West Side flooding prompts deluge of complaints at budget hearing

Under siege from her flood-ravaged residents, West Side Ald. Emma Mitts (37th) unloaded Thursday on the city department head whose job it is to fix the perennial problem.

Mitts turned up the heat on Water Management Commissioner Andrea Cheng at a City Council budget hearing.

Scores of West Side residents still struggle to recover from the record-setting storm that dumped more than 6 inches of rain on the West Side in early July. Their homes may never be the same, even after assistance from the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

Mitts has been in the eye of the political storm ever since. She used Thursday’s hearing to transfer some of that anger to Cheng, whose department oversees Chicago’s water and sewer system.

“I don’t see nothing there for the West Side. It makes me sick to my stomach,” Mitts said after Cheng’s opening statement made passing reference to a $3 million “underground rainwater storage project to temporarily hold rainwater.”

Mitts demanded to know how the $397.8 million-a-year, 4,300-employee department allocates its resources to help neighborhoods like Austin, where basement flooding is a chronic problem.

She was not appeased when Cheng reported water department contractors have cleaned 40% of the catch basins in three West Side wards, expect to complete the job by Dec. 31, then move on to clean West Side sewer mains during the first quarter of 2024.

“It wasn’t because the department came out and said, ‘We’re gonna clean these sewers for you.’ I had to make the call. Just like I made the call the day of the flood. Nobody called me. Didn’t I call you?” Mitts said.

“Yes, you did,” Cheng replied.

Mitts was just getting warmed up. She demanded Cheng field some of the complaints now flooding her ward office.

“If I’m going to get ridiculed, then I want somebody to be there with me,” Mitts said.

“I don’t want to run my blood pressure up, but you’re about to make me run it up. … I want solutions. You talked about some fixes you’re looking to do. That’s fine, but that ain’t enough. We need to have a regional plan for how we’re gonna make sure that we contain the water that’s there.”

Cheng once again highlighted $3 million in Johnson’s budget for “many things, inclusive of the stormwater rain pilots for the West Side.”

“Obviously, with the impact from the flood, the West Side is the priority — making sure that we help everyone recover from that flood,” she said.

In 2012, then-Mayor Rahm Emanuel more than doubled water and sewer rates to bankroll a massive rebuilding of Chicago’s water and sewer system.

Since then, 215.6 miles of water mains have been replaced. Roughly 593 miles of sewers have been relined.

“If we can line them and create a pipe within a pipe, that’s preferred. It’s only about a quarter of the cost,” the commissioner said.

“When you talk about catch basins and things that are connected to the sewers, the same thing applies. If we can get in there and rehab it first, that’s better than replacing it.”

There are short-, medium- and long-term solutions to a flooding problem that will only get worse, now that the weather extremes of climate change have made “100-year storms” an almost annual occurrence, Cheng said.

“Short-term includes things like downspout disconnection that are really impactful if you can get lots of people to do it. That’s the key. Working on education,” she said.

There’s also what she called “wing storage.” That is, installing “basins that act as surge protection for flooding” in areas “in the public right-of-way that are not where we would normally have a sewer.”

Long-term plans call for what she called “massive underground tunnels that are going to help get the water to” the Metropolitan Water Reclamation District “in a faster manner.”

But don’t hold your breath.

“Those are billion-dollar projects that take a little longer,” Cheng said.

Northwest Side colleagues Nick Sposato (38th) and Anthony Napolitano (41st) reminded Cheng about a pilot program in the 39th Ward that reimburses residents for at least a portion of the cost of installing flood-control systems. It’s similar to the shared sidewalk program.

Asked if that could be expanded citywide, Cheng replied, “possibly.”

But “I would advise people to disconnect their downspouts first to see if that’s helpful because it’s so much less costly, and it helps the whole neighborhood. You’re literally taking ... water off your roof and putting it into lawns. It’s less water in your sewers.”

The problem with flood control is that, “That water has got to go somewhere, and it might be your neighbor.”