Council considers drainage issues in neighborhoods

CELINA - City councilors at Monday night's regular meeting heard about storm drainage issues allegedly impacting numerous residences in northwest Celina.

Resident Gerald "Mort" Ward, who lives on Bruns Avenue, addressed a plugged storm sewer line tied to at least a dozen homes in the Bruns Subdivision.

"I realize we've had some torrential rains here, but even on the average rains we've got a waterway at the rear of our lot. It's actually not on ours, it's the neighbor's lot," Ward told councilors. "There's a catch basin there, and we have an 8-inch line, a 5-inch line and a 10-inch line running into it, and then there's a 10-inch line actually over to Mary Lane. That line is plugged."

Ward said he personally got down into the catch basin.

"We tried running a 3-inch cutter through that 10-inch line, and we got down a ways and there's roots and stuff in it," he said. "But my question is how many houses on our subdivision does that catch basin have to take care of before it becomes a city problem?"

Ward said city engineers indicated the line is one private property.

"And it is, but it's on an easement," he pointed out. "I just want to bring it up to your attention and maybe you can get an answer or if there's some help out of the City of Celina to maybe take care of that. I don't know whose legal responsibility it is."

Ward also made a suggestion.

"We're getting 32 years old down there. It might be time to look at replacing our streets, maybe going out for infrastructure," he said. "At least get it on the planning stages. I can't tell you how bad Bruns Avenue is. Mary Lane is extremely bad. There's not only flooding in that waterway, even on some minor rains we're starting to get catch basins filled up with water."

Ward characterized the situation as a subdivision problem.

"So Mort, the line that's plugged is privately owned?" asked councilman Eric Clausen.

"It may be private. It goes in an easement," Ward said. "I'm willing to pay my fair share of putting a PVC pipe in to drain the catch basin, but the problem is we don't even know who's all tied into it. And so it becomes a neighborhood problem, but which neighbors are responsible?"

Ward wondered aloud if the city took possession of the line when it accepted the plat of the Bruns Subdivision.

City safety service director Tom Hitchcock said he would look into the matter.

"But you've talked to engineering. They've told you it's a private line, because they have a citywide map that they work off of that shows what's private, what's public," Hitchcock said. "If it's showing a private line then most likely when it was accepted by the city it was accepted as private. It was left for the homeowners to take care of."

Hitchcock pointed to other similar scenarios in Celina.

"What we run into in some of these neighborhoods was a lot of these, like that subdivision I don't believe has a detention basin anywhere for the excess water," he said. "So they tried to use these backyards as the detention area when they were originally designed. Obviously people didn't like the water laying in their backyard, so then they install a pipe to go back in everybody's backyard to try to make it drain."

Almost all of those pipes are private, Hitchcock noted.

"I live back in the Bruns addition … and my street has been flooded twice this year extensively, and I've got the same problem. My backyard is a detention basin, I can tell you that right now," said council president Jason King. "It was up past my landscaping and halfway up my yard towards my house. But we had … 13 inches of rain, so that's a lot of water to tame."

Ward said he believes the entire infrastructure in the Bruns Subdivision should be inspected for broken areas.

"We're constantly jetting and cleaning city lines," Hitchcock said. "To my knowledge there hasn't been any breakdowns, or if we find them, we fix them. I can have them double check the camera footage and everything in those areas, too, to make sure nothing's been broke down. I would assume if we found something we would have fixed it if it's on city lines."

Councilman Matt Gray said some of the same issues have been experienced in the Kessler addition.

"I don't necessarily think that the homeowners have the ability to go back to Kessler. So we would have to take care of it ourselves, is what the city's telling us," Gray said.

The city at one point did mandate retention basins for new residential developments, Hitchcock said.

"The older subdivisions, they didn't have detention basins for the water to back up into. Hence the reason all new subdivisions have to have their own retention basins, new development has to have their own retention basins," he said. "So I mean, the city over the last 50 years learned some lessons about stormwater backing up … but unfortunately in the older neighborhoods there is no detention basin for it to go to, so it just lays in people's backyards And then once the lake's high enough there's nowhere for the water to go. It sits until the lake gets low enough for us to drain into it."