Flood Mitigation Committee (now called Sustainability Resiliency Committee)
Dec. 10, 2014
Topic: Raising Streets on West Ave
Members present: Commissioner Malakoff and Grieco, (Wolfson absent).
Others present : Commissioner Steinberg and Mayor Levine
Presentation by: City engineer, Bruce Mowry, and Alan Wise who works for the consultant hired by Bergerson
Below are notes taken by Wavna at a city meeting where staff presented to the elected officials new information details that shed light on the details of the street raising project.
Raising streets – “It’s a game changer, its a policy decision , it is the future of out city. Establishing a minimum elevation for all the streets”.
Need to perform harmonization to transition from a raised road elevation down to existing finished floor elevation.
Step out of your car you will have a flat area, a landing platform, then steps down to the sidewalk; one or two steps, and three steps at the worse case scenario. There will not be handrails down the steps.
For ADA compliance there would be no steps just uniform sidewalk elevations.
Where a business is very close to the sidewalk there will be a very short distance to transition so a greenspace landscaped scenario will take place which you would notice less.
Sidewalks will be 5 or 6 feet wide which allows minimal width to make these elevation transitions.
Commissioner Micky Steinberg- “Water goes down hill so how do you prevent water from flowing into buildings?”
Alan Wise: “The sidewalk will slope away from the building and we will have on the sidewalk at the base of the steps another drainage collection in addition to drainage collection in the street. And these will both be tied into the pump stations that we are installing”
We have to raise streets because we cannot get developers to build up, so we have to do this so they take us serious.
Driveways generally slope down towards the road. The raised street will cause many driveways to have to be leveled out from inside the private property in order to meet the road. And that is a policy decision of who will pay that cost. It is not a huge cost but there will be a cost for that tie-in.
Commissioner Greico – “Will this have a negative impact to condominium parking lots?
City Engineer, Mowry – “Not from the city, they may have their own flooding but not from the city. Everything in the right-of-way stays in the right-of-way. We are sloping the sidewalks at a 2% slope inland to bring the water from the sidewalk into the city right-of-way.”
City is exploring an impact fee or concurrency fee so it will be fair. The Waves project is a pilot program and the city is paying the fees. But The Waves is giving the city some things to off set those costs.
Injection wells are already failing and they will fail worse so we know the water will have to be addressed by a pump system.
This project, Phase One, will be the cross streets from Alton Road to Biscayne Bay to include 6th, 10th, 14th, 17th streets. Then we will come back and do the fill-ins in a separate contract and this was a request made by the homeowner association when we had our meeting with them. To have a phased approach to
