Weather | Sports | Forums | Comics | Classifieds | Calendar | Movies
Continued complaints lead officials to clean out stopped-up drain pipes that some residents blame for years of flooding.
By MATTHEW WAITE
© St. Petersburg Times, published September 30, 2001
NEW PORT RICHEY -- Not a pretty image, seeing muck, rocks, tree branches, garbage and other unidentifiable crud come shooting out of a pipe.
But for Richard Scholl, it's beautiful.
For more than two years, Scholl tried to get someone -- anyone -- to clean the stormwater drain pipes west of U.S. 19 off Main Street. He has spent his own time trying to convince city and county officials that if they'd just clean the pipes, the flooding problems that plague that area would go away.
On Wednesday, a county public works crew cleaned out the pipes, which no one knows who installed and when. They run nearly three blocks from the city, through private property and into the county, creating a jurisdictional problem that left parts of them neglected for years.
Scholl, a 57-year-old retired engineer, believes that now that the pipes are cleaned, the decade-old flooding problems in that area should go away.
"It's a great thing to see that Pasco County is doing a lot to get this thing solved and it's not costing millions of dollars," Scholl said.
The pipes Scholl has been trying to get cleaned start in the city of New Port Richey, go under a condo complex and end up in a drainage ditch off Oelsner Street in unincorporated Pasco County.
"The system is there," he said last year. "It's just not working. It's clogged."
Clogged as it may be, the city in 1992 had engineers look over the whole system. City Manager Gerry Seeber said the engineers believe the pipes are too small, and a new system, as part of the city's drainage master plan, will cost $540,000 to be installed.
Tom O'Neill, the city's public works director, said he doesn't hold out hope that the now-clean pipes will solve the problem.
"Any time they clean anything, it has a positive effect," he said. "The overall system is too small."
Tires, bottles, rocks, branches and all forms of debris had clogged the pipe leading away from a retention pond behind a Hess gas station. That prevented water from leaving the pond. Then the pipes themselves were gummed up, and at the end of each section was a concrete box called a catch basin. Those, too, were filled with trash, not allowing water to come out.
At the end of the pipe is a drainage ditch, which runs out into the gulf. Only a trickle of water comes out of the pipe when it rains. The rest backs up into the street, over the banks of the retention pond, and becomes a mess.
The mobile home park nearby floods during a hard rain, as do the condos across the street. Businesses along the area either had to build up a flood control wall or leave.
Some did both.
Ron Howarth and Brenda Dyer used to own a smoothie shop along Main Street, just east of the mobile home park. Every time it rained, they had water coming in the front door, with waves of it coming in when cars would drive by.
They complained to city and county officials and were told that it would take thousands of dollars to replace the system, which wouldn't happen for years if at all. They tried to tell the county and the city that the pipes were clogged, but no one would listen, they said.
To try and stop the water, they spent $5,000 to build a berm on the front of the building, creating an awkward mound in front of the door. The berm cut down on parking, and because there had to be a lane around it to get to the parking lot, it didn't work very well. A year and a half ago, they sold the smoothie shop.
"We weren't able to use it like we should," Dyer said. "You've got to have parking."
Scholl, a regular at New Port Richey City Council meetings, was there in late 1998 when a group of citizens -- including Howarth and Dyer -- complained to council members. Scholl started doing his own digging.
What would come from that would be diagrams, blueprints, surveys and public documents that showed the underground pipe.
And no one could remember whose pipe it was.
New Port Richey said it wasn't theirs. So did Pasco County. The Southwest Florida Water Management District was asked. Not ours, they said. The same answer from the Florida Department of Transportation.
O'Neill said something like Main Street's mystery, multijurisdictional pipe happens more than people think in many places. He said that unlike many others, this pipe requires three entities to keep maintained: the city, the county and the private landowner.
"We do our best to make sure our area of responsibility is taken care of," he said, adding that it was proportionally small compared with the other two sections. But, he said, the city and the county have talked about how to fund a drainage project in the area and are working together on it.
But while the two governments talked, Scholl kept asking New Port Richey or the county to go in and clean it. Eventually, the county agreed to, but needed easements to do the work. It couldn't get them.
For a year, Scholl called and asked, and eventually, he and state Rep. Heather Fiorentino got the last land owner, Peter Lenhardt of Clearwater, to agree to a 60-day easement, giving the government permission to go on his land and do the work.
On Wednesday, it was done.
"I'm really happy," Scholl said. "I just need to see a big rainstorm now."
- Staff writer Matthew Waite can be reached in west Pasco at 869-6247 or 1-800-333-7505, ext. 6247. His e-mail address is waite@sptimes.com.