Drainage issues among neighborhoods in the Ponte Vedra Municipal Service District was brought up by trustee Mickey White, who is in his first year as a trustee and helping oversee road and bridge-related issues.
According to White, St. Johns County manages and owns San Juan Drive, Pablo Road and Ponte Vedra Boulevard, which means to address any issue that arises on the roadways, the MSD has to work with the county to get the job done.
After doing research and looking into the flooding issues that seem to become more frequent of a problem, White informed the board that much of the area that makes up the MSD adopted a swale drainage system around the 1930s.
However, since the 1960s there have been many changes to homes and front yards over the years, and in some of the cases it included filling in the inlet initially put there as part of the necessary requirement that makes a swale system operate correctly.
“In an ideal world, they (homeowners) should have been told,” White said. “That’s why Ponte Vedra Boulevard and San Juan both flood. It’s because they have a system that has been chopped up and it has left it no longer in working order. Areas that don’t have curb are the focus because they are the worst.”
White let the board know that he has been calling county engineer Duane Kent once a month since joining the MSD in hopes of talking further about the issue at hand.
“The county is currently asking the state to be grandfathered in so that we can go in an maintain the pipes that we have that are failing and or are rotten.” White said. “Can we do that without having to meet the current nutrient standards and sedimentation reduction standards? That appeal is in, and if we want to have a dry sidewalk, we need them (state) to say yes to that.”
White stated that its going to have to get addressed because it will eventually create a saturated base and road failures will follow.
At the end of the day, White believes that the swale system is still a viable approach to drainage and water flow, and it is not too late to return back to a much more efficient system, but there are many steps that need to be taken first in the process to make that happen.
“We need to come up with a way that we can put a band aid on this and make it better so that we’re not having water coming in people’s garages, that’s what I’m trying to accomplish in my time on the board here, and I hope I’m able to get it done,” White said. “It’s not simple, and we’re going to have to jump through an extreme amount of red tape to get it done. But if we can, I think we can educate people and come up with a solution and we may have to rip up a few front yards and redo a lot of sidewalks, because those will have to be either yard drains or under drains.”
In the future, maybe there could be a scenario where the MSD has a steward in charge of watching over to make sure the swale system is remaining in place and not messed with, but at the moment he referred to the current situation as “gridlock,” and that it would be best to first have an idea how to solve the problem before they go about handling it more in-depth.
