ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Saturday, November 16, 1996 TAG: 9611180047
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: C-5 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: MARY BISHOP STAFF WRITER
Garden City residents plagued by decades of flooding will get a chance to move to drier ground as early as next year because of a $1.9million federal grant awarded Friday to Roanoke.
No one will be forced to move, city staff and neighborhood leaders emphasized.
"If you're a property owner and you don't want to participate, you don't have to," said Dennis Tinsley, organizer of a Garden City task force that worked out the relocation plan.
Money from the Federal Emergency Management Agency will be available for purchase of 39 homes and three businesses on 18 acres near Garnand and Gum Spring branches. The properties lie along Garden City Boulevard as well as streets that branch off it, such as Thomason and Bandy roads.
Total cost of the project was estimated Friday at $2.5 million, with about $500,000 expected to be contributed by the city and another $85,000 by the state.
The project grew out of Garden City's worst flood. On June 28 last year, more than 4 inches of rain fell on the mountainous neighborhood in 75 minutes. The flood did more than $700,000 in damage to Garden City, more damage than resulted from the Roanoke Valley's record-breaking flood of 1985.
Garden City residents long had been frustrated with city and state government for not doing more to control flooding. During the 1995 flood, dozens of residents gathered at a badly damaged house and railed against City Council members, city staffers and others. "Everybody wanted to yell at Bill Clark," the city's public works director, according to Tinsley.
Tinsley, who grew up in Garden City and still lives there, decided instead to work with the city. He immediately set up the task force that over the next 16 months engineered a 10-phase flood plan with residents and city engineers. The $2.5 million relocation project is only Phase One; other plans call for bridge replacements, channelization, storm drain installation, ditch grading, and additional curbs and gutters.
Project manager Greg Reed, a civil engineer with the city, said the plans still must be approved by City Council, but he hopes that city representatives can hold a public meeting and begin talking with individual property owners within 60 days. If all goes well, he said, the city could begin making offers around springtime to buy the first of the properties.
Reed said early attention will be given to a woman whose home was so badly damaged by last year's flood that she hasn't been able to move back, and to a couple whose beauty salon was rendered unusable by the floodwaters.
He said that while other sections of Roanoke also have suffered from recurrent floods, Garden City has been especially hard-hit because of its steep watershed, the high velocities of creek overflows and mountain runoff, and the location of 85 of Garden City's approximately 1,100 homes within the flood plain.
A federal news release said that properties will be purchased at fair market values that predate the 1995 flood and that all acquired structures will be demolished. FEMA said the land would be deeded to the community. A city news release said that covenants would be established to prohibit future development on the acquired properties, except for parks, greenways and other uses that would not restrict the flow of water.
LENGTH: Medium: 63 linesby CNB