As Volusia County continues to grapple with ongoing flooding concerns — and possible solutions — just a few months shy of hurricane season, some residents of the county’s rural Tomoka Farms Village community say they’re ready to take matters into their own hands.
At a community meeting attended by about 50 people Thursday night, Mike Poniatowski laid out next steps for a nonprofit entity he and some other village residents want to form: to fundraise enough money to hire experts, like an attorney and a civil engineer, who can help address the area’s flooding issues.
“We need that collective teamwork to really make a dent and make an effort here,” Poniatowski said Thursday.
Tomoka Farms Village is designated for rural residential and agricultural use, per its Local Plan. But the area is increasingly impacted by surrounding development, which village residents say is causing more stormwater to flow into their rural community.
Meanwhile, existing drainage systems in Volusia County are outdated, unable to handle rising rainfall amounts. The County Council recently approved using federal funding for 30 stormwater studies for different drainage basins in the area “to see how the basin reacts and whether or not there are engineered solutions that can be done to provide some sort of relief,” Public Works Director Benjamin Bartlett said Thursday.
During Hurricane Ian, some parts of the county took on more than 20 inches of rain in a 24-hour period, Bartlett said, almost double the rainfall rate used in designing drainage systems for a 100-year flood.
Village resident Jackie Clark’s home flooded during hurricanes Ian and Milton, both record-setting storms which Clark said were always likely going to impact her home, no matter what.
But Clark is concerned a specific factor may have made the flooding worse: two reservoir lakes for reclaimed water in the nearby city of Port Orange.
“In dry times, they wanted to have extra storage for their reclaimed water,” Clark said at Thursday’s meeting. “It's a really good project …. But I have a feeling they're not using it just for that.”
Clark lives just a few miles east of Port Orange’s two reclaimed water lakes, which together cover about 175 acres. The lakes were originally permitted by the St. Johns Water Management District in the early 2000s as part of an alternative water supply project, a way to make use of the city’s reclaimed water — treated wastewater — instead of discharging it into the Halifax River.
The lakes allow Port Orange to store reclaimed water for later use, for irrigation and to help recharge the aquifer, according to the city. The “unseen service” is cost-efficient and helps reduce the amount of drinking water used for irrigation, according to the city.
Additionally, “the city has the ability to pull stormwater out” of a canal that drains into the Halifax River, filter that stormwater, and “put it into the reclaimed water supply during periods of high rainfall,” according to a video published by a consulting firm that worked on the city’s reclaimed water system.
Clark, who is not an engineer, said she pored over permitting documents and public water discharge data. What she learned, Clark said, is that during hurricanes and other heavy rainfall events the city appears to be sending more water to the lakes than they can hold. She fears the discharge has intensified the flooding in her rural pocket of unincorporated Volusia County.
“I don't know if I'm misunderstanding any of this, and I really don't know if anything negligent is going on,” Clark said at Thursday’s meeting. “I do know that we live in a low-lying area, with an under-designed drainage system.”
“Maybe we would have flooded anyway,” Clark said. “But we don't need their [the city’s] water.”
In 2022, on average, Port Orange sent about 1.6 million gallons of water per day, or MGD, to the reclaimed water reservoir lakes, according to the city's comprehensive plan. But when Hurricane Ian hit that year, there were several days when the city sent much more water to the lakes: as much as ten times the yearly average, according to Clark’s interpretation of water discharge records she requested from the city.
Clark said she found similar trends when looking at the city’s discharge data for dates during Hurricane Milton and two rainstorms in late 2023.
A Port Orange spokesperson said via email that “there have been no failures with the lakes.”
Bartlett, Volusia’s public works director, said one big challenge with addressing flooding problems is the necessary pace of progress: “Flood mitigation projects don’t happen fast.”
Although the 30 stormwater studies recently approved by the Volusia County Council are on the way, they’ll take awhile to come to fruition. But Barlett told residents an analysis of the drainage basin that includes the Tomoka Farms Village community will be “the first one out the gate.”
The most recent watershed study for Tomoka Farms Village was published in 2009. It pointed out several issues with the area’s drainage that were never addressed.
Meanwhile, many village residents are frustrated by talk of analysis and want to see action, Poniatowski said, telling Bartlett: “We're tired of studies, and studies of studies.”
Bartlett empathized, saying: “I understand the frustration. We’ve got a hurricane season coming right around the corner, and nobody wants to go through another storm, like an Ian or a Milton, and have flooding occur again.”
But in order to fund projects that can help prevent future flooding in a watershed, Bartlett said, those watersheds must be analyzed by qualified engineers, who can run models demonstrating where an area is most likely to flood and which specific improvements would most likely help reduce flooding.
“You’ve gotta show [funders] that what you’re doing is gonna be an improvement,” Bartlett said. “It's just an unrealistic timeline to expect these projects to happen fast. That's the facts, and I don't know of any other way to say it.”
Closing out Thursday’s meeting, Poniatowski spoke of plans to form a 501(c)(3) nonprofit entity on behalf of Tomoka Farms Village so the community can hire experts to study the area’s flooding issues and possible solutions.
“We already have the articles drawn up,” Poniatowski said.
Already, residents have successfully pushed back against several recent development proposals that would’ve clashed with Tomoka Farms Village’s local plan, he said.
“That's why it's important that village people stick together, and they make their voices heard,” Poniatowski said.
