The obvious source of the West End's stormwater drainage problems is the gigantic earthwork supporting the Interstate highway. Take out the Interstate, and replace it with a Galligan canal, and -- voila!
$6 million bond, drainage topic of public forum in New Albany; Coffey pushing for more west end improvements, board says work based on plan, by Daniel Suddeath
NEW ALBANY — Residents will be given the opportunity to speak about drainage and a proposed $6 million loan for New Albany stormwater projects during a public meeting Wednesday.
New Albany City Councilman Dan Coffey — who has been outspoken in his criticism of the stormwater master plan that is being used to determine the projects — said he’s hosting the forum so residents can have input before a vote is taken on the bond.
“There’s real questions about the way the stormwater [utility] has operated, and also their supposed engineering study, and I want the people to have a chance to speak,” Coffey said Friday.
He pledged to host three public meetings in the coming weeks across the city, as the first one will begin at 6 p.m. in the Strassweg Auditorium of the New Albany-Floyd County Library.
Mr. Coffey didn't "formally" invite the storm water board? Why not?
ReplyDeleteYeah, I know why.
The original conceptual master plan that my board considered did not have The Castlewood Area as the highest priority, in fact the Falling Run Creek watershed and the west end did rank higher. I can not imagine that the data would have changed that significantly since 2007 to cause Castlewood to rank higher.
ReplyDeleteThe reason I suspect that prorities changed would be due to the activism and boisterous concerns of the residents in that area.
The current master plan has not to my knowledge incorporated any hydrology modeling or real time flow data to justify its prioritized capital projects and I believe Mr. Coffey is correct to call the plan into question, furthermore I believe it is bad public policy to utilize the same engineering firm for the master plan that is overseeing the MS4 permit becasue it creates a biased perspective. My Board wanted to go in the other drection and hire a separate engineering firm for the master plan to avoid just that kind of potential conflict of interest.
In my mind there are lots of unanswered questions that should be raised before approving a $6 million bond.