Army Corps rejects proposal

The Army Corps of Engineers has shot down a proposed 48-inch drain tile that would divert flood water from Millers Branch to the east.

“We can’t build that,” Dan Vogler of the Corps told the flood advisory committee Friday morning.

The Corps estimates that running such a tile underground across the Jay County Fairgrounds, land owned by the Tri-State Gas Engine and Tractor Association and the Tom Homan family, would cost $7.9 million.

And a Corps cost and benefit analysis says the project doesn’t make sense.

Meanwhile the Corps’ proposal for an open ditch along that same route from Miller Branch to the Cartwright ditch is a non-starter. Local officials and the affected property owners have rejected that concept.

“The open ditch is an impossibility,” said committee secretary Barry Hudson.

Vogler stressed Friday that any alternative other than the Corps’ proposed open ditch would have to meet or exceed that plan’s benefits.

Such an open ditch would cost an estimated $3.6 million and provide significantly more in terms of flood risk management than the tile.

The committee is now looking at the possibility of creating a detention pond on the west side of Morton Street north of the Tri-State grounds on city-owned acreage. Information on that alternative is being sent to the Corps for review and cost-benefit analysis.

Meanwhile, Corps officials said that the timeframe for the planning process is running out. The process is in its second year, and there’s usually a three-year limit.

“We’re getting near that clock on this,” said Vogler. “We’re probably at the end of our rope.”