After yearslong battles with the city of San Diego over crumbling stormwater infrastructure in their southeastern San Diego neighborhoods, hundreds of people whose homes and businesses were damaged by flash flood waters in January are now suing the city.
The $100 million mass tort lawsuit has nearly 300 plaintiffs — homeowners and renters as well as business owners in the communities of Southcrest, Logan Heights and others along the Chollas Creek watershed.
The lawsuit contends that city leaders have known for years that the creek and stormwater infrastructure around it are in urgent need of attention.
“The city of San Diego failed in its duty to protect communities from flooding,” reads the complaint, filed Monday in San Diego Superior Court.
It says the city knew for years that its storm drains were clogged full of vegetation, sediment and debris and therefore “created a destructive state of affairs and absolutely failed their residents.”
It also contends that despite years of warnings, the city failed to take the steps necessary to avoid flooding or increase stormwater revenue in the past two decades.
And it notes that the city’s stormwater system makes up the biggest share of its infrastructure backlog. A city report from earlier this year found that stormwater needs had grown to more than $2.2 billion over the next five years — a figure higher than the city’s entire proposed annual budget.
The city itself has said that absent billions of dollars in new spending, the outdated and underfunded stormwater system “poses a risk of flooding and catastrophic failure,” city officials wrote in a report published earlier this year.
The city attorney’s office declined to comment Wednesday on the pending litigation.
“The heart of that complaint is the clogging of Chollas Creek, which the city has known about for some time as a problem,” said Evan Walker, one of the five lawyers representing plaintiffs in the lawsuit.
Walker said his office, along with contractors and appraisers, have been assessing the storm destruction since January to calculate the total cost of damages.
The suit he filed on behalf of flood victims lists six causes of action, ranging from negligence to creation of a dangerous condition for public property.
This isn’t the first time the city has had to defend its aging flood-control network. Walker sued the city on behalf of some of the same residents after the same channel overflowed in 2018 and caused some of properties on Beta Street to flood.
That suit accused the city of not only knowing about but helping to create the failures that caused the flooding. It pointed to a concrete channel the city built to direct storm runoff from Chollas Creek but allowed to remain clogged, as well as an embankment above the channel that directed stormwater toward homes.
Residents eventually accepted just over $200,000 to resolve the lawsuit. But the settlement did not require the city to correct the problem.
The events of 2018 were “more or less the same” as what residents experienced in January, Walker said, but the biggest difference “is the sheer magnitude of the damages and that people affected” in this year’s storms.
The 2019 case only had a handful of plaintiffs. But now, some of those who previously settled are suing the city again, under different causes of action.
Greg Montoya, a plaintiff in both lawsuits, said he watched in despair as his block was inundated once again — this time much more extensively — after the bridge at 38th Street, just upstream from his home, was clogged with debris.
“The bridge acted like a dam, and water couldn’t get through — so it overflowed, blew out all the fencing along the creek and started flooding down the street,” Montoya said. “It was a mess.”
At least 3 feet of water destroyed most of his belongings, and he has since been living in a hotel through the county’s hotel voucher program while he repairs his home.
Since the first lawsuit, Montoya says he’s kept pestering the city, sending numerous emails and reports via the city’s online Get It Done problem-reporting app in an effort to clear the storm drains.
“They just continue to show that they have a lack of interest in this area,” he said.
He hopes he and other flood victims are compensated for their losses but also that the city will implement a plan to fix the stormwater system. “I hope this time they take it more seriously and get something done,” he said.
Meanwhile, city leaders are working to close the stormwater infrastructure funding deficit with a proposed parcel tax increase. The tax measure, which city officials hope to put on the November ballot, would raise anywhere from $74 million to $474 million a year for flood prevention and water quality projects.
The goal is to eliminate a $1.6 billion shortfall in the funding needed to complete crucial flood prevention and stormwater infrastructure improvements over the next five years — a gap that’s grown so wide in part because the city’s stormwater fee is only a small fraction of what other cities charge.
Should the tax hike appear on the November ballot and win approval from voters, it would mark the first such fee increase since Proposition 218 began requiring from two-thirds of voters back in 1996.
San Diego’s existing stormwater fee is about 95 cents per house each month — far less than the $10 per month that city officials say is the true cost of what San Diego must do to prevent floods and water pollution.
Despite the funding struggles, city officials have suggested the January floods were unavoidable. In a February press conference, city stormwater director Todd Snyder said the creek channel behind Beta Street wasn’t designed to handle such an intense storm and would have been overwhelmed even if it had been maintained.
The city may also face more legal claims to come. Other residents like Gerardo Hernandez who aren’t plaintiffs in the suit say they plan to pursue legal action of their own.
“Every person lost different amounts of money and property,” Hernandez said. “So it’s better to (sue) individually.”
Hernandez has also been living at a hotel through the county’s temporary lodging program after his Beta Street home flooded, and says he has been dealing with pain in his legs and hips since standing in cold water for five and a half hours the day of the flood.
In preparing to sue, he has been making a list of everything he lost, from toenail clippers to Christmas decorations to five vehicles. It’s currently at 18 pages.
