Flooding at Clearwater Estates may require an improvement in the drainage system.
At the last Clearwater City Council meeting, a contingent of about 12 residents from Clearwater Estates made their case to the council.
Speaking for the group, Dan Langva said the current holding pond isn’t doing its job.
Back in 2012, the city contracted with Bolton & Menk to design a drainage system to alleviate the problem. Part of that design included running 640 linear feet of 15” diameter pipe from a holding pond to outlet into the Mississippi River.
The holding pond was built in 2013, but the outlet pipe wasn’t included in the final project.
Langva said the flooding problem is still there. And this year’s late snow and heavy rain hasn’t helped. A few residents bought flood insurance because of the snow.
“We’ve been experimenting with this for seven or eight years, and the results are, it just doesn’t work,” he said.
He said the Estates community hired an engineer to look at the infrastructure. The engineer said the holding pond, which not only drains about nine acres in the Estates, but 46 acres from a pipe on Main Street, isn’t big enough.
“I’m here today to say, you make a motion that we go ahead, spend the money on the pipe and fix that pond,” said Langva.
Councilman Vern Scott said a decision to add the pipe now might be premature, since there are rumors about a potential apartment structure planned at the site of the golf course maintenance building.
“You’re going to have more (water) running into there and the pond is not big enough for it right now,” he said.
Mayor Andrea Lawrence asked him to explain.
“So you’re worried if we put in a 15-inch pipe and they build out, the 15-inch pipe isn’t big enough?” she asked.
“Right,” said Scott. “It’s going to be a bigger problem.”
Engineer Joe Pelawa from Bolton & Menk, who wasn’t part of the 2013 project, said they could calculate the runoff from a new building and design the pipe accordingly.
“The pipe size would probably go up to a 30”, he said. “The difference in price is not tremendous. The real cost is digging the trench, getting the easements and getting the corridor.”
He said there shouldn’t be much of a problem getting discharge permits from the DNR.
“They probably won’t have a major issue,” he said. “We’ll just have to show that we’re not going to cause the bank to erode.”
The council directed Pelawa to research the current easements, potential future easements and bring back a few different options for running the discharge pipe.
