City Council Candidates Discuss Lilly Run Flooding

Patch asked the candidates for the May 3 election to share their opinions on more than a dozen topics relating to the city.

In this installment, City Council candidates—incumbents John Correri and Randy Craig, and challengers James Lauer, Diane Lawder, Lori Maslin and Barbara Wagner—address solutions for the Lilly Run flooding issue in Havre de Grace:

John Correri

Correri has seen this issue on his desk before.

“I’ve been around for a while. It’s been there for a while, Lilly Run has,” he said. “I’d love to be able to say that we got it done in my lifetime.”

Correri said the city has done its homework on the project, with renderings complete. The key is getting grants.

Correri sees one of the major steps in helping to alleviate the problem in creating large holding ponds between the high school and middle school.

 “To me, that’s kind of the end of the story. You have to rewind back, look at the beginning, and find out where this water’s coming from and start there before you start. I’d love to be able to get that taken care of and bring that to a climax there, and have that as a controlling area for Lilly Run. But we have a lot of work to do before that. It’s going to be very costly.”

Randy Craig

Craig pulled out a three-inch thick binder during his interview with Patch to illustrate the potential solutions to the Lilly Run flooding problem

“There are 18 solutions to this problem,” Craig said. “It’s not do this one, or this one. It’s not A or B or C. It’s A and B, and C, and D, and all the way down. None of them are cheap. None of these work without all of the others. The goal is to do all of them, and that’s how you solve the problem.”

But Craig said it’s an impossible task for the city in the current economic climate—and probably would be next to impossible even in better financial times.

“To afford to do it all at the same time, is well beyond the capabilities of the city to do, unless we were to borrow a substantial amount of money,” Craig said.

In the meantime, Craig thinks the first step is to divert the water.

“If you have a leaky pipe in your house, what’s the first step you do? Turn off the water,” Craig said. “Some of these solutions the city has been looking at recently help build a tub to hold it. To me, I’d rather divert the problem.”

Craig says the State of Maryland is coming down with new stormwater regulations, which might provide an opportunity to obtain grant financing from state organizations.

Overall, the two-term Councilman puts it like this: “The answers are here. But the money’s not.”

James Lauer

Lauer did not respond to repeated interview requests from Patch.

Diane Lawder

Lawder looks back at the opportunity the city had when developers were eying what used to be Tranquility Place.

She thinks by developing the land on the southern end of the city, a corporation could have done the majority of the diverting through the neighborhood as a good-faith gesture to the city.

“It would have been great if those developers said, ‘We’ll take care of this for you.’ It didn’t happen,” she said.

Ultimately, Lawder points to the financial aspect of the situation as the hold-up to fixing the flooding.

“There’s no money in the budget to fix it right now,” Lawder said. “Is it a problem? Yes. Does it flood? Yes. Do people’s homes get flooded? Yes. What do you do? They cannot fix it. They don’t have the money.”

Lori Maslin

Maslin isn’t sure flooding along Lilly Run can be completely fixed. But if it can, then there becomes another issue.

“Say they can. Then the question becomes, how do you pay for it? Then we’re back to taxes. City services. We don’t want to pay more. But you want to get in and out of town when it rains terribly, and you don’t want a certain segment of your community having their basement flood every other week. So how do you fund it?”

She said it’s an obvious concern for those residents along Lilly Run. But it’s a concern for all citizens in certain storms.

“There have been times where we’ve had terrible, terrible rainstorms, and you can’t get in and out of town, because Revolution and Juniata flooded, the base of 155 at Juniata is flooded. It’s flooded at Otsego and Juniata, most of there to 155,” she said. “We have some flooding issues. The system can only take so much rain at once.”

Maslin also points to the issue that much of the land surrounding Lilly Run is protected because its wetlands.

She acknowledges the issue has been an underlying one for years. But she doesn’t think its one that’s been ignored.

“Its just a matter of determining if the way its being addressed is sufficient, or if we’re at a point where we need to move forward with some result of what’s been determined,” she said. “And finding a way to fund it if that’s the way it is.”

Barbara Wagner

Wagner sees the flooding as an issue not only for those who reside along Lilly Run, but for all residents and visitors to the city.

“When it does flood, it interferes with getting in and out of the city,” she said. “It effects everyone in that aspect.”

Wagner said she’s looking forward to talking with the city’s John Van Gilder, who has done a great deal with the project in recent years.

“There’s no way for any of us to know what the answers are,” she said. “But our job is to do our homework, hear from the experts.”

Funding is ultimately an issue. Wagner brought up the potential housing project that would have been built where Tranquility Place once stood as the ideal panacea for the issue.

But since that project fell through, she thinks grants can help. But some failing infrastructure will fall on the taxpayers, she’s afraid.

“It is something we need to worry about and some tax money is going to go in that direction,” she said.

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Other issues the candidates for City Council have addressed:

—April 20

—April 21

—April 22