Downtown drainage plan–hard, unimaginative, anti-environment

Any city in the desert that is smart and forward thinking is going to save and use its stormwater runoff. Evidently not T or C. 

The city commission accepted the “Master Downtown Drainage Plan” that’s been in the works since Morris Madrid was city manager in 2019. WH Pacific, the engineering firm hired, presented the final version at the April 9, 2025 meeting. It recommends the usual hard surfaces that will rush water faster to the Rio Grande that carries pollutants from vehicles and roads–the biggest pollutant of rivers. 

No water harvesting to green up the city, no swales to catch rain and water trees and plants, no cheap cleaning and filtering out pollutants by plants and earth. The ball fields and golf course and parks are brown and only get effluent left over from sewer treatment–which only hardy plants can handle–while our uncollected stormwater is rushed to the river. 

Instead, the plan proposes to build a box culvert, put in pipes under a couple of streets and tear up streets to repave them so that they don’t crown but form a shallow channel in the middle. The plan also proposes a “storage” area under Bullock’s parking lot that will hold one acre foot of water, but it’s not water to be used again–it will “infiltrate” into the soil instead of being captured. 

Figuring out how to keep downtown from flooding after rain events has been a to-do for city commissioners for at least 20 years. Poor Bullock’s grocery store. It’s at the epicenter of flooding, barricading itself against stormwater that quickly rises above the shallow aquifer created by the hot springs beneath. 

The hot springs bed is a shallow, tilted bowl of cracked Magdelena limestone in the bend of the river. The soup bowl is interspersed with clay lenses and rock intrusions that act as lids or barriers that press the water down here and make it gush there. 

This flukey, pressurized hot springs basin, this rarity, is what makes T or C. Makes or breaks it, if it’s ruined. The drainage plan doesn’t even consider the hot springs. 

But not considering the hot springs is a tradition here. The effect of paving, hardening the river’s edges at Rotary Park and Ralph Edwards Park with parking lots, bringing in fill to destroy what was once filtering and cleansing seeps, building concrete channels to puncture the pressure in the hot springs aquifer and rush its waters and chemical-laden stormwater to the Rio Grande have hurt the hot springs and the river. 

Like other cities, T or C must be threatened with huge fines or corralled into compliance via NPDES permit requirements. And it hasn’t been threatened–yet. 

Although plants and soil are better and cheaper at cleaning water and certainly more beautiful, T or C city commissioners accepted the hard-surface plan. City Commissioner Merry Jo Fahl even admitted that she “didn’t like to think” of the vehicle and road runoff going into the river, but it was “OK” that the plan didn’t consider that. “We’ll have to build some sort of filtration system in the future.” Prepare for the purchase of a multi-million-dollar mechanical monstrosity when the EPA no longer allows the city to pollute the river. When we could have restored the riverside to seeps and trees and plants with pleasure and much less expense. 

For a brief shining moment then-Mayor Steve Mulcahy, (https://sierracountycitizen.org/what-happened-to-this-drainage-plan/) a forward-thinking economic-development professional tried to get the city to use green infrastructure to solve the downtown drainage problem, but it got no traction from his fellow commissioners. We’ve reverted to rear-guard leadership again—our usual position.