City of Florence gets $2.6 million for stormwater improvements

The grant will not cover the full $3.2 million the Pennsylvania Street watershed improvements will cost, but the rest of the funds will come from the city’s 2021 stormwater bonds, according to Assistant City Manager Clint Moore. The money will go toward improved drains and pipes and the purchase of new property to build stormwater ponds, he said.

“Engineering, permitting, all of those things take a fair amount of time to get put in place prior to the bidding and construction to actually start,” Moore said. “Residents will be able to start to see surveying work and that preliminary investigation and things like that occur.”

The Pennsylvania Street project is around 75% designed, Moore said. The final design should be complete by the end of summer, and construction will likely start in late fall or early winter, he said.

The new grant, which was awarded by the state but uses federal funds available through the American Rescue Plan Act, brings the total grant dollars awarded to the city for stormwater projects to almost $10 million, Moore said. Those funds are on top of the $7 million in bond money the city took out in 2021 for stormwater improvement projects.

Two other stormwater projects are being funded primarily through grants: West Cedar and McQueen Street watershed improvements and North Church and Oakland Avenue watershed improvements.

The West Cedar and McQueen Street watershed project received $3.9 million in grant funding in March 2021, and engineering for the project is nearly complete, Moore said. Construction is set to start this year.

The project will increase storm drain sizes in the area and bring the headwaters of Gully Branch, the stream that runs through Timrod Park, out of pipes and into the daylight, Moore said.

The headwaters stand on a piece of land the city bought for $750,000 in the fall of 2022, he said.

“That’s a very exciting ecological component as well as flood control that we are going to be able to do with those grant fundings,” Moore said.

The project’s total cost is around $5 million, with the amount not covered by the grant coming from the stormwater bonds. The city has asked the state for another $1.5 million to cover the rising cost of construction, according to Moore.

The North Church and Oakland Avenue watershed project received a $3.07 million grant in February 2022, and the city is gearing up to start engineering for the project, Moore said.

Mostly, the project will be adding new pipes, new drains and new inlets to the area, as well as replacing existing pipes with larger ones.

All of the projects are moving as fast as they can, but regulations and permitting means the process is often slow, Moore said.

“Obviously there is a lot of oversight and review conducted by the state because these are federal dollars,” he said. “That can sometimes extend the timeline a little bit, but we are working very closely with them to expedite that and get things moving as quickly as we can.”