Trinity Boulevard flooding and Little Road

2:16:40Okay, thank you. Um, I I need to go back to Trinity Road for a second. Trinity Boulevard, I'm sorry, and this is kind of for more for next year. Um, something we talked briefly about at the county. If you saw during the hurricane, Little Road went underwater. And Little Road is part of the SIS system and is part of the evacuation route for Pinellas County. But I have a video here. It literally had a river going across it and we had to shut it down. if

2:17:11you notice in in the community that you live in, Heritage Springs, the the um the ponds are always at height. full capacity. They never get drawn down. Yes, they do in the summer. No barely. Barely off that are along Trinity Boulevard. Yeah. Um and and then we had a lot of residents again who, you know, get flooded in Thousand Oaks and that there's a whole another story of why that happens. But I feel we need to be looking at

2:17:42solutions to drive down that those ponds better ahead of a storm, ahead of the big storms and stop Little Road from going underwater. And that's going to take some engineering work. The Army Corps came here a number of years ago and looked at doing a big study with Swift Mud. Randy may remember this when he was on the Swift Mud Board and Commissioner Oakley and Commissioner Weightman. That they looked at holding back the Anchor River and providing storage on the east

2:18:12part of the Starkey Wilderness Preserve on the 4,000 acres. that the state bought to compens mitigate for the Sun Coast Parkway because that has different rules on it than the eight thousand acres that are on the Starkey Wilderness Park. You cannot change those. Those are very strict environmental rules on it from my family. the Army Corps said the cost of holding back that river and large rain events was too great for the benefit. And and um so they mixed that that program. So we're kinda left hanging

2:18:42with no solution right now. um for the Trinity area and flooding. There were discussions about putting Capac uh Conveyance. I don't speak his language. putting letting water go under Trinity Boulevard out. Um

2:19:02So I think we have to go back and revisit some kind of solution for for the Trinity and it could be just getting Swift Mod to let us open those gates earlier, but we do need an engineering look at getting water capacity out of Trinity and and Big Rain event. So that'll be hopefully w something we'll bring to you next year. Madam Chair. Yeah.

2:19:21So it's touch a little bit more but part of the w the water is supposed to flow on Lake Corporate Creek.

2:19:26Oh yeah, Penallas County water comes north. into Thousand Oaks in Trinity.

2:19:31So that may be part of it. But the other part is and we've done some b uh best management practices with Swift mud with the Army Corps, taking some of the water out like the si the the old C V S store back above and changing the little gates early. But the whole thing is gonna be the conveyance. Yes. When everything was dry way back when, all these trees started growing, all the vegetation was in, now the wetlands are full. If we can get the water to be conveyed, it'll work. And if you if you take a look at all the flood that goes on that area, when it goes past that CVS,

2:20:02it goes into Oak Ridge. Oak Ridge never floods. Never. The water flows 'cause I get drainage already in, conveys the water out. The place to the past that was with the reserve. That was like really a choke point. Swift mud went in, did a great job opening them up. And now they will flow when it goes into the ankle. So if the back end gets conveyance and flows, then we should be able to get conveyance on the other end. And that's gonna take I think with the in January twentieth from here on in, we may be a better shape to make it work, but I think the conveyance,

2:20:32and that's what the developers did from years ago, And the improvements we made show that. But I think that will be the key.

2:20:37Yeah, we so that's just gonna take a little work. Uh but I think I think there's a a not too expensive solution that we can get to get more water out. So we've got to keep Little Road from getting shut during a hurricane.

2:20:52I think you also gotta put put in perspective. I have that.

2:20:57Many of these tiger leads. uh that we gotta be realistic. What happened to us doesn't happen every year. Right. So we can't overreact because we were fourteen inches above rainfall. Then Debbie, Elena, uh I mean, we don't know what the one and five hundred, one and two hundred, whatever that is. That was I guess not the it's a bad climb, but the perfect storm that hit our area.

2:21:27Yeah.

2:21:27And We also need to look back at we have sixty the whole state was head. And sixty-seven counties have the same questi the same problems that Pasco County is having about, wow, what what are we gonna do with all this water? And there comes to a point you can't do nothing. You only can put so much in the full cup. So we have to mitigate as much as we can. But there's nothing, I don't think, we could have built that protected us from what happened.

2:21:57Yeah. That

2:21:57we we couldn't big big enough canals. We couldn't have run the bypass canal or wait till the nobles thinged up again. So I think we gotta look at some of this stuff logically. Three oh one blood. I've grown up on three of one. It's never flooded. But Little Row twenty eight flooded. There's a a bun what my point is There's a bunch of major highways for a bunch of major people that flood that With the Coochie went a mile out of its veins. A mile. That covered highways. So, I mean I think we gotta put this in perspective when we want to try to solve

2:22:28a problem. Well, how long do we want to solve it? Is it for one of one hundred, which is what we're designed to do? Or do we we wanna start doing one in five hundred, we don't have enough money. There's no way.

2:22:40Yep, right. And r I agree with you a hundred percent and that's why an army corps rightfully said it's cheaper to buy out some of those houses that repeatedly flood. There m there might be five or six and you know, two of these thousand oats. And um and you know, we buy them elevate help them elevate or whatever, but Um It's this isn't the first time that little road's been shut.

2:23:07Yeah, yeah.

2:23:10And if

2:23:10it's a little road solution, that's better than road flooding. Well we use in Tampa area, we use Morse Bridge. We'll shut it down. We got sixteen thousand acres of stand, we flood it.

2:23:20But Little Road is a um it floods too often.

2:23:24Um

2:23:27you can't when the

2:23:28canals and the rivers are back. We have a place to move it to. We have a place to move it to, but regulatory issues are keeping us from moving it out that we need to work on.