Details of Three Pond Error
Question: If this road was in the city planning documents as far back as the late 1980s, why do we need a new permit? Why wasn't the roadway included in the original permits for The Preserve, Eastwood One, and Eastwood Two?
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Answer: Actually, it was included, and the permits were approved. However, five years after approval, SJRWMD found a serious error in one of the permit applications, and concluded it should not have been approved. The documentation showed that the engineer had intended to include numbers for each of the three detention ponds, but inadvertently left one of the ponds out of the calculations. To bring the system into compliance, changes had to be made to the pond/structure, and the roadway had to be taken out of the permit. In short, for five years, the approved three-pond system was noncompliant with stormwater standards. Fortunately, SJRWMD eventually found the error and insisted on corrective action.
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When the City Council was briefed on the history of the permitting process, they were told about some changes to the pond/structure, and were also told that the roadway had to be taken out of the permit when Eastwood Two was permitted. However, the story of the five-year, three-pond error was not mentioned.
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The three sections below contain quotes from documents supporting the account above.
Extracted from Stormwater Management Study, City of West Melbourne, June 2020. Prepared by: DRMP, Inc., paragraph 1.
"The Heritage Oaks Boulevard/Doherty Drive Extension was originally permitted on December 9, 2003, as part of the Heritage Oaks East Subdivision St. Johns River Water
Management Permit (SJRWMD) #90425-1. Heritage Oaks East Subdivision became the Preserve and Eastwood One. Runoff from the roadway extension was to drain into the interconnected lake system of the two subdivisions. Eastwood Two was permitted by SJRWMD as Permit #90425-2 on May 8, 2007. Runoff from Eastwood Two was ermitted to drain into the lake in Eastwood One. On April 2, 2013, SJRWMD discovered that there was not enough capacity in the interconnected lake system of the Preserve and Eastwood One for the runoff from Eastwood Two. The developer of Eastwood Two commissioned a study of the interconnected lake system that showed that runoff from Eastwood Two could be included if the lake control structure weir was raised and the runoff from the future Heritage Oaks Boulevard/Doherty Drive Extension was removed from the system and permitted under a new and separate permit (see Exhibit “A”, enclosed letters and excerpt from study)."
The whole document is in this PDF file, and the quoted part above is highlighted.
Extracted from: Storm Water Calculations and Supporting Documentation for: Heritage Oaks, Including Preserve, Eastwood One and Eastwood Two, 3rd Revision: August 07, 2013, paragraph I and II.
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"This set of calculations is in response to the letter of non-compliance from the St. Johns Water Management District dated April 2, 2013. The letter indicates that the proposed addition of Eastwood Two was not properly accounted for in the stormwater calculations for said project; therefore, the project was in non-compliance…."
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"The stormwater system was originally designed to take into consideration the Eastwood Two project; however, during the permitting process of Heritage Oaks East, somehow the Eastwood Two basin was eliminated in the final calculations submitted to the SJRWMD and not accounted for during the permitting of Eastwood Two. This resulted in insufficient water quality treatment and proper attenuation.
In order to bring the system into compliance, we propose to modify the existing outfall structure by reconfiguring the weirs; adding two new ponds; and because of the configuration of the existing outfall structure and its inability to allow for proper drawdown, add an additional outfall to the West Melbourne ditch located adjacent to the north property line."
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The whole document is in this PDF, and the quoted part above is highlighted.
Transcribed from DRMP presentation, city council meeting, 4 June 2019:
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"And this roadway extension was actually included in the permitting of The Preserve and Eastwood One and the stormwater runoff from the developed roadway was included in those systems. And as you can see there – I'm going to move my mouse around there - there are two lakes in The Preserve, and Eastwood One, they're interconnected by a North-South pipe. And the roadway was supposed to drain into that as well, in that it drains down through this lake into a canal along the south side, which is a Melbourne Tillman canal. Now later, the Eastwood Two project was permitted. And when that was permitted, the road right of way was extracted, actually from the permit. And there was some work done to amend the control structure in the lake in Eastwood One to accommodate Eastwood Two."
Click here for the audio file.