The old drainage ditch with stone walls and a concrete floor runs through the middle of the golf course at the Chattanooga Golf and Country Club. But the floor is crumbling, with plants growing out from the cracks, and parts of the stone wall are collapsing.
Almost 1,500 feet of the stormwater drainage ditch needs to be repaired, said Tony Kinder, a civil engineer for Chattanooga.
“It drains about 520 acres,” Kinder said Monday, standing along the drainage ditch. “But most of it is not the Chattanooga Golf and Country Club, it’s the other residential homes.”
For several weeks, the City Council has debated the city’s role in a public-private partnership to repair the gullies. The total cost of the project is expected to be about $1.3 million, with the city paying $750,000 of the bill. The country club said it would hire the contractors.
PDF: Rehabilitation of WPA Storm Drain System – 1975
But last week, council members asked why the contract work was not publicly bid and wondered if doing work on private property would open the city up to doing more work on private property.
Officials with Chattanooga Golf and Country Club could not be reached Monday, but city officials said last week the private organization would rebid the work publicly.
A tour of the country club Monday showed problems. One 20-foot section of wall had crumbled to the bottom of the drainage ditch, leaving exposed dirt. Large concrete portions of the ditch were crumpled and broken.
The stormwater gully was built almost 70 years ago by the Depression-era Works Progress Administration.
But there are questions from council members on how much work the city should be doing on private property. Councilman Peter Murphy during a Public Works Committee last week asked Public Works officials why they were doing the work on that particular piece of property.
City Attorney Mike McMahan said it was because it was an old WPA ditch, the city has an “implied easement” and an obligation to maintain public facilities.
“Everyone is listening and saying, ‘Well, I have an implied easement as well,'” Murphy responded.
Steve Leach, administrator of Public Works, said Monday there are miles and miles of old WPA ditches running through the city. He said most of them need some amount of maintenance and there is no “one-size fits all” approach to fixing them.
In some cases, the city may have to buy property to fix them, he said. In other cases, the city will just bypass the old lines and use public property for the new drainage culverts.
If the ditch in the country club were left unchecked, it could end up causing flooding in the area, he said.
Water does not care whether it goes on public or private property as it is draining, he said. So, the city will look at what is needed in every area to deal with stormwater runoff the best possible way, he said.
“We try to keep up drainage the best we can,” he said.
WHAT’S NEXT
The City Council is expected to hear about a rebid of a contract for stormwater repairs at the Chattanooga Golf and Country Club next Tuesday.