SAINT PETERSBURG, Fla. — The cleanup continues in St. Petersburg's Shore Acres neighborhood, where on Wednesday neighbors made stops at city-provided dumpsters to dispose of their damaged and flooded belongings after the weekend storm.
For most, the cleanup process hasn’t stopped since Hurricane Idalia.
RELATED: Still cleaning up after Idalia, residents of St. Pete's Shore Acres neighborhood face flooding again
“It's just heartbreaking. It really is,” Kevin Batdorf, the president of the Shore Acres Civic Association, said. He’s called the neighborhood home since 1986.
“The flooding in the streets is worse now than it's ever been. The past three years have been continuously worse,” he added.
Batdorf recently met with city leaders to express his and his neighbors' concerns and calls for long-term solutions to what’s becoming a more persistent problem.
“We just need our politicians to sit down the agree to take action and move forward,” he explained.
What could that action look like?
Batdorf says at the state and federal level, more funding for home-raising grants could be game-changing in helping take flood-prone homes out of harm's way. A program through FEMA currently exists, but it's costly upfront.
“The houses that flooded in Shore Acres, and it was over 1200 during Idalia, that’s your workforce housing," he said. "People cannot afford the $400,000 it takes to lift your house or the $600,000 it takes to rebuild a new house in today's economy, so we need some help from the city, the state and federal government."
At the local level, Batdorf thinks addressing aging infrastructure in a meaningful way should be the next step.
“When you have water in your streets from a high tide, just a high tide that's an infrastructure situation. The infrastructure is not being maintained properly,” Batdorf said, who’s working on organizing an independent study through funding from the National Association of Realtors to identify possible issues in the neighborhood and solutions that then can be presented to city leaders.
“They tell us they're going to address the concerns, but we have water in the streets. Our neighbors want to know when that's going to stop,” he added.
Meantime the city of St. Petersburg says they have budgeted $15 million for stormwater infrastructure projects in Shore Acres in the upcoming year and more money down the line.
“These were projects that were identified in the 2018 Shore Acres Resiliency Study. We are also spending approximately $500,000 in 2024 to add two new backflow preventers and replace 12 of the 71 existing backflow preventers that have reached their useful life,” Alizza Punzalan-Randle, the communications and community engagement director for St. Pete Mayor Ken Welch, said.
“Our soon-to-be-completed citywide stormwater master plan has identified three additional stormwater capital improvement projects in Shore Acres estimated to cost $11.7 million to be prioritized in upcoming budget years,” she added.