Fort Worth to review storm water regulations because of delays for developers

In a balancing act between protecting the city from flooding and appeasing developers, city administrators are working to revamp the storm water management manual — the current version is 198 pages — after a focus group said the book is too long and complicated and the permitting process is ineffective.

“For example, if we say we want to minimize the risk of flooding, then we are effectively imposing such harsh regulations on development that it becomes unreasonably expensive to comply with those regulations, and thus we end up driving development away from Fort Worth, which serves to hurt us,” Assistant City Manager Fernando Costa said Tuesday at a City Council meeting.

Costa said the city should produce a revised drainage criteria manual by March 31, complete a performance audit on city storm water plans by April 3, revamp the permitting process to require less data in the preliminary phases of development by April 13 and provide additional training to city reviewers by April 30.

Tim Welch, a North Richland Hills councilman and the president and owner of Welch Engineering, said the recommendations presented to the Fort Worth council Tuesday are headed “in the right direction.”

“In the city of Fort Worth, you have to go through a constant permitting process — a preliminary, a final. Sometimes, depending on the complexity of the project, you think you have just completed a Ph.D. presentation at the end,” said Welch, who has been working as an engineer for 29 years and is a member of the focus group that worked on the storm water plan.

Welch said some storm water projects in Fort Worth have taken him up to 18 months to get finalized, and he said some developers are hesitant to work in Fort Worth because of the complexity.

The North Central Texas Council of Governments has also published a regional storm water manual to help North Texas cities comply with state and federal storm water quality regulations. Their manual is only 68 pages.

The city is also going to study the Cultural District and the south side — areas of town prone to flooding — to look for an areawide solution to storm water improvements, as opposed to the current standard, which is to tackle the problem on a lot-by-lot basis.

This story was originally published March 24, 2015 at 7:53 PM with the headline "Fort Worth to review storm water regulations because of delays for developers."