- October 8, 2024
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Palm Coast has 950 outstanding swale maintenance requests from residents.
Stormwater Deputy Director Lynn Stevens said that the city has two swale specialist who respond to the requests and inspect individual swales to determine how much build up needs to be removed. Stevens said the inspectors then prioritize the swales based on severity.
“We have over 1,200 miles of swales,” Stevens said, “and we … regrade approximately 40 miles per year.”
It can take a “considerable amount of time” between a resident submitting a maintenance request and having it completed, Stevens said. That is because the maintenance teams do not go to individual homes, but regrade problem swales in batches.
The city’s 20-person swale maintenance staff — half of all of stormwater’s maintenance employees — work on 60-day rotations in sections throughout Palm Coast. The routes are decided on a need-basis, Stevens said, working from the most critical swales down to the least critical.
The swales with the least build up are left for a later round of maintenance, she said. Which is why residents may see only one side of a street receive maintenance, but not the other.
On average, the crews complete 7 miles of swale maintenance in each rotation. While there is some flexibility for the teams to complete more if they were to finish an area early, Stevens said, the crews are restricted to the 60-day time frame.
Stormwater Maintenance Manager Andy Hyatt said the swale maintenance team are very good at their jobs.
“They’re very efficient, they care about what they’re doing,” he said. “It a very technical thing that they’re doing and they deserve a lot of credit.”
Once a crew begins the process, it can take just one week for a swale in front of one home to be regraded and have its sod replaced, Stevens said.
As far as the city’s stormwater management system goes, she said, the city’s swales are the least critical part.
“They're the most aesthetic but the least critical when we talk about protecting homes from flooding,” Stevens said. “The flow [of the swales] do play an important part. They’re just not the most critical part.”
They're the most aesthetic but the least critical when we talk about protecting homes from flooding."
— LYNN STEVENS, deputy director of stormwater
The city’s stormwater management system operates like a pyramid, Stevens said: The canal system forms the base of that pyramid, the ditch system the center and the swales are on top.
Stevens said the city does rely on its homeowners to extend the life of a swale between maintenances. Residents need to mow the swales and remove debris from the culverts under the driveway, she said.
“The homeowners play an important role in helping to maintain the swales,” Stevens said.
At the Jan. 16 City Council meeting, multiple residents suggested the city outsource swale maintenance in order to speed up the process.
“We need to outsource a swale maintenance company,” resident Robbie Barrick said. “We [should] focus our energy on cleaning out the swales and the culverts once and for all and then we pay to maintain them.”
Stevens said if the city does decide to outsource the work, it likely would not impact the city’s current maintenance teams, but rather supplement their work. But staff would need to look into the technical questions first — like, she said, would an outsourced crew have its own swale specialist to inspect the amount of regrading necessary?
“There's a lot of other steps that we have to evaluate and flush out,” she said.
