Florida’s new fiscal year begins Friday and that means billions of dollars will start making their way across the state to fund projects approved during the legislative session. Some of that money will end up in a ditch in Tallahassee.
This year the state budget earmarks more than 10 million dollars for Tallahassee projects—the new fiscal year begins at the end of this week.
“After reviewing the governor’s stated vetoes, we are extremely excited to see that a number of our projects have been able to pass muster and hopefully will be in the signed budget by the governor,” Tallahassee Mayor Andrew Gillum said a few months ago right after lawmakers packed up and headed home.
All the projects made it through. That means the city is getting money to help recruit a low cost carrier at the Tallahassee Airport, expand Capital Circle Southwest, and repair the Ochlocknee River bridge.
It’s also getting half a million dollars for the central ditch.
“Which will mean nothing to the average person,” Gillum says with a grin, “but the impact that they will notice is that we’re basically trying to improve the flow of water particularly as it moves through the southern sector of the city.”
So, not quite as exciting as JetBlue—but important.
David Henry does storm water planning for the city. He suggests meeting at Lake Elberta for this story, but he calls it by another name: the FSU City of Tallahassee regional storm water facility.
I’m going to stick with Lake Elberta.
Henry explains how the lake and the ditch help storm water move through the city.
Rain in Frenchtown flows south through the Florida State campus and into the ditch. Then, Henry says, “[it] crosses under Jackson Bluff Road, continues to flow south until it gets to Lake Bradford Road, where it splits. Some of the storm water goes underneath Lake Bradford Road into the regional storm water facility, the rest of it continues on down where it ties in with Munson Slough.”
The ditch runs just south of Lake Elberta—you can see it from the street—and as we walk up to the fence, Henry explains there are hints of the problems he’s hoping to fix.
“Now here you can see the ditch is close to twenty feet deep,” he says, “and along the edges, especially down towards the bottom, the vegetation has been eroded away from the high velocity flows that come through here.”
There are a couple of problems with erosion. Not only does it eat away at narrow areas like this one, but it leads to sediment build-up in wider areas—making them more prone to flooding. It also carries away vegetation which can help pull nutrients out of the water reducing algae growth downstream.
Henry says the city is planning to fix the problem with gabion baskets—imagine chain link fencing wrapped into large empty bricks filled with rocks.
“They’re set up in layers, and they go gradually outward,” he says—like a stair step pattern. He says the workers will stack the blocks in a U shape along the sides and bottom of the ditch.
But they won’t be starting up at Lake Elberta. Instead, Henry explains there’s another spot that needs the attention more.
He takes me to a crossing on Kissimmee Street a little further south.
“As you can see from looking down the ditch through here, it’s very heavily eroded,” Henry says. “It’s deep and it’s narrow. The velocities down through here are very high, and they scour out whatever vegetation that might get a chance to grow in between major storm events.”
Maybe fifty yards down from the crossing there are large concrete pilings set up as a kind of do it yourself retaining wall. Those pilings are now leaning precariously in to the ditch.
The first part of the project will address the ditch from Kissimmee Street down to Springhill Road. After that, the city will jump back up to Lake Elberta and work back to where it started.
“Again if you own real estate down there, if you own a home, if you park in a lot of these low lying areas,” Mayor Gillum says, “Improving the central drainage ditch is going to be an improved quality of life for you, because it reduces the amount of potential flooding that your area could otherwise receive.”
When it’s all said and done the project will cost about $6.8 million, with the vast majority of the money coming from the city. Officials are hoping to complete the project by about this time next year.
