Five months after the design process on Riverside’s Groveland Floodwall stalled over budget constraints, village officials are taking halting steps to restart the project.
At Riverside’s March 7 village board meeting, United States Army Corps of Engineers Project Manager Thomas R. Kanies asked trustees for further direction after he and his project team encountered greater-than-expected costs that prohibited them from finishing the project.
The Army Corps has been in charge of designing the floodwall since trustees OK’d the project in 2020. Work on the floodwall has been in progress on-and-off since 2013, when a record-breaking Des Plaines River crest — more than a foot and a half higher than the previous record — caused extensive flooding in Riverside. After the flood, the Army Corps first proposed the floodwall that autumn as one of several flood-prevention projects along the river.
In 2023, the team said the project’s $7.2 million price tag from 2018 had not changed. But when Kanies took over in October 2023, he said, the cost had gone up to $17.9 million as a result of changes in scope and the price of construction materials.
The problem that the project team is facing, Kanies said, is they cannot move forward on the project without going over a maximum spending cap. Under the authority of Congress, flood-risk reduction projects like the Groveland Floodwall each have “a federal dollar limit of $10 million,” he said.
The Army Corps has agreed to pay exactly 65% of the cost of the project, leaving Riverside on the hook for the other 35%. If the Army Corps were to spend all $10 million that it can on the floodwall, Riverside would have to spend about $5.4 million for its share, meaning the project has a combined funding cap of $15.4 million. That figure is more than $2 million lower than the current estimated price for the project, which is why progress on the floodwall’s design halted in October.
For the village’s 35% share, Riverside has partnered with the Metropolitan Water Reclamation District of Greater Chicago, which has pledged to “see the project through,” Village Manager Jessica Frances said at the meeting. In the initial agreement, the MWRD only committed to providing about $2.6 million of funding, which would have been enough to cover the village completely at the original project price.
In order to get more funding for the project, Riverside must make a formal ask of the MWRD’s board for a specific amount. Frances said that while MWRD staff working on the project had given feedback and “expressed support” for it, they could not say whether the board would approve specific funding requests. That means the village cannot ask how much funding is available before deciding on a path forward, an idea trustee Megan Claucherty suggested during discussion.
Three proposals
The original design that Army Corps was working on — which Kanies said was 90% complete before he and his team noticed the funding issues — would have included the full floodwall extending north of Forest Avenue as well as two pump stations, one north and one south of Forest Avenue, which would allow the village to pump rainwater into the river and store water underground during extreme flooding.
At the meeting, Kanies presented the village board with three possible alternative floodwall designs, which each had different flood-preventing capabilities at different costs that would fall under the Army Corps’ federally dictated budget cap.
Kanies’ first proposed alternative design would not include either of the pump stations or the underground storage. Instead, the floodwall would have five separate drainage outlets that would allow water to flow back into the river during some flooding events. The design would cost $8.3 million for construction and about $12 million overall, he said.
The second alternative design would lose the north pump and underground water storage but keep the south pump, which would allow for potential connections to the storm sewer in the future, costing $11.4 million for construction and about $15 million overall, Kanies said.
The third and final alternative option, coming in at $10.3 million for construction, would feature a reduced-capacity south pump but otherwise be the same as the second option. Kanies did not mention the total price for this option.
Next steps
The presentation seemingly left village trustees unsure of where the project stood or when it would be completed as they discussed options to move forward.
“How long will this project take to complete?” trustee Alex Gallegos asked Kanies after he had finished presenting the alternative design options.
“Depending on — so that’s why, too, we’re looking for that design and, basically, the capabilities that we’re trying to bring with the project,” Kanies said in response. “It would vary, but design remaining would be a couple months, half a year of design, and then it would go out for contract, and then construction would start post-contract, depending on weather and time of year.”
“So you can’t give me a timeline as to when this will finish, is that right?” Gallegos asked.
When Kanies said he said he couldn’t give an exact date, Gallegos scoffed and interrupted him.
“So if I hired a contractor to come to my house and said, ‘I need you to do this and this and this,’ [and they said to me] ‘I don’t know when I’ll be done,’ is that an accepted answer?” Gallegos asked.
Kanies said it was not.
“It seems that our next decision is what to ask MWRD,” Village President Douglas Pollock said toward the end of the discussion. “I think that I can safely guess that everyone would say, ‘Hey, if we can get the full $8 million, let’s ask for it,’ right? It’s a no-brainer.”
Ultimately, Pollock said he and Frances would “further strategize” over the next week to find the best way to approach the MWRD for additional funding.
Correction: This article was updated to fix the inadvertent misspelling of a village trustee’s last name. His name is Alex Gallegos, not Gallagos. We apologize for the error.
