For years, residents of Roseland Park have had to quietly watch as their yards and the nearby roadways slowly fill with water every time the city receives a heavy rain.
If the city faces a major storm, the park, which is one of the oldest subdivisions in the city, can have several inches of standing water following the rough weather. Last week, commissioners executed a Consultant Work Order with Singhofen & Associates Incorporated to begin the process of tackling the massive problem.
“I’m really, really, really excited about the Roseland Park project moving forward like this,” Mayor Rick Lott said. “I hope we all are. I really can’t wait to get into more of the details when the design comes back from the architectural firm.”
Now that the city has hired Singhofen & Associates, which it brought on for an hourly not to exceed price of $79,653.20, there will be several months of design for the upcoming project. Then the city will review the design and, if they like the proposed plan, go from there into making it a reality.
City staff and the consultant have already used computer simulations to determine the best solution for the area and Singhofen will prepare the final design for construction.
“What’s more important, if I can say it that way, is the project is moving forward,” McDaniel said. “This is a long-standing need and I’m really glad to see this kind of progress being made where we finish the study, we identify what the problems are and now you’re getting a solution designed to address those problems, which means that neighborhood, once this is implemented, should no longer flood. You won’t have standing water in the back of it. It will be a major improvement for the residents in that area.”
Anyone who lives near, or has even driven by, the Roseland Park area knows that any rain, especially the hard summer rains that come practically daily, causes the properties and the roadway, especially Azalea Street, to fill up with standing water.
The city has received complaints from the residents who have called that subdivision home for years. McDaniel said their concerns and frustrations are more than warranted and calls the property one of the worst flooding areas in the city.
“We get a heavy rain back there in the east portion and they could literally have two or three feet of water standing,” McDaniel said. “It needs to be addressed. This isn’t a minor thing, this is a very significant project.”
Realistically, however, the city is facing a massive undertaking. Preventing flooding the likes of which is frequent at Roseland will not be a simple fix. The city will have to dedicate land behind it to the east to ensure the project can be successfully completed. They will install additional stormwater structures and pipe and also reconstruct the roadway adding new curb, inlets and a sidewalk to ensure the entire area remains relatively dry during storms.
The issue at hand is the property the city owns that is required to be altered to address the nearby flooding is at the northwest corner of the stadium property. The negotiations for the long-awaited Sports Village originally had that property on the table for prospective developers. Gary Sheffield Sports Village, LLC won the bid for the development and is currently in negotiations with the city to hash out the perfect plan for the project.
“Even as we’ve been negotiating on Sports Village we’re having to keep in mind that if they want to use those parcels of land they have to allow us to run stormwater infrastructure on them because that’s part of solving the Roseland Park problem,” McDaniel said. “We’re basically — and I’m giving everyone the preview, not the technical version —but we will basically pull the water to the east and northeast into large retention areas that will be constructed in the wooded areas up behind Roseland north of the stadium, well actually north of the Urban Forest property.”