The Arlington City Council convened in a special meeting on August 5, 2025, at 12:30 p.m. in the Council Briefing Room, 101 W. Abram Street, 3rd Floor. The meeting included an executive session lasting from 12:30 p.m. to 2:38 p.m., followed by open session work and issues discussions from 2:49 p.m. to 6:00 p.m. Key topics included flood preparedness and emergency response, the FY2026 proposed budget, a Unified Development Code (UDC) text amendment in response to state legislation, and various operational updates.
Alright, we'll go ahead and call the afternoon session order. Check one, two. Okay, we'll go ahead and call the afternoon session back to order. Uh, we're gonna move on down to our work session items three point one, saying you can assist director of public works. I'm here today with Irish Hancock and then Jay Warren to do a joint presentation on how we get ready for floods and then how we handle the emergency response related to floods. And so the important part is it's never if a flood occurs, it's when a flood occurs, and that we've done the work beforehand to get the city ready. And then that we have the staff in place to be able to monitor and respond and to adapt to the situation as it unfolds. We're in the northern end of Flash Flood Alley, but we're also in tornado alley, which leaves us susceptible and at risk of experiencing severe weather at any given time throughout the year. And so just to kind of help paint the picture of what like types of flash flooding we experience in our section of Flash Flood Alley, kind of want to walk us back through some of the major flood events that we that we've had in history, starting with the first one that's May 1989. Uh, it's not our first flood ever, but it's probably our most notable flood that we've had in the history of the city. In the fact that over a course of several weeks, we got storm after storm after storm of two, three-inch rain events that weren't necessarily intense, but it was a lot to soak the ground and basically put us at a significant flood risk whenever an intense rainfall happened to where everything was just basically directly runoff and caused a rapid rise in creeks. What I have up here are uh clippings from the Star Telegram the day that the Lake Arlington spillway started to overtop. The notable thing is is that through May 16th of that year, we had received about seven and a half inches of rain in the region, but then it was just one evening in Burleson, Crowley, and Everman, our upstream neighbors in the Village Creek watershed, that they got around six to eleven inches of rain in a very short period of time. But we also got about six, six point three inches. A flood happened on Johnson Creek, the water went up, rose, and we had about three to four feet of water in houses along Johnson Creek and in Rush Creek and in portions of Village Creek. And then over the course of two days, that water that hit our upstream neighbors in Village Creek started to work its way down the creek into Lake Arlington, and the lake rose 12 and a half feet in a matter of two days, causing the spillway to overtop. The most notable thing about this is that this was not our hundred-year water surface in the lake, and it was doing this. And so that resulted in about 400 homes needing to be evacuated along Village Creek and Lake Arlington. The thing about this flood event is that most of the time in May, spring, we have similar rain events where it's just storm after storm after storm of rain here, rain there, and then we get a deluge somewhere. In May of 2015, we had 15 inches of rain through mid-May, and then we started in the east side of Arlington getting six or seven inches. It is very common for us to have this situation where it's just a substantial amount of rain over a few weeks, and then we get the big the big storm somewhere that impacts us. And so when this happened in 89, these are pictures from the Johnson Creek area. On the left, this is the Abrams Street buyout that we did, and then the other two pictures are actually now Julia Bergen Park, where the homes had about three to four feet of water in them. There is a debris line on that Ford uh truck right there that is uh shows the debris line is on the hood of that truck. This is pictures of Village Creek. Uh that this is off of division to the left, and then right is the actual spillway overtopping here. And then this is after the fact, so this is what water utilities had on file of the damages around the pump house after the water started to recede and go back to normal lake levels. There was extensive erosion damages around the spillway. Now, the other kind of gulf-fueled storm event that we really have to get ready for that are major is during our hurricane season. So in September of 2010, we had tropical storm Hermine make landfall along the Texas coast and go straight up towards us. And over the course of a 24-hour period, set parts of Arlington got six to twelve inches of rain. Most notably Rush Creek received nine inches of rain. And the reason why we had such severe flash flooding is that the storm basically followed from the headwaters, the southern part of the city, all the way up to the Trinity River. And so the rain bands were going from south to north, which basically had severe significant amount of rain basically following the creek. And when you have that happen in Rush and Johnson and that some of the other watersheds we have, you end up with quite a lot of flooding and quite a lot of large flood wave that comes through. And so in this case for Tropical Storm Hermine, we had over 250 drainage concerns from residents, 150 homes reported structural flooding, and 90% of those damages were concentrated in the Rush Creek watershed. And so here we've got on the left where the Rush Creek buyout was, where we have Clarence Foster Park, you know, the Rush Creek Dog Park on the left. And then on the right, we have the Rush Creek Reef Channel that runs in between Shady Valley Country Club as well as the Shady Valley neighborhood. That's this is at the 100-year level in this area for this flood. And then we also had flooding on Johnson Creek. It's not as kind of reported out on on it, but this is Collins at Johnson Creek that was overtopped where we closed it down. And to the right, this is actually Meadowbrook Park to the left, Meadowbrook Rec Center is just off the picture, and then the neighborhood is to the right. And so we had we had overtopping of uh Abram Street at the time, you know, we've gone through and we've raised the streets since then. And so that those are kind of some of the severity of flooding. But the most notable thing was the emergency response that we had to do, particularly within the Rush Creek buyout area, where fire had to go and do several swift water rescues because when the water started to rise, there were people at home. We had we have stories of people needing to crawl out windows, climb up retaining walls, basically to get out of the way of the flood. And our fire department was there to help get people to safety in that very dangerous event. And so, how do we get ready realistically for a flood? We start at the basics, which is to identify our flood risk. And so we have the comprehensive stormwater plan that is focused on the worst first.