Studer Community Institute

Delano project offers an upstream solution

October 22, 2014
/ Shannon Nickinson
/ training-development

Stormwater does not respect political boundaries. As local officials have responded to the infrastructure damage caused by the epic rainfall this spring, one thing has become clear. Repair and restoration efforts may be divisible by City or county lines, but when it comes to prevention, collaboration is the path that holds the most promise. Which is why some officials are coalescing around the idea that the solution to flooding in downtown Pensacola is upstream. That’s where the Delano Project could come in. Delano has been on the radar for Escambia County Engineer Joy Blackmon for years. It gained focus when the basement of the Central Booking and Detention facility flooded in April 2012. Central Booking flooded again in this year’s event. On April 30 a natural gas explosion ripped through the building, killing two inmates, paralyzing a corrections officer and injuring 184 people. “We’ve been trying to work on it for several years,” Blackmon said. “In recent months we acquired some property for pond sites and a few others are identified that we’d like to obtain.” Money is an issue, Blackmon said. Delano would cost $3 million. It would require a 25 percent local match, but Blackmon says money from the current iteration of local option sales tax is identified for that purpose. Hazard mitigation money from the Federal Emergency Management Agency also could be an option, she said. Word from FEMA on whether Delano is eligible for funding from them should come in January, Blackmon said. If it is approved, “we can start design almost immediately and move into construction,” she said. The 'Iron Triangle' The Delano Street project is part of what Blackmon says county staff have called “the Iron Triangle.” It is one of the basins that contributes to the city’s stormwater issues in the Longhollow neighborhood, she says. There is more than one aspect to the effort. One piece would be to improve capacity at a county-owned pond on L Street. Improving that would decrease the volume of water that flows through Longhollow, Blackmon says. The county wants to get some property near the animal shelter and Hermann Street where there is a pit owned by the Florida Department of Transportation “It stands in water constantly,” Blackmon says. “I don’t think it is something that’s ever functioned properly.” Delano is in the 3,115 acre Eastern sub-basin of the Pensacola Bay basin, an area that covers city and county jurisdictions and drains a wide swath of Pensacola from north of Fairfield Drive, through downtown Pensacola and Aragon to the bay. Jail location a factor County Administrator Jack Brown says Delano could offer an opportunity to collaborate on stormwater solutions that could benefit the community at large. “We’ll work all of our projects independently, but we’ll support each other in our effort to acquire funding,” Brown says. The City of Pensacola commissioned studies of four basins in the wake of the April flooding. Preliminary data from the Longhollow basin study, which is due out this fall, shows that if the county realized their goals for the Delano project, “we wouldn’t have to do anything at Longhollow,” said Assistant City administrator Eric Olson. “If you get it right up north, you could really change what you have to do down south,” Olson said. “We don’t want to rush to say let’s do this $25 million project in Aragon and come to find out we could have done a $10 million project at Delano and helped everybody in that corridor.” One big, unresolved piece of this drainage puzzle remains the Escambia County Jail. County Commissioners directed staff to pursue plans to build a 1,476-bed correctional facility to replace both the damaged Central Booking and the current jail. The cost of replacing Central Booking project is estimated at $161 million not including site acquisition or out-of-county inmate housing. The timeline for its completion is three years, three months. The insured value of the Central Booking building was up to $45 million for the physical structure and up to $25 million in flood insurance coverage, county officials have reported. The fourth round of local option sales tax projects, which goes to voters on the Nov. ballot, included $47 million in upgrades and improvements at the main jail and Central booking. That money was spread over fiscal years 2018-2027. But the location for the new jail remains unresolved. The topic could come to commissioners at their Nov. 13 committee of the whole meeting. It could be rebuilt at the current location, but when commissioners discussed it in August, there was talk of building at another location where room for future expansion was possible — and flooding was less likely. In an ideal world, Blackmon would like to have the Central Booking site for stormwater retention. “I’d very much like to turn that into a pond site,” she says. “It may not work logistically; that’s only if everything else were perfect. “They could build (the new jail) back in a way that it wouldn’t flood, but it is one of the lowest spots in the area.”

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Delano project offers an upstream solution

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