MORGANTOWN — The Morgantown Utility Board is exploring a project to reduce the frequency and severity of flooding in the Oak Court, Acorn Village and Tanglewood areas of Morgantown.
During its most recent regular meeting, the utility’s board of directors approved $55,000 for Strand Associates to conduct a preliminary engineering report.
MUB General Manager Mike McNulty said significant rain events regularly result in flooding issues in those areas.
“Staff met with the residents of those areas and said we would bring a proposal to the board where MUB would take care of the PER costs and go back to those residents with an opinion of costs for the project. As we’ve done on other projects, those customers in that drainage area would be assessed to pay for those upgrades,” McNulty said.
MUB put up $40,000 in early 2022 to cover the first phase of a flood control study in response to public fears and frustrations after historic flooding in and around the Suncrest area as a result of two 100-year rain events in summer 2021.
Getting WVU and the West Virginia Department of Highways, the area’s other two MS4 (municipal separate stormwater system) entities, on board was critical to the larger and more expensive ($300,000) second phase as the three systems are interconnected.
Both declined to participate, leaving MUB to focus on smaller stormwater projects within its own system.
“This has been on our radar screen for quite some time. As we talked about the flood study, we said we’d come back with some smaller projects. This dovetails right into that,” McNulty said.
In other MUB news, the board approved up to $100,000 in annual debt service for vehicle purchases in each of the next three years.
McNulty explained that since COVID, getting new vehicles has become extremely difficult.
The scarcity has not only driven up costs, it’s also prompted manufacturers to stop participating in state contracts that allowed public entities to purchase at discounted rates.
“With the state contract we enjoyed some rather low price points for vehicles. Those days are gone at the moment. We don’t know if we’ll ever see them again,” McNulty said.
TWEET @DominionPostWV
