Driving south on the Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Beltway in DeLand, there’s new development on nearly every block.
What isn’t already built is under construction, and nearly every single development is a brand-new, well-manicured subdivision, with some commercial exceptions.
Wendy Anderson, who’s lived in Volusia County for 10 years, is showing me around. Turning onto East Taylor Road, South Blue Lake Avenue, and Orange Camp Road, we arrive at the Victoria's: Victoria Hills, with uneven terrain and a golf course, Victoria Commons, a dense neighborhood with small townhomes, Victoria Gardens, a 55+ active adult community, The Reserve at Victoria, more sprawling and full of single-family homes, Victoria Oaks, one of the newest additions, and Victoria Trails, where she lives and our focus for this story, along with a community called Sawyer's Landing.
All of these neighborhoods make up Victoria Park, a master-planned residential community approved in the late 1990s. It spans nearly 2,000 acres was approved for more than 4,000 living units.
Now, for this story, the geography of where Victoria Trails and what Anderson calls a “random” addition, Sawyer’s Landing, is important.
“Sawyer’s Landing is the neighborhood inside our neighborhood that is not our neighborhood,” Anderson said. “It’s a chunk of land that was developed after Victoria Park was approved.”
According to the Stetson University environmental science professor, the original developers of Victoria Park had never intended on building Sawyer’s Landing. The small subdivision is a horseshoe with some 90 homes built on what, original plans show, was meant to be left untouched as natural wetlands.
She said this was before the Great Recession hit, and the project switched hands.
“It was sold off to another group,” Anderson said. “The original developers here were not going to develop it because it was originally wetlands, but the people they sold it to didn't have any problem doing that.”
Wetlands hold a lot of water. According to the National Oceanic Atmospheric Association and the Environmental Protection Agency, one acre of wetlands can hold up to 1.5 million gallons of water, acting like a sort of sponge, before then distributing that water through a natural hydrology network. Houses and even the most permeable cement can’t do that.
Anderson is also an appointed member of the Volusia County Environment and Natural Resources Advisory Committee, or ENRAC, where she helps draft language for new ordinances to address flooding issues.
Over the years, she's watched her neighbors deal with increased and sustained floods, which led to her concerns with the Victoria Trails and the Sawyer’s Landing developments. Anderson believes they are directly responsible for the severe, long standing floods affecting older adjacent communities on unincorporated county land.
“These two areas are creating a much, much higher elevation, almost like a dam that kind of pushes the water. That water used to spread out over a much larger wetland area and now is being contained or constrained into those larger acreage properties,” she said.
The water displacement, however, isn’t the only thing on Anderson’s mind.
In accordance with the St. Johns Water Management District and city of DeLand regulations, roads and homes are to be built at higher elevations to avoid flooding. This means, newer neighborhoods under the purview of the SJWMD are built at least to the 25-year, 24-hour minimum storm standards. DeLand has stricter standards. Developments there must be able to withstand the 100-year, 24-hour storm. In other words, a major flood event that has a 1% chance of happening in any given year.
Older neighborhoods didn’t have to meet those regulations.
Anderson said the north section of Victoria Trails and Sawyer’s Landing have been built up on a lot of excess fill. Meaning, they sit at a "much higher elevation" than the older neighborhoods, now below, experiencing chronic flooding.
Because water flows downslope, Anderson says it’s all ending up on the northwest side, where her county neighbors live, in what the city said are naturally low-lying areas of unincorporated county land, which Anderson said used to be flat.
“It's not that laws are being broken. Laws are actually being followed. And so these developers are required to do what they've done,” she said.
Her other concern is the pump. According to Anderson, for years, Sawyer’s Landing was pumping hundreds of thousands of gallons of water to the surface to keep its retention pond looking full for aesthetic purposes.
Retention ponds are designed by engineers to offset pre-development water runoff by holding and diverting stormwater. Keeping those retention ponds artificially full defeats their purpose, she said.
Victoria Trails development plans show ground elevations of up to 5 feet, while the Sawyer's Landing plans show the recharge pump set to keep the water level at 78 feet. Anderson said, the retention ponds in her neighborhood are kept at 75 feet.
Although Anderson eventually got the pump shut off in 2022, she believes all that extra water, as the area was getting hit with record-high rainfall, helped raise the water table – in other words, the level at which water normally sits underground is now higher.
Keith Riger is a civil engineer with 40 years of experience can attest that water tables need time to find equilibrium.
“Once the groundwater fills up, once the water table rises up, it takes a long time for it to go back down,” Riger said.
Riger has worked both in Volusia County and DeLand in public works. He said that during his time he has seen a lot change, mainly an urban population boom in Central Florida and increasing rainfall.
According to Riger, among other factors, these changes can make it harder for engineers to make accurate predictions, as they have not traditionally counted these rare heavy rainfall events in their data. However, he said they usually "get it right."
“Engineers are not infallible; they make design recommendations based on the information that they have available at the time,” he said.
As extraordinary events can and do occur, and now more frequently, Riger said some local governments have been adopting even more stringent regulations to account for rising water and changing rain patterns.
“We’re mindful that, whether it be climate change, or back-to-back storms, hurricanes, or normal variability, sometimes the criteria doesn't provide enough storage volume to attenuate the problem,” he said.
For JC Figueredo, that’s putting it lightly. The small business owner owns 12 acres of unincorporated county land, directly to the other side of Victoria Trails and Sawyer’s Landing.
Figueredo's property isn't in a flood zone. In fact, he lives in an area of the state designated as the least likely to flood. Still, he said he hadn’t seen his grass in almost five years. He can now because it’s been a dry season but the ground remains squishy.
“It’s never held water this long during no rain,” Figueredo said. “Since they finished these developments, this ground has been wet like this. It’s ruined. You can’t do anything with it.”
Like Anderson, Figueredo said he believes stormwater now just sits here due to runoff from newer developments and more are under construction.
“There’s nowhere for water to go. So, the problem is that, if they don’t fix it, it’s going to affect thousands of people here soon,” he said.
Thousands of people across Volusia County already claim that new development is the cause for their flooding.
Figueredo and his neighbors have taken their grievances to the city, the county, engineers, and developers – he even filed a lawsuit that a judge dismissed earlier this year.
At the same time, they’re taking matters into their own hands; spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on commercial-grade underground pumps, building their own retention ponds, and installing raised berms around their properties to dam the water.
According to County Chair Jeff Brower, some have had to walk away from their homes altogether. But this isn’t exclusive to this community near East Taylor Road and Jackson Road.
Multiple communities across Volusia County have taken this issue to local leaders. In March, more than 1,000 people rallied in Port Orange, demanding better flood mitigation measures and low-impact development. In April, the Venetian Bay neighborhood of New Smyrna Beach adopted a moratorium on new developments after finding errors in their stormwater plan.
And this month, residents of Daytona Park Estates in Daytona Beach requested to meet with the county on concerns that new homes are causing older properties to flood. People left comments on County Councilman Danny Robins' Facebook post, in which he offered to meet with the public, after sharing an official county document stating officials are aware of the DPE residents' concerns.
The statement went on to say that county taxes do not go to residential flood mitigation or stormwater management, which are expensive processes usually left up to individual communities.
"The county has not approved any plans or funding for the design and construction of a master stormwater system in Daytona Park Estates. This would be a significant undertaking to complete," the document said. "Funding an activity like this in a vested subdivision is typically handled by a special assessment of the property owners within the subdivisions."
For now, the city of DeLand said in a statement that it's in talks with the county and residents to try and mitigate ongoing flooding. They cited an extensive study of the area, in which independent engineers concluded that rain is causing the floods, not development.
“Somebody needs to scratch their head and say ‘Okay, we need to do something different here,’ and that's where we are,” Brower said.
Brower has committed to not approve any more new development proposals until officials can come up with solutions to current flooding issues. He said he’s trying to get the rest of the council to follow suit, but for the most part, he said, he stands alone.
“I think they associate development with economic development, that it brings in tax money, it brings in jobs. And I wouldn't disagree with that if we were doing it correctly,” Brower said. “There’s this idea that if you don’t grow, you’re dying. I say, if you don’t grow responsibly, you risk dying a horrible death.”
Craig Fugate was the Federal Emergency Management Agency administrator for eight years and now lives in Florida. He said local governments should be working with FEMA to redraft development regulations and flood maps, but he said that when the agency tries to expand flood insurance rates zones as needed “people hate it,” and there’s often resistance.
“Not always, but in some communities, developers and builders, and to a certain degree, public officials will push back against that because they perceive it as limiting their opportunity to develop something,” Fugate said.
Fugate said development can be improved upon without big economic impact, but the conversations need to be had. With climate change and increasing populations, soon, he said, old industry standards won't cut it anymore.
“Are we building resiliency into future construction based upon these extreme rainfall events? Or are we stuck only doing what we've done in the past, and it's just going to keep happening?” Fugate said.
He said this is especially true for Florida and homeowners need to step up for themselves if local governments won’t.
“When you look at an overhead, you have built literally in proverbial swamps, watershed areas, and the headwaters of the three major waterways of Florida. And then you're surprised when you get, you know, an extreme rainfall event, and your area floods,” Fugate said. “People say, ‘Oh, but it’s never flooded here before.’ Well, I wouldn't use my past experiences trying to figure out what's going to happen, when you’re getting record-setting rainfall events occurring, which means, it's never happened in your lifetime.”
Until people stop playing the blame game and see the matter for what it is, Fugate said, he recommends homeowners find ways to protect themselves.
Lillian Hernández Caraballo is a Report For America corps member.
