B

The city of Morristown is moving forward to address stormwater issues, from incidental repairs to determining a game plan for a 10-acre drainage basin.

In its recent meeting, Council authorized a purchase order for storm drain lining and related services from Portland Utilities Construction Co., LLC for $69,250 via a publicly solicited and awarded bid by the Town of Brighton, Tennessee.

The lining and services make up a repair method for the city’s stormwater pipe systems.

“This is a repair used on failing metal pipes in our collection system,” City Administrator Tony Cox said, “This is something that we’re able again to piggyback on another purchasing process.”

Council approved a proposal from LDA Engineering to provide Professional Services for the Havley Springs Branch Stormwater Study in an amount not to exceed $28,000 and authorized Cox to enter into an agreement.

“At the workshop on the fourth of this month, Council expressed the desire to look at this drainage basin to see what can be done in terms of stormwater management,” Cox said. “LDA is the firm we’ve been using as our stormwater consultants. They’ve got experience in this basin already. It is a very large basin. It covers 10 square miles.”

The study will begin the assessment process, according to Cox, who added, “It will give you some ideas of where the problems are, some potential solutions and lay out a game plan for that large, significant drainage basin in our system.”

“How long will it take to do the study?” Councilmember Joseph Senter said.

Steve Drummer, Senior Civil Engineer with LDA, indicated a definite time frame would be hard to pin down.

“We would get started immediately, start looking at the known problems, try to assess them first and make recommendations, look for solutions,” Drummer said. “But once we get into it, there’s probably issues there that we’re not aware of now. Or maybe some of the solutions we come up with, we’d have to look either upstream or downstream to try to make those work and not cause additional problems.

“I would imagine probably by the first of the year we would have looked at everything that was there and at least come up with a preliminary look at what possible actions could be taken,” he said. “And then move from there to either look at more from an engineering standpoint to do a correction, which would come back and be a project to design and then get a contractor to work on it.”

Senter asked if more than one contract/project would be needed since the basin encompasses such a large area.

“Just knowing what I know now – and Mike Poteet took me around a couple of weeks ago, and we looked at some of the known problems – it definitely would take a least a couple of actions to get things rolling,” Drummer said.

“It kind of looks like what we started 12 years ago when the Council appropriated I think it was $5 million to put toward storm drainage,” he said. “We came in, there were 64 known issues; we started looking at them and broke it down and I think we probably did about 20 separate projects over that time frame to correct those. So I can see this being several projects, maybe one project that lumps several small ones together – we’ve done that in the past also.”

Drummer added, “Some of the problems as I’ve seen them to date, their solutions are not going to be similar. Some of it will be construction to provide additional drainage or additional storage, or maybe even trying to relocate an existing facility.”

Councilmember Bob Garrett said, “I’ll tell you how you do your design work: just wait ‘till it rains. You won’t need an estimate for that.”

Cox told councilmembers the Army Corps of Engineers would be involved in the approval process, further complicating any projects.

“When you have an impact on floodplains, adjusting those areas, that’s not a quick nor simple process,” he said.

Drummer concurred: “Anything within the bounds of the stream itself, we would have to go through FEMA (Federal Emergency Management Agency) and/or the Corp with any kind of improvement that we wanted to meet.”

In other business, Morristown Mayor Gary Chesney appointed Councilmember Tommy Pedigo to fill the unexpired term of Councilmember Al A’hearn on the city’s Tree Board.

Two members who came off the board after serving their terms, Clarence Thompson and Terry Waterson, were recognized by Chesney for their service.

“We deeply appreciate the two of them for sharing their time with the board and their input,” Chesney said.

Council voted Chuck Smith and Tara Howerton as new members of the board.

As part of his regular meeting report, Cox announced the traffic light at Morris Boulevard and Thompson Creek Road should be fully operational within several weeks.