It’s Raining It’s Pouring

Good afternoon. Thank you for your service and thank you for letting me speak.

We have had a lot of intense rainstorms recently. We had flooding a week ago when we had 6 inches of rain. But parts of Chatham County got 14 inches in one day during Chantal. It will happen soon in Raleigh, and it will be disastrous! We need to start mitigating now!

Thank you, Mayor Cowell, for your recent message about flood resilience. Thank you Council for eliminating parking requirements in central Raleigh. And I thank the City for the Rainwater Rewards program that helps citizens remove impervious surfaces or install rain gardens, to reduce runoff.

However, for each property taking part in this program, there are a thousand going in the other direction. It is unbelievable the amount of impervious  surface we have added to Raleigh since Hurricane Fran in 1996.

We see it everywhere: a small house with a one-lane driveway is demolished and replaced by a much larger house, or two or three. Each house has a driveway  wide enough for two huge SUVs, resulting in a front yard that is half concrete. And then they install hardscape in the back yard, with drainage pipes to the street.

This is all unregulated. When you multiply this by tens of  thousands of homes, it makes a difference.

A certain developer likes to demolish old houses and fill the lots with townhouses with mostly-concrete front yards.

And the newer sidewalks are wider than the old. More concrete!

The old 5-foot sidewalks are fine. If groups of people cross paths, they can adjust. That is better than getting flooded. Our storm sewers are mostly the same we had in 1996. If we replace them with larger pipes, that will prevent them from overflowing, but will take water to the streams faster, causing worse flooding along the streams.

Please direct staff to update our development rules, and create financial penalties per square foot of impervious surface. There are alternatives: driveway strips, permeable pavers, grill blocks, or even gravel.

I have walked the walk: I have removed three driveways from properties I have owned, and removed tons of concrete from the back yards of two other properties.