CLARKSVILLE, TN (CLARKSVILLE NOW) – Last year, the Clarksville City Council amended the fiscal year 2024-25 budget to include $500,000 toward studying drainage mitigation around Elberta Drive and Love Street, two areas in northwest Clarksville known to flood for years.
Now, more than a year after the funding was approved, residents say they are still out of the loop on what’s happening, they’re still experiencing flooding, and in some cases, it’s gotten worse.
“I have repeatedly asked, on multiple occasions over the years, just to be kept informed. Each time, I’m told by city representatives, ‘We’re working on it,’ but then no follow-through occurs. It feels dismissive and disheartening,” Danielle Luntz told Clarksville Now. “It’s incredibly frustrating to feel so powerless.”
Elberta Drive: ‘I had not been in my house since February’
After waking up to find her basement filled with murky water on Memorial Day 2024, Candace Payne told Clarksville Now she has flooded a total of three times now, which included twice this year, in February and April.
“In February, the flooding was substantially worse than the other two,” Payne said. “That particular time, we ended up having to be evacuated from the house. The water actually made it to my front door. I think at that time, there was roughly 5 feet or so.” Payne said that after flooding in February, she had to move out and pay rent to stay elsewhere.
“I just moved back into my house,” Payne said. “I had not been in my house since February, I’ve been in an apartment paying not only rent, but my mortgage as well. It’s disgusting that I was paying utilities for two places. I’ve now got a storage unit to put the things from the apartment in, because I’m too scared to put them in my house. If I put anything downstairs, once we hit fall, if the rain has been as bad as it has been, I would be stuck losing all of those things again.”
Payne said her aunt, who had been living in her basement, is still trying to recover from the first two floods. “The items that we were able to save from the first flood, she lost in the second flood. We’re grasping at straws waiting for them to get something done,” she said.
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Payne said she is still in the process of receiving hazard mitigation, but she has concerns if the opportunity will still be available down the road with how long the process continues to play out. She also has concerns with several other people in her neighborhood now experiencing damage from flooding.
‘I’m drowning and nothing is being done’
“I know the city has been saying we’ve had historic amounts of rainfall. Yes, we have, I wholeheartedly agree and acknowledge that. But it’s more than just the rainfall. Especially if the water has nowhere to go,” Payne said. “I’m drowning and nothing is being done. The city knows these are problem areas, and you can’t keep blaming the rain. Honestly, it was nice to see the city redirecting and trying to figure out something when it comes to stormwater management.”
Currently, the City of Clarksville is in the process of studying the need to create a Storm Water Utility.
“There has to be some sense of urgency, though,” Payne said. “We’re sitting back waiting for our city officials to do something. As I’ve said all these other times, if it was one of their family members, if it was one of them … something would have been done. We wouldn’t be sitting around waiting for it to happen a fourth time – Lord forbid it happens, but with the history – who’s to say that it won’t?”
She said that outside the city reaching out to confirm she knew about the Clarksville-Montgomery County Long-Term Recovery Group, as well as providing a trash bin to help her clean out her home, she hasn’t heard much.
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Payne is asking for her house to be condemned by the City of Clarksville, and there is precedent in the area. Around 2008, the city condemned and demolished a home across the street from Payne’s property, she said, because of flooding. At the time, the city offered to condemn her house as well, but the property owner declined and then sold the house years later, she said.
Over the last few weeks, Payne said, mold has been found in two of her rooms.
Love Street: DIY stormwater basin wall
Meanwhile, at the intersection of Love and Hayes Street, neighbors Billy Lange and Danielle Luntz have dealt with their properties flooding for more than 6 years now, which has cost them tens of thousands of dollars.
For the past six years, Lange had been working toward building his and his wife’s dream home in the Meadow Lane subdivision of St. Bethlehem, off Trenton Road. It took him years, however, because after buying his property, he found out a portion of the land was used previously as a neighborhood retention pond, he said.
Recently, Lange began building a basin wall that directs water toward a ditch on his property, and it seems to have taken some of the stormwater off himself, as well as his neighbors. Lange said that after receiving heavy rainfall recently, water didn’t flow over to his neighbors like before.
“That basin, that the city created, it used to come in through the middle of my property, which also went to my neighbor’s property. That created a flooding problem for the both of us,” Lange said.
“But the wall that I’ve started to build has brought the water farther down the property line to the ditch, which makes the 18-inch pipe – that’s really too small – kind of hold the water to take the water first instead of it all sitting at one time. I think that that’s helping, but with no help from the city, I’ve had to do this all on my own.”
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However, Lange said that if their area receives a flash flood event, they are still prone to flood because the volume of stormwater would be too much, and it’ll end back up over the street just like in the past.
“When it flash floods, we’re going to flood. We already know that because the pipe just can’t keep up with the volume. … If we had a little bit bigger of an offset pipe, I believe it would take.”
Lange said the City of Clarksville had given them a lot of hope that they were going to do something for his community. “But they’ve never been transparent to let us know. It’s been kind of a guessing game for a year,” he said.
‘They obstructed the natural flow of that water table’
Lange shared a plat map that he said shows the “ditch” was originally on Garth Drive, and that’s where the drainage easement is, Lange said. “But there’s four houses that sit in a drainage easement. The city tried to say that I shouldn’t have built, but the city diverted the water onto my property because it was vacant.
“They obstructed the natural flow of that water table that would normally take it to Garth. Because it would all collide in one spot. Them doing that, even though they aren’t helping any, they say they inherited it. We all know, according to the story and the plat map, it’s always been there. It was a natural easement that was obstructed by development of county to city that created this problem. And it was all due to growth. It wasn’t just from a man who built a house on the corner. This problem had laid there for many years … but it laid across the street and not on this property.”
Lange said that if you count all of the people that are affected by the natural basin, there’s a total of 11 homes, which includes his and Luntz’s properties on the outskirts.
$44,250 spent out of $500,000
Clarksville Now reached out to the City of Clarksville to see how the $500,000 allocated toward studying the drainage mitigation in the areas of Elberta Drive and Love Street has been used. Street Department Director David Smith responded that $44,250 has been spent toward the two areas:
- Elberta Drive – engineering fee – $12,500 (Terracon).
- Elberta Drive – engineering fee – $13,250 (McKay Burchett and Company).
- Love Street – engineering fee – $18,500 (McKay Burchett and Company).
As for what’s next, Mayor Joe Pitts said the city prefers not to discuss any future plans, as they remain to be finalized. The city is also actively strategizing options for next steps in flood mitigation but has nothing definitive to share at this time.
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