- December 26, 2024
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The city of Ormond Beach is among the eight municipalities that will be receiving grant dollars to help with stormwater planning studies.
On Tuesday, Nov. 19, the Volusia County Council approved the distribution of over $60 million for 18 stormwater projects in Community Development Block Grant disaster recovery funds from the Housing and Urban Development, which allocated $328.9 million of these dollars to Volusia County in May 2023 to help with Hurricane Ian recovery. The county's action plan, called Transform 286, set aside $92,910,000 for infrastructure and mitigation projects for the county, cities and nonprofit entities, according to a county staff report. The $60 million will be used for lift station replacements in Daytona Beach, sewer improvements in Daytona Beach Shores, new stormwater ponds in South Daytona and chemical tank replacements in Holly Hill, to name a few of 18 projects.
Then, the county put out a call to its municipalities to ask if they had any stormwater studies they'd like help funding. Eight municipalities — Ormond Beach, Holly Hill, Deltona, Lake Helen, New Smyrna Beach, Orange City, Port Orange and South Daytona — took the county up on its offer.
"The answer was a resoundingly 'yes, please,'" said Donna Butler, director of the county's Recovery and Resiliency department.
The county will fund about $8.6 million for the 27 requests from these municipalities. Ormond Beach will receive $350,000 for three stormwater studies.
"All of the study areas that have been identified with this grant are areas that were impacted both with Ian and Milton," Ormond Beach City Engineer Alex Schumann said. "It's areas where we can help our residents get water out and get water where it needs to be, to the Halifax and Tomoka rivers."
The grant funds were approved by the County Council in a 5-1 vote, with Councilman Don Dempsey voting against. Councilman Matt Reinhart was absent from the meeting.
Dempsey was concerned with the proposed allocation of $6.8 million of grant funds for the construction of a new operations building for the county's Emergency Medical Services. Volusia's current EMS headquarters are located in Holly Hill at 112 Carswell Ave. and 135 Carswell Ave., and are being proposed to be relocated to a former automotive dealership building at 1720 Mason Ave., which the county purchased earlier this year.
Dempsey was concerned that the list of projects that were receiving CDBG funds were largely located in east side municipalities. The only west side city among the seven that will be receiving the total $60 million of funds is Orange City — though its Mill Lake mitigation and improvement project is receiving the most funds at over $15 million.
"I'd like to go down that list and make sure we have enough money available before we spend it on an EMS building," Dempsey said.
County Manager George Recktenwald said there will be more projects coming before the council for funding approval in the next round; Volusia still has about $50 million of funding for mitigation projects, as $18 million were transferred from other Transform 386 categories to mitigation as part of the vote.
EMS covers the entire county, Recktenwald said, and its current headquarters flood with each storm.
"It's the headquarters for a very large, very critical operation that we run," he said.
