McALLEN — The city is making progress on more than 150 drainage improvement projects slated over the next several years, and on Wednesday officials marked the completion of three of them.
With District 5’s Jackson Park as the backdrop, city officials celebrated the completion of the projects known as the Camellia Avenue drainage improvement project, the Gardenia Avenue improvement project and the La Vista Avenue Bridge improvement project.
“They consisted of upgrades to local storm sewer systems serving the area — our local area — as well as large-scale improvements to our regional system as a whole,” said Mario Cruz, the city’s drainage engineer. “The North 8th Street at Camellia drainage improvement project consisted of upgrading nearly 700 linear feet of existing storm sewer and included several upgrades to catch basins as well,” Cruz said. “Similarly, the North 12th at Gardenia Avenue project introduced roughly 1,300 linear feet of new storm sewer.”
Cruz added that the La Vista Avenue Bridge improvement project is one of four bridge replacements programmed with the Bicentennial Blue Line bridge improvements project. It included the demolition of an existing simple span bridge and the installation of a three-barrel, 12 by 12-foot concrete box culvert structure, according to a description of the project provided by the city.
The projects are just a few of the several projects the city has in the works that were either funded by a 2018 bond issuance or from its drainage utility fee program.
The Camellia and Gardenia projects were both funded by the utility fee program with a cost of about $225,000 and nearly $267,000, respectively.
The La Vista Avenue project was paid for by the 2018 bond and cost about $1.27 million.
The Camellia and Gardenia projects connect to the regional detention facility located at Jackson Park, where stormwater will pool to provide relief to the drainage system downstream. Once alleviated, the water will be allowed to move into the Bicentennial Blueline, then to their main drains to the north and then east to the Laguna Madre.
City Manager Roel “Roy” Rodriguez said the city focused on drainage in the area because it suffered from flooding due to its outdated infrastructure.
“Because it’s the older part of town, the design at the time was only taking into account what was out here then,” Rodriguez said. “And so as development occurs, there’s more runoff. The more pavement you have, the more roofs you have, the more runoff that you’re going to get because of it.
“That design and that infrastructure that we had that had been here for decades was just inadequate and so we had to do two things — we had to replace some of it and add capacity to some of it also,” he added.
The city has more than 40 ongoing drainage projects in addition to the 17 already marked as completed.
With the slew of projects on their plate, Rodriguez said the city would be working to have as many completed by summer when hurricane season typically begins and brings heavy rainfall to the Rio Grande Valley.
“We made a promise back in 2018 that we’re going to work as hard as we had to to get these things done,” Rodriguez said. “I think that the estimate to complete all of these projects was somewhere between eight and ten years, we think that we’re going to shorten that to about six and so we’re going to keep working because we’ve got to provide our citizens the relief that they deserve.”
