When flash flood waters swept into homes and businesses near Chollas Creek last week, not many people should have been surprised — not residents, not activists and certainly not a parade of San Diego city officials.
City leaders and others have known for years that the creek and stormwater infrastructure around it are in dramatic need of attention and that absent billions of dollars in new spending, the communities of Southcrest, Logan Heights and others along the channel that feeds San Diego Bay could seriously flood.
Year after year, city officials have outlined deficiencies in an outdated and underfunded stormwater system they describe as “failing.”
“The City’s stormwater infrastructure, most of which was built in the 20th Century, is past its useful life, resulting in system deterioration and failure,” city officials wrote in a 2022 infrastructure report.
“Age, combined with deferred maintenance due to historic underfunding of the storm drain system, poses a risk of flooding and catastrophic failure,” city officials wrote in a report published earlier this month.
The backlog of projects aimed at shoring up the stormwater system is so extreme, it makes up the largest share of an infrastructure deficit that has swollen to more than $5 billion — roughly equal to every dollar the city spends per year.
“Consequences of inadequate maintenance include flooding, sinkholes, property damage, increased maintenance costs and public liability costs,” a 2018 city audit found.
Quickly rising stormwater overran some of the city’s neediest neighborhoods Monday, sending waves of mud and debris crashing into homes and dozens of residents fleeing to safety.
Many residents say Monday was far from the first time they have had flooding due to problems with the city’s stormwater system. Now residents and advocates are calling for the city to do more to fix the system before future floods can bring repeat wreckage.
Delays and backlogs
First developed more than a century ago, the city’s network of pipes and drains is now old and outdated. It was built in a different time, when San Diego was far less densely urbanized and before climate change increased the severity and frequency of storms.
All told, the city needs some $2.2 billion in stormwater upgrades over the next five years, according to a city infrastructure report released earlier this month. It doesn’t have funding for at least $1.6 billion of those identified needs.
That infrastructure need has ballooned over the years as needed projects go underfunded. In 2016, the city had estimated it would have $416.2 million in stormwater capital needs from 2017 to 2022.
City officials say cost projections have risen over time because they are more comprehensively assessing their infrastructure than they have in the past, and a lot of what was built during the city’s population boom of the 1950s and 1960s is now nearing the end of its lifespan.
Last year, the stormwater department told elected officials that there were more than 1,000 known pipe failures that had yet to be addressed.
The city currently uses about 19 miles of corrugated metal pipe for stormwater, a material now considered outdated. Virtually all of the city’s corrugated metal pipe has exceeded its expected useful life.
The failed pipes “pose (a) threat to health and safety,” the stormwater department said.
The city has approximately 200 segments of flood channels. Almost a third of them need “substantial maintenance,” the stormwater department wrote in a report to city council in November.
But the agency says it only gets enough money to maintain four segments a year.
Infrastructure failures contribute not just to flooding but to sinkholes, erosion and pollution in streets and alleys, the department said. They are also costly — infrastructure emergencies caused more than $46 million in capital costs last fiscal year, according to the stormwater department.
Still, city leaders have repeatedly called Monday’s atmospheric river a pounding so rare and severe that it would have overwhelmed any stormwater system, no matter how well-equipped.
“Even a storm drain system that (was) designed to the golden standard today … would have failed,” Kris McFadden, one of San Diego’s deputy chief operating officers, said at a news conference Thursday.
Stormwater maintenance and capital projects are time-consuming, costly and full of bureaucratic hurdles to clear, McFadden added.
Flood channel projects take time to plan and carry out partly because they require multiple reviews and regulatory approval from several agencies, from state and federal wildlife agencies to the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, officials said. The approval process takes years.
Not only do the actual projects have to be planned and conducted, but corresponding environmental mitigations must be conducted and paid for to offset the impacts of the channel projects, McFadden said.
“Increased and evolving clean water regulations have enormously expanded the city’s compliance obligations and associated infrastructure costs,” city officials wrote in a recent infrastructure report.
McFadden noted on Thursday five stormwater construction projects starting this year, including upgrades in Southcrest Park and in Lomita. The projects are aimed at better controlling runoff and improving water quality. Two years ago, the city dredged the flood channel in Southcrest, he added.
McFadden said the city prioritizes which flood channel segments to upgrade first by considering public input and by measuring the risk, including which channels are most likely to fail and the extent of damage any failure might cause.
Last fiscal year, the city completed 22 stormwater capital projects, mostly storm drain repairs or replacements, budget records show. The current budget calls for beginning design and construction for 53 capital projects across the stormwater network this year — including a drain and channel upgrade along Beta Street, which flooded last week.
Flood-damage cleanup
Chronically underfunded
Problems with the stormwater system can largely be boiled down to one reason, officials have said: It doesn’t get nearly enough funding.
The stormwater department gets only about a third of the money it needs on an annual basis, according to a November report from the department. It needs $314 million annually on average, but it has a budget of only $109 million.
In June 2018, then-City Auditor Eduardo Luna released a detailed report on San Diego’s lagging stormwater system.
The 88-page performance audit spelled out deficiencies not only with the city’s flood-control practices but with the fee structure that doesn’t come close to generating the money needed to implement repairs.
San Diego charges single-family homes 95 cents a month to pay for stormwater costs — as little as one-tenth what other California cities charge for that service, the audit said. For multifamily and commercial customers, the fee is less than 7 cents per 100 cubic feet of water used.
The city’s stormwater fee is so low that it doesn’t even cover 10 percent of the department’s $60 million-plus in operational spending. Last year, the surcharge raised $5.7 million.
“Current revenue sources are not sufficient to address storm water funding need,” the audit said.
Auditors also said the city should replace vulnerable pipes more quickly and write a plan to make improvements more efficiently. They made nine separate recommendations aimed at getting the needed upgrades prioritized and completed.
McFadden, the director of the city’s Transportation and Storm Water Department at the time, agreed with all nine of the recommendations.
But even though city staff issued several proposals aimed at addressing the fixes and lapses in revenue, little has been done to increase the stormwater infrastructure fee, first put in place in 1996. The fee has not risen since.
McFadden and others blame California’s Proposition 218, ed by California voters that same year. The so-called Right to Vote on Taxes Act requires a two-thirds majority vote before cities, school districts and other public agencies can impose special taxes.
“Proposition 218 has essentially frozen funding for stormwater management at 1996 levels,” wrote the California Stormwater Quality Association.
San Diego has not placed a stormwater fee increase before voters ever since.
Other local governments in California have successfully made the case to voters that spending on flood control is worth the investment.
In 2004, Los Angeles city voters ed a $500 million bond to fund stormwater and clean-water projects. In 2018, Los Angeles County ed — on its second try — a stormwater tax increase of 2.5 cents per square foot of impervious surface. It generates $280 million for projects a year.
Three years ago, San Diego officials discussed placing a stormwater tax measure on the ballot that was expected to raise about $85 million a year. But they didn’t pursue one after survey results suggested they might not receive the two-thirds voter approval needed for it to .
Instead, San Diego leaders have taken a different path toward securing money for managing stormwater — seeking grants and borrowing money.
In 2022 the city said it had accumulated $733 million in loans, grants and other financing, including a hefty federal loan, to pay for dozens of stormwater projects over five years, including replacing old pipes and pump stations.
But the loans are far from a cure-all, officials acknowledged in a presentation last year. Even that $733 million would cover only one-third of the capital improvements needed over five years and does not include operations or maintenance needs.
‘The drains aren’t clean’
While San Diego officials have been sounding alarms over the aging flood-control network, lawyers defending the city in civil lawsuits have adopted a different position.
According to a legal complaint Southcrest resident Greg Montoya and others filed in 2019, the city not only knew about the threat for decades, it helped create the conditions that caused the flooding.
The city built a concrete channel to direct storm runoff from Chollas Creek but nonetheless allowed it to remain clogged, the lawsuit said. City work crews also constructed an embankment above the concrete channel behind Beta Street that then directed stormwater to nearby properties, the complaint alleged.
“That concrete channel was in a dangerous condition on or around Dec. 6, 2018 because it was clogged with vegetation restricting the water flow and causing water to back up and overflow the banks of the channel,” the lawsuit said. “That condition caused plaintiffs’ properties to flood.”
Lawyers hired by San Diego argued that the city was not at fault.
An expert hired by the city “found that the 100-year flow in Beta Street will not cause flood impacts since plaintiffs’ residences are adequately set back and elevated above the street,” the city’s lawyers wrote in a 2021 court filing.
“Collectively, the alley and Beta Street meet the city’s criteria to avoid flooding of existing buildings,” they added.
Montoya and his neighbors eventually accepted just over $200,000 to resolve the lawsuit. But the settlement did not require the city to correct the problem.
On Monday, he watched in despair as his block flooded once again.
Montoya told The San Diego Union-Tribune he was aghast as he watched Mayor Todd Gloria blame climate change and otherwise deflect responsibility for what happened to homes along Chollas Creek once again.
“I would tell the mayor that he made false statements,” Montoya said. “I have documents that show the drains aren’t clean.”
The yearslong quandary in the stormwater system has not escaped the notice of clean-water advocates and other environmental groups. They have been pressing the city to do more to improve its watershed-management practices for a long time.
Groundwork San Diego – Chollas Creek is a local nonprofit founded in 2007 at the direction of city officials. Its mission was to create a master plan for the 32-square-mile watershed that stretches from City Heights and Encanto to Barrio Logan and San Diego Bay.
Executive Director Leslie Reynolds credits San Diego public officials for working to develop and implement a climate-friendly plan for a regional park, but she also said progress has been too slow.
“It’s devastating,” she said of last week’s events. “There have been pockets throughout this watershed that have experienced flooding for decades, and historically the city’s response has been inadequate.”
Reynolds credited the Gloria istration for beginning upgrades along Chollas Creek in the area that flooded so many homes last week, but she said far more improvements need to be made.
“The problem is huge,” she said. “We need improved levels of service for storm drain maintenance.”
Phillip Musegaas of San Diego Coastkeeper also said the city has been slow to act.
“City agencies’ failure to clear stormwater channels and creeks of trash and debris led to flooding impacts to homes and property that were much worse than they could have been,” he said.
Musegaas said the mayor and City Council must do more to raise money to fix the problems.
“These intense storms are not a fluke, they are the new normal,” he said. “Continuing to ignore the funding problem will only make things worse, and continue to put San Diego residents’ lives and property at risk.”
‘This cannot happen every several years’
Many residents across San Diego also saw the threat posed by the recurring neglect of the city flood-control system.
Rob Campbell is a healthcare from Encanto who repeatedly filed requests to the city for help, warning that the flood channel near his house was unsafe. He submitted photographs he took showing an old television, a shopping cart and heaps of garbage clogging up a culvert near his home.
The requests for service were routinely closed without the city taking any action, he said.
“It’s super sad for all of the people who live in the affected areas,” Campbell said. “It’s not a secret that we are a low-resourced area. We have been historically underfunded. I don’t know how else to advocate for the community. I have taken all the avenues I know how.”
Prior to Monday, more than 2,600 complaints about the city’s stormwater system had been filed in the past year to the city’s online Get It Done problem-reporting application. More than a quarter of those were unresolved as of Thursday.
People have complained about clogged storm drains and flood channels blocked by heaps of trash and overgrown vegetation.
“Full grown trees in the ditches, water has no where to go but up into the streets and homes, city has not cleared in years,” wrote one resident from the Shelltown neighborhood just south of Southcrest.
“This is the second time in eight years we have had massive flooding in our apartments due to the negligence of the city drains,” someone from Golden Hill wrote. “This cannot happen every several years, as it is (devastating) to our investment and tenants who live here.”
And from a resident in Clairemont: “Clean out the channel!!! This is the 4th time that I am reporting this.”
Campbell, the healthcare from Encanto, said in his experience city workers tend to close out complaints rather than fix the problems.
“That’s pretty typical to close without having an actual resolution,” he said. “That’s a common thing. It’s a major problem that you can’t follow up with a Get It Done report. You are forced to re-report.”
The stormwater department only conducts work for Get It Done requests that are straightforward, like clearing a storm drain or pipe, a city spokesperson said.
When requests concern more complicated issues that would take years and millions of dollars to fix, like clearing a flood channel, the department marks them as resolved, even if the work hasn’t yet been performed, the spokesperson said.
Earlier last week, Gloria announced he had spoken with Vice President Kamala Harris about the city’s flood damage and pressed the former California senator for federal relief.
The city said Friday it had set aside $370,000 for grants to businesses and nonprofits affected by the storm, and on Saturday officials got word that the county will qualify for state relief for public infrastructure.
