. If an easement exists, it is usually for utilities and not City property. In most cases, the ditch or creek is within the residents’ property lines, so they literally own the problem.
Backyard drainage problems are common in the older parts of town but also can be found in relatively newer areas of O’Fallon, such as Southview Gardens and subdivisions along Deer Creek Road. The residents own the waterways behind their houses and the City has no authority to do work on private property.
New subdivisions generally do not have this problem: creeks are designated as common area outlots that are maintained by a homeowners association. This removes ownership liability from the specific homeowners and places maintenance responsibilities on all residents of the subdivision and precludes flood insurance requirements (in many cases).
The cost for the City to assume maintenance responsibility for backyard drainage systems would be substantial. There is no conceivable way for the City to do this without a new funding source. A Stormwater Utility has been considered in the past, but that would be an additional fee on homeowners, businesses, churches, and schools. Other taxes could be increased to provide funding, but again that would place an additional cost of O’Fallon residents when people already feel their budgets are being squeezed.
In 2005, the Mayor and City Council formed a Stormwater Advisory Committee in that studied the City’s stormwater challenges and made recommendations on how to address the problems in a comprehensive manner. The Committee recommended that a proper stormwater budget should be about $1.2 million per year to provide for maintenance, development enforcement, and capital improvements.
The City’s current stormwater budget is around $470,000. Regardless of whether a Stormwater Utility is ever established or some other revenue generating tool, the policy question is whether the residents and City Council feel that stormwater drainage is a big enough problem to devote significant resources to make substantial improvements. (There are certainly are a number of passionate residents who want their stormwater problems solved.) If not, then we will continue to make incremental changes when money is available and continue to listen to disappointed residents every time we get a strong storm.
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