Sean C. Morgan
The 1200 block of Main and Long streets may get some help with a drainage problem that has plagued it for years.
The alley in the back of the businesses there have no drainage available. Storm water simply runs out of gutters into the alleyway, in some cases flooding buildings. Passing vehicles can splash water onto and into other buildings.
“There’s no place to run it to,” Sweet Home Florist owner Peggy Emmert said. “There is absolutely no storm drainage in this block.”
Public Works Director Mike Adams started talking with business owners in the block about it when the city started a sewer demonstration project last year.
The business owners saw the project, to reduce inflow and infiltration, as an opportunity to get their drainage problem fixed.
Inflow and infiltration is ground water that leaks into the sewer system through cracks or gutters directly attached to it. During heavy rain, the massive amount of storm water entering the system can overload the wastewater treatment plant forcing the city to bypass untreated water into the South Santiam River.
The business owners saw this project as another way to control a portion of that rain water.
“They were working there anyway,” Doug Emmert, owner of Sweet Home Florist, said. “We went to a Public Works Committee meeting,” but funding wasn’t available for it.
The city has designed a project to install storm drainage in the alley, Adams said in a letter to the business owners. The cost would be about $80,000.
The city wasn’t able to include the project in the first phase of the demonstration project, Adams said, but the city will offer it as one of several packages in a bid for the second phase. If bids for the second phase are financially feasible, the city will include the drainage project.
“The sewer demonstration project is a community wide project with benefits to the entire community in which we are all helping to pay for through sewer rates,” Adams said in the letter. “Since this planned storm drainage work is to be conducted in a somewhat localized area, it would be very beneficial if each of you as business owners could provide specific financial help to offset the cost of this localized work and would be greatly appreciated.”
The $80,000 is not feasible for the businesses in the block.
“To me, we need to work hard to keep the businesses we have,” Mr. Emmert said.
Even talking about $25,000 to $30,000, Mrs. Emmert said, “that could just suck the life out of some businesses. It’s not like business owners in Sweet Home are making a lot of money. The retail people, they’re not making what people probably think they should be.? There’s no way we could do it. Small businesses in Sweet Home just don’t make the profit to do a big project like this. I’d love to have it done, but I’m not willing to risk my business.”
Adams is asking the businesses to try to find some funding, possibly through a grant, to help with the project to help justify to the council and help the council justify why it would do such a localized project.
“My opinion, if it’s on my personal property, it’s my issue,” Adams said. “Once I get it to the public system, then it becomes a public problem. That’s why we’re here and trying to take care of it.”
Related to the issue are drainage problems all around the city.
Adams points to water flowing into the city off the south hills on its way to the river as an issue. He asks whose responsibility that is.
To answer that, the city has been working on a variety of possible funding mechanisms to do storm water projects and improve drainage all over the city.
“We need to figure out some way of adequately funding it at some level,” Adams said. Right now, the city has no specific way to pay for drainage projects. It spent 900 man hours on drainage last year, but those resources mainly came from streets and sewer budgets, those most closely tied to storm drainage.
If a funding mechanism were put in place, Mr. Emmert said, he thinks people would respond better if they saw work underway at the same time. Something like the 1200 block alley is a perfect thing to show people what could be done.