After storms that repeatedly left streets, driveways and yards underwater, Seminole is moving to design long-term fixes for its most flood-prone neighborhoods.
The City Council on Oct. 27 approved a $250,000 work authorization with Advanced Engineering and Design Inc. to develop a citywide flood adaptation plan. A Florida Department of Environmental Protection grant covers the full cost.
The plan builds on a vulnerability assessment the firm completed late last year. That assessment tested how the city’s drainage system and other infrastructure would hold up in 21 storm scenarios involving heavy rainfall, storm surge and sea level rise. The first study identified the problems. The new one is meant to solve them.
“The adaptation plan is where you come up with all the adaptation strategies and projects … to address some of those problems that were identified in the vulnerability assessment,” said Cody Stewart, the firm’s director of resilience and sustainability. “So it’s just the next step on the resiliency pathway.”
The plan won’t be a broad regional overview. It will focus on specific neighborhoods where water routinely backs up during heavy storms, and engineers will design projects aimed at each area’s drainage bottlenecks, much like a watershed management plan.
The plan is also the key to paying for those projects. Stewart said a finished plan makes the city competitive for state and federal construction money. State resilience grants typically cover 50% of construction costs for approved flood mitigation projects. City officials said Seminole could cover its share with federal infrastructure grants or stormwater utility fees.
“In completing the study, not only are you going to get those strategies to help address the vulnerabilities that we identified, it also queues the city up to get additional implementation grant funding for these projects,” Stewart said.
The Lake Pearl drainage basin, the city’s most expensive pending stormwater project, is among the first in line for that money.
Residents will get a say before the plan is final. After engineers draft their recommendations, the city will hold a public meeting where residents can weigh in on the proposals, describe their own experience with flooding and suggest fixes of their own.
“What takes a lot of the time is your adaptation plan isn’t just a study that we draft and give to you and move on,” Stewart said. “You have a lot of community involvement.”
Council members said residents can’t afford a long wait.
“Can we go quicker at this, because we have people that their homes and areas are flooding, and some of our neighborhoods have flooded several times,” council member Kadi Hendricks Tubbs said. She asked whether anything could speed up the process or whether DEP rules dictated the schedule.
The state grant agreement sets a completion deadline of March 31, 2028. Engineers and city public works staff said that date is a cushion the state builds in for hurricane delays, and the work should be done well before then.
Stewart said he built the firm’s proposal around the grant deadline to keep the city in compliance, but the deadline doesn’t have to be the schedule.
“We can certainly move quicker,” he said. “We have to follow that timeline in order to be compliant, meaning that we can’t be any later. But we can be earlier.”
Public works staff said nothing prevents the city from finishing early. Engineers said they would give city management a faster schedule for identifying focus areas and holding public meetings, which could put Seminole in line for construction grants sooner.