Nearly four months before last week’s downpour, managers of a 93-unit affordable-housing complex in Rolando asked the city to clean the canal alongside it. The city didn’t get to it until it was too late.
Last week, water burst through fencing separating the channel from the Village Green Apartments and poured into dozens of apartments, leaving 57 families temporarily displaced.
City crews on Monday finally cleared some brush from the area, including a large palm blocking a significant portion of the storm drain. It wasn’t clear whether the palm was there before the flooding devastated the apartment complex.
What is clear is this wasn’t the first flood to hit the Village Green apartments and that property managers tried to avert a crisis before the latest one ravaged dozens of homes. The city, however, didn’t deem cleaning the channel next to the apartment complex a priority project until after last week’s storm.
The city’s Get It Done website shows there were more than a half dozen requests to clean the channel over the past several years, including in January 2017 when someone submitted a photo showing floodwaters spilling from the canal into Village Green’s parking lot and into multiple apartments.
ConAm Management Corp., which manages the apartments, kicked off its latest series of requests for canal cleaning on Sept. 28. By early December, emails obtained by Voice of San Diego after a public-records request show a ConAm manager emailed a staffer in Council President Sean Elo-Rivera’s office to ask for help.
In early January, Elo-Rivera’s staffer got word from a deputy director in the city’s Stormwater Department that cleaning up the channel next to Village Green wasn’t a priority project.
Deputy Director Eddie Salinas wrote that the city ranked the channel known as Cartagena 1 channel 41st out of 174 channels after an April inspection and noted that it was downstream of two other Rolando area channels, including one where a maintenance project was set to begin in February.
“Cartagena 1 is not planned for maintenance due to its lower ranking when compared to other higher-ranking channels,” Salinas wrote on Jan. 5.
Salinas also described environmental reviews necessary before maintenance work and staffing challenges.
“Once we are done with our channel work, we will have the ability to revisit Rolando Park for any minor maintenance opportunities that we can perform without permits,” Salinas wrote.
The rain hit before the other Rolando area maintenance project was set to begin.
A week after the storm highlighted the inadequacies of San Diego’s storm and drainage infrastructure throughout the city, Village Green residents are continuing to process what happened and question whether the flooding could have been prevented.
Monica Hill, who has lived at Village Green for 15 years, is among the displaced residents. She lost a living room set, two beds, pictures and a slew of other items.
Since the storm, Hill said she’s been anxious and struggling to sleep. For now, she and other tenants are staying in hotels with support from Wakeland Housing and Development Corp., which owns the apartment complex.
“I was traumatized, just had never seen anything like that before,” Hill said, recalling the panic she and neighbors experienced when water poured into their homes.
Hill said residents requested channel cleaning at multiple community meetings last year. She said the area has long been littered with branches, clothes, trash and at one point before the latest storm, a tree stump.
“We just want the city to be accountable,” Hill said. “You were asked several times to have a cleanup.”
When Hill’s neighbor Frida Medina awoke last Monday, she said her apartment was already underwater. Medina and her partner Toni Cass, jolted awake by Medina’s cries for help, rushed downstairs on the first floor of their unit to check on their dog and two cats who were thankfully safe and then scrambled to gather their things. The couple said San Diego police ultimately broke a sliding glass door so they could leave their apartment, a move that also led water and debris to rush into their home.
They made it out safely but are now they are left assessing the destruction – and how it changed their lives overnight. They lost a car, a computer, vinyl records, books, appliances and more.
“It was so, so overwhelming and sad,” Medina said. “We just stand in the middle of the living room just crying, hugging ourselves, just trying to make sense of any of it.”
Medina and Cass are also convinced channel maintenance could have been a game changer – and that more is needed. They described palms and shrubs lining the concrete channel that they believe may have contributed to last week’s flooding and could fuel future floods.
Both were glad city workers came out Monday but said they had more work to do. Palms and shrubs remain.
City spokesman Craig Gustafson confirmed the channel hasn’t received significant maintenance in recent years in part because it’s a “concrete-lined channel that historically has had minimal vegetation growth.”
The last notable project, he wrote in an email, was when the city removed a strand of palms in 2018.
Gustafson said the city prioritizes channel projects after annual inspections by ranking them on factors including the probability of flooding, structural damage, level of vegetation and debris. Ultimately, the spokesman said, the Stormwater Department’s annual budget only allows the city to pursue clearing and maintenance in four of its roughly 200 channel segments each year.
Clearing a storm drain can be relatively easy and the city can complete requests deemed emergencies within 24 hours, Gustafson wrote, but requests to remove vegetation or maintain a stormwater channel – as in the case of channel near the Village Green Apartments – are more complex.
“Working inside the channels requires regulatory approval from various agencies, including U.S. Army Corp of Engineers, Regional Water Quality Control Board, California Department of Fish and Wildlife, and in many cases proof that compensatory mitigation (i.e., creation or enhancement of wetlands off-site) can be provided. This can be a lengthy process with significant budget implications,” Gustafson wrote. “The decision to maintain a stormwater channel is a financial commitment, not just an operational decision.”
That’s being disputed by at least one agency, the San Diego Regional Water Quality Control Board, which told Voice that the city has clearance to do routine channel maintenance before storms.
Gustafson said the city was ultimately able to clean the channel near Village Green Apartments this week – plus work in a slew of other areas – by diverting staff from other functions to channel clean-up and maintenance work.
Elo-Rivera, who represents the Rolando area, has visited Village Green residents multiple times since last week. He said he appreciated that city staff addressed urgent needs in the channel next to the apartment complex. He’d still like to see staff completely clear brush on the west side of the channel.
Still, Elo-Rivera said he wasn’t sure whether cleaning the channel as residents and property managers requested would have stopped water from spilling into the property.
For now, Elo-Rivera said, he’s focused on ensuring displaced residents in Rolando and elsewhere have access to necessities such as food and shelter and a November ballot measure he announced he plans to push to increase city resources for both stormwater projects and disaster relief. If the City Council forwards the yet-to-be-detailed measure to voters and voters sign off, the new tax could help address $1.6 billion in projects the city now can’t afford.
“I don’t want San Diego to move on and forget about these communities because there is a lot of tragedy that’s gonna deserve our attention for a very long time,” Elo-Rivera said.
Rebecca Louie and Gama Vazquez of Wakeland told Voice their company, which owns the apartment complex, is also focused on aiding residents. Earlier this week, the company doled out $30,000 it raised for the cause to residents to fund hotel stays and other needs until Feb. 17. They have teamed with Elo-Rivera’s office and others to supply clothes, food and diapers. They are expecting it will take a couple months to do repairs that will allow the 57 families to return.
Like Village Green residents, they also can’t help but reflect on whether the strife all have experienced could have been avoided.
“Could this have been prevented? Possibly,” Vazquez said. “I just don’t know that for a fact right now but looking back in hindsight, with all the households that have been impacted and all the damage to the property and the units, it’s devastating.”
MacKenzie Elmer contributed to this report.
This is a major ‘fail’ by the City, another example of a bureaucratic blunder. This is a concrete channel, constructed to move water safely away from people and property. The technology and equipment exist to ‘clean’ channels on a regular basis before mud, debris, and growth create any sort of green belt that environmentalists will quickly deem a sensitive habitat. In typical fashion, the City continually fails to perform routine maintenance on infrastructure until it fails.
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Is this a surprise. San Diego is notorius for failing to maintain infrastructure. Just look at the roads that have been terrible for 20-30 years. Look at buckled sidewalks, the condition of Balboa Park, schools that are 40+ years old, short-staffing of police…..the list goes on. However, there is tons of money for homeless, migrants, every social program, pensions, etc. How about starting with taking care of taxpayers needs first….and then what is leftover can go to charity projects.
Dan, please identify where in the city budget there is an excess of funding for unsheltered folks, migrants, and social programs. It is one thing to gripe about the city’s failure to maintain critical infrastructure. It is quite another to place the blame for that underfunding at the feet of our city’s most marginalized residents.
So are you saying that the city spends no money on these programs? I am not suggesting anything about the less fortunate in our community….the “marginalized”. However I am suggesting that priorities are not in order. The is a limit to the amount of $$$$ available to operate this city….and I am suggesting that more emphasis needs to be put on the basics of providing overall public safety and maintaining our common elements.
You said there is “tons of funding” for homeless and migrants. Surely, if that were the case, it wouldn’t be hard to find in the city’s budget. Last year’s adopted budget included $704 million for capital improvements, $623 million for the police department, and $100 million for street resurfacing. By contrast, homeless services accounted for $47 million in city spending, $3 million of which goes to the police department. To frame it differently, the city spends $43 million just on police overtime every year. The city budget document is 1,492 pages. The word “migrant” doesn’t appear in it even once.
I know from personal experience with a Alvarado Creek that Fish and Game and the Water Quality Control Board do make it extremely difficult to clear channels, even when filled with think, invasive plants. So the WQCB statement is at best disingenuous. The spokesperson for the WQCB said “routine” maintenance is permitted. What is their definition of “routine.”
So are you saying that the city spends no money on these programs? I am not suggesting anything about the less fortunate in our community….the “marginalized”. However I am suggesting that priorities are not in order. The is a limit to the amount of $$$$ available to operate this city….and I am suggesting that more emphasis needs to be put on the basics of providing overall public safety and maintaining our common elements.
The Mayor and City Council decide how much money in the city’s budget goes to each service. They are the ones who chose to spend the funds on something other than storm drain maintenance.
It’s another example of the recuurring theme of shortsighted plsnning and funding around infrastructure projects followed by a sudden focus on–and funding for–something when it causes a big enough problem that it can no longer be ignored.
And politicians wonder why the public has such a low opinion of them and government?
I live in North Park on lovely canyon that is part of the storm drain system. I work in Southeast San Diego across from Chollas Creek. One only needs to look at the mountains of dumped appliances, mangled car parts, and the trees growing out them exposed in the clean up process to see that the storm drain system was not maintained for years. It is just one of many ways that City and County and the school district fail low income communities.
The flooding of the Rolando housing complex is symptomatic of a leadership crisis that has the operations functions of the City of San Diego, its elected city council and the mayor excelling at just one thing: EXCUSES.
If the 9-member council were a baseball team with Mayor Gloria as coach, Team San Diego would be notorious for its consistently high number of unforced errors. Add the Rolando blunder to the Sempra blunder (failure to form a true city-owned utility) to the Sempra building purchase blunder to the homeless blunder and we can begin to see a pattern of incompetence and an opportunity for someone to lead the city out of its culture of malaise and mediocrity to point it toward excellence. The mayor should be that leader, however, he can’t do so without owning the current state of despair and the fact that he’s party to and responsible for the outcomes past and future.
Time is running out for the Mayor and half the city council as they face elections in November. I’m glad we have Democrats in power in San Diego. I have worked for 40 years to elect politicians whose focus would be less on corporate interests and more on diversity, the environment and the people who live here. I’m not sure how we can possibly justify further trust without some inspired and immediate leadership. Mayor Gloria should order a stand down, pull the operations department heads together and LISTEN.
Corporations are always first in line for municipal dollars in San Diego. Dark money and lobbyists make sure of that. Infrastructure projects that protect residents in University are almost always short on municipal funding. The city is actively looking for non-profits to take over these maintenance items. So non-profit managers will have to go hat in hand to corporations, seeking tax shelters, for what should be a municipal responsibility.
We need to take government out of the board room and we need complete corporate transparency with all non-profits making their schedule B tax forms public. Citizens in a functioning democracy have the right to know how money is being spent.