Key Biscayne residents got a clearer picture of how the Village’s Resilient Infrastructure Adaptation Program will commence near the K-8 Center, with costs and timelines outlined during the Council Workshop last Wednesday night.
However, the presentation by Village officials and engineering leaders didn’t come without questions regarding expenses and the approach, which begins with a complete overhaul of the stormwater system, plus roadway improvements, in Zone 1, the area that has been the bane of flooding for at least a decade.
Here’s what we learned:
* The work will only be done in Zone 1, one of eight zones the Village will tackle. Zone 1 is being designed with enough drainage capacity to receive stormwater from other zones to the north or south, should the community and Council choose to address street inundation further in the future beyond Zone 1.
* The 30% design was completed in July, with the 60% design slated to be firmed up by December. One hundred percent of the design would be completed by May 2025 with a proposed project budget of $74.865 million, including $46.1 million for stormwater and roadway projects alone.
* The project would get underway in late 2025 or early 2026, with the completion of Zone 1 taking 18 months to two years.
* Costs have exceeded the original $35.9 million price approved by the Village Council earlier this year. Accounting for an 8% inflation rate, it brought the base project to $38.9 million. Another $5.8 million was added when the Village decided to select a more sturdy, longer-lasting approach to roadway reconstruction that includes a black base to minimize how much the roadways must be elevated, as well as costing out a new outfall with large dissipator structure and associated force mains.
* At this point, The total cost of the Zone 1 effort is $74.8 million, with some $23.6 million in grants applied for and $5.9 million already received. The rest will come from the taxpayers, a loan with the State Revolving Fund, and money from the General Obligation Bond, approved by voters in 2020.
* Costs to single-family homeowners during the length of the project could range, on average, from a low of $500 up to $1,200 per year, although there are some outliers for overly large homes. For multi-family dwellers, that cost would range, on average, from $156 to $400 a year, all dependent on assessed value and impervious areas. Those costs have an additional impact on the existing stormwater fee and millage, whether one lives in Zone 1 or not.
* Should the Village be successful in securing approximately $15 million in grant dollars applied for, it would leave a $60 million project cost to protect $1.6 billion of property value in Zone 1.
* There is a public dashboard (KEYBISCAYNE.fl.gov/elevating) on the Village website to show how the projects are coming along, even street by street, as construction begins.
* Mayor Joe Rasco wanted to point out that figures, “like $300-, $400- and $500 million for an all-encompassing resilience program for the entire Village,” that keep getting brought up in conversations are simply far too premature since there will be a “pause” upon completion of construction of the Zone 1 area to analyze the new system’s performance and determine the next steps to target the remaining zones, should the community and Council feel it is necessary.
“It’s been a long summer,” Village Manager Steve Williamson said. “Our team has been working hard, primarily on Zone 1.”
That’s the area in which the 30% design was presented to Village staff and Black & Veatch, the program and construction manager, for review before moving forward toward the 60% design milestone
Williamson said later, in a message to the Islander News, that it is “standard business practice when investing in this large of a project” for such a review of the projected cost estimate to take place. In addition to the independent team review, he said a “full design review” would take place by Black & Veatch, and that the Village still had some questions for AECOM officials.
How vulnerable is Key Biscayne?
“How the Resilient Infrastructure and Adaptation Program (RIAP) as a whole has been structured to maximize decision-making flexibility, the program management tools developed, as well as projects completed to date and projects that are soon to be underway related to the Village’s resilience goals,” were the basis of Tuesday’s presentation, according to Village officials.
The motivation for the stormwater projects (which includes the under-grounding of utilities and roadway improvements) is balancing addressing existing street flooding problems while also keeping the long-range challenges in sight, with increasing projected sea level rise and more intense rainfall anticipated in 2060, according to the Southeast Florida Regional Climate Change Compact.
The motivation behind undertaking the ambitious, forward-thinking RIAP is quantified in detail in the recently completed Vulnerability Assessment, paid in full by a grant from the Resilient Florida program and undertaken by team members from Black & Veatch.
The Vulnerability Assessment considers threats, such as rainfall, tidal flooding, coastal erosion, storm surge and extreme heat, the Village’s vulnerabilities and even the lifespan of critical structures on Key Biscayne. It quantifies the economic benefits to the community by undertaking the overall resilience program.
The community’s benefits include reduced chronic flooding, protected shorelines and boundaries, the reliability of utilities in a flood, strengthened readiness for storms and emergencies, and increased service reliability, safety and aesthetics.
Steve Williamson.
“However extensive a program we undertake, we want it to be focused on solutions and not wasting precious time and resources,” Williamson said.
Based on stormwater and economic modeling from engineers at AECOM and Black & Veatch, without the Resilient Infrastructure Adaptation Program (RIAP) in place, by 2060, 461 structures on the island would be affected by a 10-year, 24-hour flooding incident (7 inches of rain over 24 hours).
In comparison, about 50 structures could be breached even if all the RIAP improvements were completed in the Village. For every $1 spent, the upgrades would translate to approximately $5.46 in reduced damages.
‘Runaway train’ or forward-thinking?
In Zone 1, the pumping system will be designed and constructed to initially eliminate water at a 1-inch per hour pumping rate, with the capability to increase to 2 inches per hour as needed, based on the maximum number of pumps installed in the future, said Dr. Roland Samimy, the Village’s Chief Resiliency and Sustainability Officer.
Dr. Roland Samimy.
Former Council member Luis de la Cruz, who said he had pushed Village officials to create the much-needed Chief Resilience Officer position many years ago, vehemently argued that the current drainage system still has 15 years of life.
“This is madness … we’re on a runaway train,” he said during the middle of the two-hour meeting. “We need to step back, take a break, clean up our system, and do everything we can to maintain what we have. Look at it, inspect it to see if it’s really failing and then make the decision to go forward. We’re talking hundreds of millions of dollars of investments, your tax money.”
The longtime resident implied that “more than half” of the 39 gravity wells “are not working, similarly with outfalls.”
He said the entire discussion leading to this point has frustrated him.
“The furthest thing (the new resilient chief) was going to propose to us, I thought, was to rip out a perfectly functioning stormwater system, still (within) its useful life, and replace it with something that’s going to cost us hundreds of millions of dollars, something you guys can’t even tell us how much it is …
“What we need to do tomorrow is order every single gravity well cleaned by the end of the year and every outfall unplugged … even with that, our storm drainage system is working perfectly today,” he added, noting a hard rain would still force excess water to remain “a couple 2-3 hours” before dissipating.
“We have so much to do here, resiliency-wise. Our beaches are going to cost us enormous amounts of money … under-grounding should happen tomorrow. We’ve been talking about it for 15 years. Our perfectly working storm drainage system should not be touched until such time as it doesn’t work,” de la Cruz said.
Luis de la Cruz.
“The fact we’re designing something for 40 years from now, you’re cutting something off in the middle of its useful life in order to put something (new) in. If you waited 15 years, maybe who knows what kind of (new engineering) design would come in, and then you’re adding 15 years to the new system … I hope I’m making sense,” de la Cruz said, drawing applause from several in the small crowd of attendees.
“It’s not an either-or question, it’s really an and,” Williamson said. “Thank you, Luis … we are doing maintenance and we’re going to continue to do maintenance (on the existing system). Unfortunately, we’re facing nature … we have sea level rise that’s going to keep coming at us, and we’re also facing increased rain.”
Dr. Samimy said the current system just won’t keep up that pace.
Back in the 1950s, shallow, auger wells helped drain water off the Village streets, then the outfalls were introduced from 1969 to the early 1990s with the associated plumbing to bring water to the outfalls, he said.
In 1993, the first Stormwater Master Plan, completed by Williams-Hatfield-Stoner, recommended proper drainage wells; approximately 27 were installed, 80 to 100 feet deep, in the mid-1990s. By 1995, the auger wells “were pretty much abandoned,” he said.
“So, these (current) outfalls range from 30 to 55 years old, the drainage wells about 30 years old,” Dr. Samimy said, acknowledging some additional drainage pipes were put in along the way.
“The reality is, a large part (of the system) is undersized and relatively old,” he said. “To say it has plenty of design life is, I think, stretching a little bit. The reality is, that the environmental conditions … were very different then compared to now and are going to get more and more challenging, and that’s why this is being even considered.”
Dr. Samimy said, “We do aggressively maintain the system now, flush out, jet out and pump out the catch basins and drains every year. It’s kind of nuts. No municipality does that. The (federal/state) requirement per the National Pollutant Discharge Elimination System (NPDES) is to inspect a minimum of 10% of a municipal stormwater system per year and clean accordingly based on the results of the inspection. The Village inspects and cleans 100% of the stormwater system annually; otherwise, it will not drain (properly).”
At that point, things got a little tense, with de la Cruz challenging that statement, forcing Mayor Rasco to step in.
The 39 wells in the Village are rehabilitated in groups of 3 to 5 a year (some years more wells are rehabilitated based on the available budget) for $7,000 each to flush them out.
“They all don’t need to be redeveloped every year because not enough sediment collects in that period,” Dr. Samimy said.
A total of 27 wells were rehabilitated in 2010 for $293,080.
Village is ‘the envy of the County’
Williamson said he was among a large group of municipal leaders speaking with Miami-Dade Mayor Daniella Levine Cava a week ago, with the discussion there centered on the county’s new “flood response plan” in light of flooding earlier this year, when Aventura faced a 17-inch rainfall, while Key Biscayne’s total hit 4.5 inches that day.
Mayor Daniella Levine Cava.
“At this point, we are the envy of the County because we actually have a plan,” Williamson said. “We’re pointed out all the time as the example of how (a community) very deliberately takes this (flood control) through a process.”
Former Key Biscayne Mayor Mayra Peña Lindsay was in the audience Wednesday night and said that most of the Village’s stormwater system is 15 years old and “not (from the) ’50s, ’60s or 70s. We are the envy of the County in that we do not have flooding like in downtown Miami.”
She said she had tried to get the Zone 1 flooding problem fixed some 10 years ago.
“The sky is not falling, (but) we can always do better … I would be disappointed to see if we take this opportunity to fearmonger into over-engineering to a point where it’s hundreds of millions of dollars that is maybe not needed, and that is why people are concerned,” she said. “(The Village has) always been very good, very responsible, about doing thoughtful, aggressive, but incremental, change.”
She pointed out, with only 8,000 households on the island, “hundreds of millions of dollars has a huge effect on a few number of taxpayers.”
Mayra Peña Lindsay.
Council member Brett Moss said he was caught off-guard by the higher cost than the $35.9 million he and his fellow Council team approved in July.
“I had no idea outfalls would be an additional $5.8 million,” he said, believing that the $35.9 million cost was the bottom line of the Council’s long debate on whether to approve the 1-inch per hour drainage or 2 inches per hour.
Dr. Samimy indicated, at that time, “We didn’t know how much force main we’d need.”
Moss understood the 8% inflation costs, but “Now you’re throwing $5.8 million (in). It’s very confusing. We make these very serious decisions, and we’re not being told the (accurate) numbers. We need to know that when we’re making decisions.”
He asked his fellow Council members, “Did you understand they were excluding a big chunk?”
Councilman Brett Moss.
A hush fell over the meeting.
Vice Mayor Allison McCormick said, “I do think it’s a lot of money; inflation, you can’t control that. … But, at the end of the day, the lump sum total is getting bigger, it feels …”
“The base price was a lot lower because it was a separate (entity),” Moss said. “If we did not understand it, that’s the fault of the administration, the fault of engineers. I’ve been to sooo many meetings. There’s no way I couldn’t understand it … if it was (in there), it’s a (breakdown) of communications.”
Part of the costs is that there is a contingency cost included, which will gradually be lowered as the design scope nears 100%. Also, the increased Zone 1 projected project cost emanates not only from inflation but the added $5.8 million to construct a new outfall and associated large dissipater structure, a crucial element in reducing the velocity at which stormwater leaves the pump station in Harbor Park to the nearby outfalls to lower force main costs, Dr. Samimy explained.
“I look at it as a top-level investment,” Williamson said. “Approximately 4.5% of the total Zone 1 project cost is to protect $1.6 billion of property value in Zone 1 alone.”
“Hopefully, we can make this process cheaper,” Mayor Rasco said, “and a decision eventually will be made whether to go forward with construction or not.”