Ordinance 17-99 - Laserfiche WebLink

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By enlarging the pond, we added to the storage capacity of the easement. In his memorandum to the City Council, Mr. Powell has indicated that the pond has an area of 6,000 square feet. We think this is a conservative estimate, but we will use that figure for the time -being. Assuming an average depth of 2', the pond holds 12,000 cubic feet of water. There are 8 gallons of water in a cubic foot. That means the pond now holds at least 96,000 gallons of water. In the file at the Rice Creek Watershed District, the notes indicate that the entire easement is required to hold 96,000 gallons of water. The requirement for compensatory storage is fully satisfied by the pond alone. Building the hockey rink has had no effect on the drainage capacity of the easement. The hockey rink was built on the highest ground within the easement area. While fill was taken from one area and moved to another area, there was no net change. An engineer we retained has given an opinion that the hockey rink has only a negligible effect on drainage. We have seen no evidence from anyone contradicting this. WHAT HAPPENED BEFORE WE BUILT OUR HOUSE IS RELEVANT ONLY TO DETERMINE HOW MUCH STORAGE IS NEEDED. In Mr. Powell's memorandum to the council, he makes an issue of the fact that the developer did not grade the easement area according to the proposed grading plan. He refers incorrectly to "storage already missing" and things being made worse by the addition of a swale and the changes to the pond. There is no fire under all this smoke. The developer was required to replace any storage displaced by fill on the rest of the Peninsula. At the time of the proposal, he was estimating how much fill would be needed for the road. In the end, he needed less than 60% of that fill, so he was not required to provide the entire amount of storage in the original plan. There was no "missing storage" before we built on the property. The addition of the swale which was built to accommodate the Schwartz's would have had no negative impact on storage. If anything, digging that out added to the storage capacity. As I explained above, the changes to the pond increased the storage capacity.