Residents criticize Fayetteville for delays on storm drainage upgrades

Feb. 04--About a week after Donna Wilkes moved into her home, a flash flood deluged her Fayetteville street and overflowed a drainage ditch and 36-inch pipe in her yard.

From her front porch, a terrified Wilkes saw her trash cart float away and water from the open channel creep toward her brick home.

"You just feel so helpless," said Wilkes, who moved into the Greenwood Homes subdivision off Cain Road in 2007.

Wilkes said she didn't realize the extent of the flooding problem before she bought her home on Spruce Street.

She also didn't know that 17-year-old Jesse Marquil King, while attempting to walk around the flooded street in 2005, was swept to his death into the same 36-inch culvert. Four years later, the city agreed to pay $150,000 to settle a wrongful-death lawsuit that his relatives had brought.

In 2010, according to public records obtained by The Fayetteville Observer last month, Jewell Engineering Consultants reported to the city that enlarging the Spruce Street culvert in front of Wilkes' home, as well as making other associated drainage improvements in that vicinity, would cost almost $1.8 million over three phases.

"The city of Fayetteville has experienced multiple instances of street and yard flooding along a drainage corridor that runs upstream from Spruce Street to Little Cross Creek downstream of Forest Hills Drive," the report begins.

Today, one phase has been built, with the second to get started this summer. The third phase, which would improve the Spruce Street culvert, is scheduled for construction in 2020.

The project is part of a stormwater capital-improvement plan totaling $11.3 million. But the plan remains in limbo, after the Fayetteville City Council last year failed to approve a stormwater fee increase on all properties that would have helped sustain its five-year schedule.

The council is awaiting a staff proposal some time this year for a long-term capital plan and funding strategy to upgrade undersized, failing or nonexistent storm drainage systems in neighborhoods across the city.

It's a mammoth undertaking, one that city officials say will easily exceed $100 million and take many years to complete. The council is expected to discuss the issue, among other subjects, at its strategic planning retreat set for Feb. 17.

But some residents, such as Wilkes, say they feel unprotected, that the city has been asleep at the wheel. They say storm water is an important issue, even if it gets lost in the headlines about a new downtown ballpark or a $35 million parks building program.

"I bet you if it had been a city councilman's or the mayor's son, that would have been taken care of right away," said Wilkes, a 53-year-old sewing instructor.

Most council members defend the city's record on storm water. They say new development -- and the rooftops and paved parking lots that come with it -- has exacerbated the neighborhood problems. And they say climate change and the recent trend of above-average rainfall haven't helped, either.

"I think the criticism is somewhat unfair," said Larry Wright, who joined the council in December 2013. "For the last three years, we have been addressing storm water."

Wright cited the completion of two watershed drainage basin studies -- Buckhead and Branson creeks -- that identified about $65 million in stormwater improvement projects.

The city has 13 more drainage basins that have not been studied.

After each study, improvement projects are identified, but each one then must be designed before it can be constructed. The studies, designs and construction are prioritized into a five-year capital plan that is updated annually.

The next basin study planned for this year is labeled Beaver Creek 2 and covers two flood-prone neighborhoods near Skibo Road in Wright's district: Hollywood Heights and Chestnut Hills. In Hollywood Heights, 13 homes that had substantial flooding by Hurricane Matthew cannot be rebuilt, unless they are elevated. The city will seek federal grants to buy out the owners and demolish the houses.

Improvements sought

Wilkes has been lobbying city officials for several years to improve the culvert next to her home, which was built in 1964 in a neighborhood behind the Eutaw Village Shopping Center. Spruce Street floods a few times each year, closing it to traffic, neighbors said.

Just when Wilkes gets a council member to appreciate the problem, she said, she gets a new district representative.

"It leads to neglect; then you have to go through with the whole spiel with a brand new person," she said.

Other residents with drainage problems who were interviewed for this story say the city is not moving fast enough to fix aging infrastructure.

Alison Boney, who is 54, lives off Pilot Avenue in Haymount, where storm water backs up into her yard and the street in heavy downpours. Two years ago, she had to replace her heating and air-conditioning unit and ductwork under her home. All of that work, she said, was ruined again during Hurricane Matthew on Oct. 8.

"I am very disappointed and disgusted," said Boney, who has been battling with the city over the issue since she moved there in 2000.

Rob Stone, the city's Engineering and Infrastructure director, said his department just completed an internal study on storm drainage in her area, including around Haymount United Methodist Church on Fort Bragg Road.

"It's just not adequate," Stone said last week of that area's drainage system.

"And yes, it is on our radar but not in this current funding model," Stone said, referring to the city's stormwater capital plan through 2021.

Stone said Matthew not only emphasized the problem areas, but revealed new ones. However, retrofitting older neighborhoods is an expensive and time-consuming process, he said.

In many cases, the city inherited the problems, after annexing neighborhoods built in the county under more lax standards. It's a familiar theme of annexed subdivisions that also lack sidewalks, sanitary sewer and green space. In some ways, the city is playing catchup, because the state prevented it from involuntary annexations until 1983, while many areas of Cumberland County were developed residentially.

While the capital plan aims to fix the past, the city's stormwater ordinance that took effect in 2009 looks toward the future. It requires "wet" and "dry" ponds, among other techniques, that slow the volume of storm runoff from leaving a piece of property after it has been developed.

The Home Builders Association of Fayetteville, an influential lobbying group with 350 members, is seeking to meet privately with the mayor and everyone on the council in small groups to air complaints they have with the stormwater ordinance, as well as the city's Unified Development Ordinance and the city's process for reviewing site development plans.

Fee hike

Three years ago, the city unveiled a plan to raise the stormwater fee over five years, by a total of $18 per single-family home on annual tax bills. The same rate is applied to all nonresidential properties, but based on impervious surface.

The city raised it in 2014 and again the following year, but stopped last year. The current stormwater capital plan of $11.3 million assumes the fee will be raised five times through 2018.

Councilman Chalmers McDougald said the council made a mistake last year not raising the annual fee to $48 per home. It's $45 now.

"It's a problem, and it's going to become more of a problem," he said. "If we continue to take this stance of do nothing, it's just going to get worse."

Last year, the council was bitterly divided 5-5 on whether to raise the fee. Some said an increase that small would not begin to address the problem, while others insisted anything would be an improvement.

The divisiveness was reportedly one of the grievances against former City Manager Ted Voorhees, who was asked to resign last April. A month prior, Voorhees had said in an email that the council's "intent is not as clear" about the fee increase, and he insisted on including the hike in a draft budgeting document the council would debate later.

Voting last March to oppose another storm water increase were Mayor Nat Robertson, Mayor Pro Tem Mitch Colvin, Jim Arp, Bill Crisp and Kathy Jensen.

The five supporting the increase were Wright, McDougald, Ted Mohn, Kirk deViere and Bobby Hurst.

Last year's deferral, Stone said, "basically took $500,000 out of the future projects, and so what we had to do is just shift projects."

Fifteen stormwater projects are under design and two are under construction, ranging in cost from $65,000 to almost $1.1 million.

Some on the council say another fee hike is premature until staff returns with a master plan. Arp said the city's focus now should be on repairing the damaged roads and bridges from Hurricane Matthew and getting reimbursed from the federal government and the state.

Robertson said it would be "fiscally irresponsible for me to vote to raise the stormwater fees when we don't have a master plan prioritizing the projects, or have a good idea of how our investment will help the residents."

He said anybody who lives in a low-lying area or creek, whether here or anywhere in the state, "your home may flood, if it rains really hard.

"There is only so much the government can do to help, but we are working on it," he said.

Fayetteville is not alone in struggling to upgrade ailing drainage systems. According to a city presentation last fall, Winston-Salem is studying 15 drainage basins, one at a time. Chapel Hill is working on its first such study, Greensboro has studied two of its basins.

"There is not a magic bullet that fixes this problem," Stone said.

Crisp, a five-term councilman, described storm water as "one of the largest problems facing us today," but he opposed last year's $3-per-house fee increase, calling it a "drop in the bucket."

"We've had a number of things that have eaten our lunch," Crisp said. "We had Rob Stone geared on the stormwater problem, and then comes Matthew."

City Manager Doug Hewett said the city's response to the devastating storm, which dumped nearly 15 inches of rainfall in 24 hours at the airport, has delayed staff's work on the stormwater master plan.

Stone, who began working for the city 14 months ago, said he was unfamiliar with the history of the three-phase Spruce Street drainage project.

The final phase -- it's set for design and construction in fiscal 2020 -- would upgrade the drainage pipe where the 17-year-old drowned over a decade ago.

The other phases must be done first, Stone said.

"You can fix a spot, but you may move the problem somewhere else," Stone said.

The city reprioritizes the list of projects ever few years, especially after another basin study is done, Stone said. Among the criteria for setting priorities are potential for injury or loss of life, number of properties affected, and the amount of property damage the flooding is causing.

Donna Wilkes, the Spruce Street resident since 2007, said she can no longer live in her home, not after Matthew. Water from the open channel and pipe along the side of her yard seeped into a few rooms of her house. The hallway bathroom has been gutted, and mildew is spreading on the ceilings. She has removed her furniture and moved in with her son across town.

"There's damage to my house now that I can't fix, because it's going to flood again," Wilkes said.

But she longs to return to her home. She liked the subdivision, she said. It has plenty of trees, chirping birds and a nearby park.

"And we just loved this neighborhood," she said. "It's so quiet. It's so sweet."

Staff writer Andrew Barksdale can be reached at barksdalea@fayobserver.com or 486-3565.

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