A large box culvert is being installed on Kings Canyon Road to increase capacity for water to flow into the creek rather than on the road during storm events.
Carson City Public Works is working on roughly two dozen large and small stormwater projects around town.
The two biggest projects — separate projects that together run from 5th Street to Clearview Drive — are on the drawing board as part of the multimillion dollar project to redesign South Carson Street.
But, a handful of smaller projects, including one on Rhodes Street off Curry Street where flooding is a recurring problem, are in the works now or already completed.
“There’s probably 50 small projects we’d like to do, but we’ve identified roughly 20 we can do, costing anywhere from $5,000 to $50,000, most of them $10,000 to $20,000,” for the $625,000 allocated for minor improvements, said Dan Stucky, city engineer.
The projects are being financed through $4.88 million in bonds issued after the Board of Supervisors last August voted to raise stormwater rates 30 percent across the board to service the debt. A rate study to reevaluate the stormwater rate structure is in the works.
The goal is to add necessary work to the capital improvement plan (CIP). Last year, when the Utility Finance Oversight Committee evaluated the CIP and recommended the rate hike, member Bruce Scott called the plan a “drop in the bucket” and Public Works Director Darren Schulz said the department could spend at least twice as much on needed projects.
The Rhodes Street work, the biggest of the small projects, is complete. A storm drain and 60-inch pipe were added on the north side of the road to help dump the tremendous flow that comes off the hills there into the system.
In January 2017, when major winter storms caused severe flooding in Carson City, Curry Street was closed for days and the Greenhouse Garden Center at the corner of Rhodes and Curry streets and the Nevada State Railroad Museum below there both suffered damage.
Another small project is nearing construction on Old Hot Springs Road, between Goni Road and I-580, to upsize a culvert and control water flows on the road there.
One of the larger projects, the $90,000 Kings Canyon Road culvert project, is underway. A 4x6-foot box culvert, or rectangular pipe, is being installed underneath the road, to direct flow into the nearby creek. The pipe capacity there now allows for 80 cubic feet per second (cfs) flows and that will increase to 350 cfs once the culvert is in place.
The $110,000 Kings Canyon channel maintenance project is slated for fall 2019. The project, from Roop Street to Saliman Road, will clear the debris and vegetation from the channel, routine maintenance that hasn’t been done except in pieces since 1999.
A $250,000 project to upgrade decades-old pipes in the Lakeview development is designed and planned for construction sometime next year.
The biggest projects — $900,000 of storm drain improvements on Carson Street between Fairview and Clearview drives, and $2.9 million for improvements on Carson Street from 5th to Stewart streets — will be designed in conjunction with the bigger road project.
A portion of the latter project’s money has already been spent on improvements made during the recent Downtown Curry Streetscape Project, which is nearing completion.
A ribbon cutting to reopen Curry Street is Oct. 26, 10:30 a.m., at Telegraph and Curry streets.