I will call the public works committee meeting October twenty eighth, twenty twenty-six, six thirty PM courthouse council chambers.

In attendance today is Josh O'Neill, Dan Callahan, Russell Larry, Trudy Healy, Commissioner Boyle is absent and excused, and myself, Eric Mankins is the chair.

So there's two on it.

So first up is communication number twenty twenty-six-five one zero.

Mark Phillips But Montana requests Council of Commissioners to present information on a failed stormwater project in his neighborhood located at the corner of a Western and Bretana to the public works committee.

In presence tonight, we do have Mark Phillips and we do have a presentations of about twenty nine slides.

Respect and appreciation for the public works counties for all county employees.

I'm only here because this is such a standout egregious construction project that I feel has clearly failed, and lessons need to be learned from

it.

I'm going to skip ahead to slide 15 to start.

And in slide 15, we're going to see two different flow paths.

Oops.

Here's slide 15.

The blue line is what I believe is an adequate representation of the likely path of flow of uncontrolled stormwater prior to 2026, as it flowed from the corner down to the south, where there is a stormwater collection ditch at the bottom there.

The county in 2026 constructed a stormwater channel, which is shown by the solid red line.

What I want to point out here is that water is preferring to flow more to the south, where the channel constructed by the county is flowing more to the east.

That means that that channel is working against the direction that water is going to prefer to flow, and as we see as the direction that it will flow.

What originally caught my eye was walking through the neighborhood.

This was the completed project.

There's a drain, but there's no curb.

So when a storm event happens, the water is able to flow past the drain

if

it's a strong enough storm event, and right beyond the top of the stormwater channel.

Here's a cross section of what the construction looks like.

There's the drain entrance at the street corner.

There's a drain pipe that delivers water to approximately the middle of the armored channel.

I was present during a rain event on July 30th.

I filmed this rain event.

You're going to see screenshots from this event.

But there were two noticeable failure points evident in that I saw.

This is failure point number one, as expected at the top.

Water is flowing, it's overwhelming the drain.

It's moving beyond the drain and right past the top of the channel.

It's flowing then out more towards the south where we knew it wanted to flow before.

Further down, about halfway down, we have kind of outlined there in red the end of the drain pipe.

The water that did enter the drain is now being discharged into the channel.

It overwhelmed the channel, and it again broke out here at failure point number two, where it broke out and moved to the south.

At the same time, I'm looking here up the channel.

That entire upper portion of the channel does not seem to serve any purpose.

All that rock is wasted.

There's no stormwater coming down through

that.

So some of my comments have been addressed.

This is a photo from Friday when we had that lovely rain.

You can see that the county has now added the curb wall there along to direct water into the drain.

In a letter provided by Director Neary, he stated that the curb wall uh forces the water on its quote intended path.

If the drain is the intended path, why was the upper half of that rock-armored channel even created?

Rock has now been extended behind the wall, but I seriously doubt that that will ever catch stormwater, that it will ever direct stormwater down through the upper

channel.

This

is on the same day.

This is the water that's coming out of the drain during that rainfall event.

You can see where it has it has wet up the southern side wall of the channel, and you can see the ponding.

The water is seeping through that sidewall, similar to what it did before.

Failure point number two has not been addressed by maintenance.

I'm now going to show you two photos to show a comparison of what the maintenance has done.

This is from July.

I'm looking down the channel to the east.

The red arrows highlight points of reference in both photos.

On the left is a rock that has like a little gash in it, and then further down are survey flags.