Design contract would plan two downtown ponds that double as parks and fix standing water at Slayter Creek Park

Anna's City Council is set to hire an engineering firm on Tuesday, Nov. 17, to design shared stormwater ponds for downtown that would also serve as parks, along with a drainage fix for a soggy stretch of Slayter Creek Park.

The professional services agreement with Teague Nall & Perkins is on the consent agenda, the list of items normally approved in a single vote, and is presented by City Engineer Kevin Bates. The resolution caps the work at $476,000, billed hourly, and pays for it with 2021 general obligation bond money from Proposition C, the parks, trails, recreation and sports measure.

The resolution's heading lists $470,500, but its approval section and the fee table in the contract both show $476,000.

Why downtown ponds

The resolution says drainage improvements are needed to carry out the Anna 2050 Downtown Master Plan, adopted in 2015. A shared regional detention or retention system, it says, would give each downtown property more land it can build on, since owners would not each need to hold stormwater on their own sites.

The firm would lay out two regional ponds, look at up to two alternative locations for each, and study whether they could hold water year-round as multi-purpose sites with a trail and a fishing dock. It would also identify property constraints and any land the city might need to buy.

Only the second pond would be carried through detailed design, at $95,000; the first would stay at the concept stage. Separately, the firm would draw two park plans with cost estimates for the pond sites, with features that could include play areas, exercise equipment, shade structures, lighting and public art.

Slayter Creek Park and the floodplain

At Slayter Creek Park, the contract targets a dip in the ground where stormwater collects, sitting between the baseball fields and the pickleball courts. The plan calls for roughly 1,600 linear feet of new drainage, either pipe, a swale or a combination, running to an outfall on the creek southwest of the ball fields.

The firm would also look at 10 minor and three major drainage crossings along the creek corridor that the city plans to rebuild as standard low-water crossings.

A $34,000 floodplain study would update the model for the creek's roughly 3.3-square-mile watershed to reflect recent growth and a fully built-out downtown, covering about 11,500 feet of channel from the south side of Rosamond Parkway. Any formal FEMA map revision would be extra work outside this contract.

Other pieces include a concept for about a mile of trail tying the existing Slayter Creek trails to the pond sites and downtown, a check of culverts in the State Highway 5 plans, a topographic survey, soil testing and a $32,500 Phase II environmental assessment.

That assessment calls for 21 soil borings at eight spots flagged in an earlier review, among them a former underground fuel tank system and a former burn pit.

Sources

annatx.api.civicclerk.com

annatx.api.civicclerk.com