ThEY KEEP YOU ABOVE WATER.
When you add up the lengths of all of the streets in Plant City, the total is 170 miles, that is the driving distance from Plant City to St. Augustine.
The City of Plant City Department of Streets & Storm Water has 37 staff to care for these streets. Eight of them focus specifically on the streets. The rest are tasked to storm water. They use 100 pieces of equipment from weed eaters, to mowers, to excavators, to a flameless pothole patcher, to a Bush Hog.
The mission of Streets and Stormwater is to enhance the quality of life in Plant City by providing safe and efficient roadways, sidewalks, roadway beautification, environmental protection and flood control through storm water management.“My goal with the department is to minimize flooding—that’s one of the big things we’re doing around here,” said Wayne Everhart, the Director of the Department.
Streets & Stormwater is divided into four Divisions:
Storm Construction is dedicated to ditch digging, pipe clearing, and construction to keep the city storm water system operating the way it was designed to.
Street Construction repairs and replaces sidewalks, removes trip hazards, makes sure the sidewalks conform to American Disability Act standards, provides road maintenance to repair potholes, and patches streets.
Rights of Way handles maintenance and mowing of the plants along city thoroughfares, including edging, weed control, and litter control. The team also manages street sweeping and city maintained parking lots.
Aquatics provides pond and canal management, maintenance, and environmental reporting.
All of the Divisions work together on sand bagging for major storms and hurricanes, and for parade setup and cleanup.
“I have seen some of the other municipalities and their struggles,” Everhart said. “This city is the right size, each individual can make a difference. That is what kept me here. It is an amazing opportunity. It has one of the best staffs that anyone could hope for. Our management is solid and supportive. I have enjoyed every day of it—not bad for 35 years.”
Streets & Stormwater is intentional about planning ahead to take care of routine maintenance before residents call in to report a need. So, the team monitors streets to find and repair potholes, repair curbs, and repair and clean storm drains. But they also rely on Plant Citians notifying them of problems that need to be addressed. The most common request is for pothole repair.
“The City of Plant City management has values of customer service,” Everhart added. “They put people in place that have similar values to make sure they are following up to inform the public or respond.” In other municipalities, when residents make a call to government offices, they get an answering machine. “When people call Plant City, they get a human,” Everhart said. “They get a response. They get follow up. We can’t do everything that is requested of us, because a lot of requests are not within the scope of what we can do, but we certainly respond. We try to let people know they are in a community that cares.”
When needs are identified, Streets & Stormwater tries to address them immediately, and complete the necessary work as soon as possible. The Department will handle anything within the capability of the staff and the equipment. “When we get a call, we can actually respond, and go out and make somebody’s life better,” said Everhart. Some projects, such as repairing sinkholes, have to be turned over to external contractors. In such cases, this greatly increases the time to completion.
“Nothing is more satisfying than when you get a call back, a response, an email, or even something sent out to City Hall showing that they appreciate the type of work that is going on,” said Everhart. “We share it with the group to let them know that their efforts are not going unnoticed. There are a lot of people out there who appreciate the work we do for them. That is a big highlight in our day when we get those.”
In a recent example of this, when staff were repairing a sidewalk, a woman and her granddaughter were watching how they poured the concrete and removed the frame. While the men worked, they answered the girl’s questions. The resident wrote an email that read, in part, “Todd and Reggie were so patient answering all of her 100 questions about what they were doing and why. Thank you for the work you guys did, and for making a little girl feel special by getting her questions answered.”
“A lot of people who work here live here,” Everhart said. “They want to see Plant City better—we want to see it cleaner, we want to see it function well.”
