Stormwater issues leaving city up a creek

Vestavia Lake, built roughly 50 years ago, sits only a few blocks off U.S. 31, but it seems a world away from the hustle and bustle of one of the city’s main traffic arteries.

The lake is bordered by tranquil woods and frequented by ducks, turtles and other wildlife, giving the 17 homeowners who belong to the association that owns the lake a peaceful retreat.

Usually.

When a major rain event occurs, the small streams feeding the lake become violent rapids — some even being used by area kayakers for practice — and the dam that holds back the five acres of water strains under the increased pressure.

And the lake is not alone in its struggle with stormwater management.

On July 26, a brief but heavy rain event crippled the entire lower U.S. 31 corridor, as Patton Creek swelled beyond its banks, flooding businesses from Park South Plaza and Vestavia Bowl down to the Vestavia-Hoover border.

Other rain events in July also caused flash flooding in Cahaba Heights and along Rocky Ridge Road, and a damaged stormwater pipe under Morgan Drive at the foot of Lime Rock Road caused the parking lot of Western Supermarket to cave in.

Vestavia Hills has five major watersheds: Patton Creek, Shades Creek, Little Shades Creek, the Cahaba River and Vestavia Lake. Compared to the drought conditions of 2016, this summer’s seemingly unrelenting rain has brought to light the concerns of residents and city leaders alike about the impact of stormwater on each watershed.

Legacy Issues

Vestavia Lake, which sits on private property owned by the Vestavia Lake Homeowners Association (VLHA), has lost between three and six feet of depth in the last 20 years, according to homeowners Tommy McCain and Alan Arrington.

That loss of depth, according to numerous studies by independent engineering and environmental firms, is the result of sediment runoff from construction sites in the lake’s watershed, the most recent involving the renovations at the Vestavia Country Club.

“It all ends up here,” Arrington said. “Everything, any kind of dirt, any kind of stuff, all these gutters with the drains, they come right in here.”

Sediment nearly filled one corner of the lake, resulting in a $25,000 project, paid for by the homeowners, to dig out and remove the buildup. After the work at Vestavia Country Club began to cause the buildup to worsen again, VHLA worked with the Cahaba Riverkeeper and the Alabama Department of Environmental Management to work out an agreement for the club to help clean out the lake.

And while the issue with the country club has been mostly resolved, Arrington and McCain said it’s only the most recent example of issues the lake has faced.

Going back as far as 1998, the VLHA has met with the Vestavia Hills City Council and developers, expressing concern about how commercial development was impacting the lake.

In addition to sediment buildup, Arrington said longtime residents have seen a drastic increase in the velocity of water coming into the lake, which has caused erosion and property loss for those on the banks of each stream.

“Over years, with the commercial development, things have gotten worse,” Arrington said.

The lake isn’t the only area showing symptoms.

Earlier this year, City Manager Jeff Downes told the city council that City Engineer Christopher Brady and his team had put together a list of 27 public stormwater infrastructure units that required attention, many of them sooner rather than later to avoid more issues like that of Morgan Drive.

“We as a city as a whole, we have a multitude of infrastructure issues,” Downes said, citing the age of the city’s stormwater infrastructure as one of the reasons issues continue to pop up.

Each watershed has its own unique and challenging characteristics, Downes said, and when one piece of infrastructure fails, it can cause problems throughout.

“From a city perspective, one failed pipe could back up a whole series of pipes or streams or conveyances, and create issues of a unique nature for each one of these,” he said.

To remedy the 27 known public stormwater issues will cost $450,000 just in materials, Downes said, with the total coming to near $1 million once labor is factored in.

In an effort to get the worst of the issues dealt with, Downes said he and his staff designated $325,000 for stormwater infrastructure work in the 2018 budget.

Downes said it won’t solve all the problems, but that it will begin the process of bringing the city’s aging infrastructure up to date.

Public vs. Private

When the lower U.S. 31 corridor flooded in July, a major item of debate — discussed at length by City Attorney Patrick Boone at an August council meeting — is the city’s ability to use public funds to mitigate private stormwater problems.

In the case of Patton Creek, Boone explained at the meeting, the city does not own the land, and therefore is not responsible for maintaining the creek.

Boone went into detail about a 2004 lawsuit that the city eventually won, where the Alabama Supreme Court determined the city was not liable for the flooding, and not responsible for cleaning the creek — even though the city had cleaned it out a few times over the years.

“There are some legacy issues in our city where structures have been built in floodplains and in floodways that in modern regulations would not have been allowed,” Downes said, “and that’s frustrating to those properties, and it’s frustrating when the city can’t solve the problem.”

Where the city does have jurisdiction, Boone explained at a different council meeting, is when a private issue stems from a public issue, or where a private issue becomes a public issue.

His example was the city’s work on the pipe under Morgan Drive. The pipe is a public piece of infrastructure that caused damage on private property, and because it serves a public interest, Boone said, the city has the right to spend funds fixing it.

For the water that flows through drains, hills and streams in the roughly 360-acre area from Shades Crest Road to Vestavia Hills United Methodist Church, eventually much of it makes its way into Vestavia Lake, which slows the flow that over time makes its way down to Little Shades Creek or the Cahaba River.

For that reason, Vestavia Lake residents argue the city is using the lake as part of its stormwater management plan, even though the lake is on private property.

“There’s really no dispute that it’s being used, at least in my mind,” Arrington said, “and I don’t think there’s much dispute by anybody that it’s being used by the city.”

The discussion of public versus private interest in Vestavia Lake isn’t new.

As far back as 1996, when Vestavia Hills United Methodist Church was in the process of building its Lighthouse facility, the issue of stormwater velocity and sediment runoff was already one of contention between Vestavia Lake residents and the city government.

For 20 years, Arrington said, the answer has been that the lake was on private property, meaning the city could do little to help.

But Arrington and McCain argue that because the lake serves a public purpose—acting as the major collection point of the upper U.S. 31 corridor runoff—the city does have an interest in helping maintain the lake.

Downes said there are many private issues, Vestavia Lake included, that have a public impact, but it’s a complicated issue for the city to deal with.

“The challenge is that it is when you start talking about jumping off into the private realm, where do you stop? And how do you prioritize, when every resident that has a private issue, it’s a priority to them?” Downes said.

However, Downes said that at some point, those issues do need to be considered, and that the council will have to make policy decisions as to how to handle any public-private partnerships going forward.

Where the city can help, Downes said, is by enforcing the city’s new, stricter stormwater ordinances that go with the MS4 ADEM permit.

Particularly, Downes said that enforcing the erosion control requirements to developers is a major way regulation can help prevent future issues.

“As much as you try, a lot of sites have failed silt fences and things when you have super heavy rains,” he said. “The ability for us as a city to employ somebody who is regularly looking and studying that is important, and we’re going to address it in this budget year.”

The 2018 budget allows for a new, full-time employee in the city engineer’s office whose sole responsibility will be to monitor and enforce these kinds of regulations.

But while the city makes steps to monitor developments, some experts aren’t convinced.

David Butler of the Cahaba Riverkeeper said that his organization sees erosion control violations constantly.

“A lot of times you’ll see just a very minimal effort to comply with the terms of their permit,” Butler said.

And to Butler, erosion control is one of the easiest aspects of development, but he continues to hear from municipalities that the issue is too broad to adequately address, which he said brings the entire development process into question.

“If the city of Vestavia, or Homewood or Hoover or whatever, does not have the resources to inspect and qualify these developments and make sure they’re doing what they’re supposed to do, is it a good idea to continue to develop?”

High Stakes

Arrington and McCain said that they understand that development will always continue, but that they want the city to have a more concrete plan for dealing with stormwater, because it’s not a single development’s doing that has caused the lake and other areas to have issues — it’s bigger than that.

“The Country Club didn’t take the dirt down here and dump it with a truck,” McCain said. “Yeah, it ran off, but it ran off and it came in through the stormwater system to get here. That’s a public [issue].”

The VLHA also wants to partner with the city for the immediate need of repairing and removing pressure on the dam that holds the lake in.

Multiple agencies have looked at the lake, Arrington said, and all have said that if something isn’t done, there is a chance the dam could fail.

 “It is impossible to place with certainty a timetable on the imminent serious damage to the dam and spillway of Vestavia Lake,” Southeastern Pond Management reported, all the way back in 1997. “Almost certainly, however, a failure to address these matters will lead to serious problems which may include the physical failure of the dam. Typically, dam failures occur quickly, often in a matter of hours during a heavy rainfall event.”

Arrington said his major concern is that if the dam does fail, that the dozens of homeowners on Comer Drive and Rockbridge Road will have a serious problem.

“The lake being here is not causing a public issue, [but] the lack of maintenance could,” McCain said.

In January, a geotechnical evaluation done on the dam by **** strongly suggested that the VLHA have an emergency action plan should something happen to the dam.

But the work that is needed, McCain said, could cost hundreds of thousands of dollars — money the VLHA simply can’t produce on its own.

“We’re doing things now with the money we have, it’s just that we don’t have the money to do what we’re doing and maintain a dam, and the spillway breaches, and all this stuff that’s occurring,” Arrington said.

He added that the association will continue to use its resources to put the proverbial Band-aid on the problems, but that in order to do the amount of work to keep those downstream safe and the lake functioning as the retention pond it has become, they need help.

“There’s ways that can be fixed, it’s just a matter of them contributing those resources,” he said.