Helena Montgomery bought her house in North Arlington for the backyard. It’s where she and her husband, Calvin Montgomery, hosted birthday parties, cookouts and holiday celebrations.
That was 25 years ago.
Today, she’s watching that backyard disappear. Their pool is tilting, so much so that the water level looks like it's higher on the west side than the east. Her deck is uneven and there are cracks and gaps in the stonework. Calvin Montgomery can’t even mow portions of the yard anymore – the ground feels like it’s going to fall out from under him.
Situated against Snider Creek, more and more of the Montgomery backyard, imbued with memories and sentiment, is being carried away by stormwater.
“I used to be really proud of this house,” Helena Montgomery said. “Now it's just, I don't even know if I can afford to stay here any longer.”
They’re not the only ones.
Mauricio Galante, who represents District 1 on the Arlington City Council, said there are close to 1,000 homeowners facing similar issues, some of them worse than what Helena Montgomery and Calvin Montgomery are experiencing.
He said the city is doing a good job in preventing flooding across Arlington.
"But the erosion? We could do a better job on erosion, that's for sure," Galante told KERA.
It’s a situation Adnan Rajib said needs to be addressed immediately, before it becomes a crisis.
Rajib is an engineer, hydrologist and director of the Hydrology & Hydroinformatics Innovation Lab at UT Arlington who lives in South Arlington. He's seen the erosion in his neighborhood.
While the issues created by erosion are largely unseen by most who live and work in or visit the city, in many cases behind buildings and in backyards, Rajib warned that Arlington needs to address them immediately.
“We are reaching a point of no return where these streams and these creeks no longer exist unless we protect them and restore them,” Rajib said. “There will be severe flooding and erosion in the near future, and the severity is such that even a less than exceptional storm can cause a lot of damage."
Erosion and flooding
Amy Cannon, Arlington's assistant director of public works, said in a written statement through a city spokesperson that Arlington has conducted watershed and localized drainage studies and prioritized flood mitigation projects through Arlington’s comprehensive stormwater plan.
“The City is actively investing in flood mitigation,” the statement read. “Current stormwater funding supports approximately $20 million per year in capital improvements through FY2031, with funding prioritized for flood mitigation and improving public stormwater infrastructure.”
The prioritization is based on several factors, she said. Among them are how often creeks flood or how much damage the flooding causes.
"The concern is not simply whether water gets high in a creek during a storm, but whether flooding is frequent enough or severe enough to affect homes and businesses, overtop roadways, restrict emergency access, or threaten critical infrastructure," she wrote in the statement.
Bowie Hogg, the city council member for District 7, agreed that the city is going in the right direction.
He praised the city, saying Arlington has skilled experts dedicated to the city’s stormwater management and erosion and flood mitigation.
“We've got a plan and it’s working,” Hogg said. “It's a plan that it's going [well], doesn't mean plans can't be reevaluated and redesigned and sometimes enhanced from what it's doing.”
While Hogg said he’s open to reevaluating the city’s plan, he also expressed doubt for Rajib’s prognosis that Arlington is approaching a “point of no return.”
Referencing a presentation given to the city council in June, Hogg said he’s going to rely on the city’s experts over those from outside.
“We just had a presentation on June 23rd from our true water expert who understands city water, not someone who's in hydrology and not actually working in the city’s water projects,” Hogg said. “We’ve got to address this, but I think we are addressing and we're maintaining waterways.”
The statement from Cannon also said flood mitigation is different than erosion.
“Erosion is a natural process along creeks, and the City does not have a program to stabilize every creek bank in Arlington,” Cannon wrote in the statement. “Property owners are responsible for maintaining natural creeks on their private property and for construction retaining walls or other streambank stabilization needed to protect their property.”
Rajib said that while erosion and flooding can be different topics, they aren’t mutually exclusive. Soil carried off from creek banks has to end up somewhere. That erosion becomes sediment, and when it’s deposited somewhere else it can build up and reduce the depth of a creek bed, pond or lake.
Because that leaves less room for water to fill, Rajib said the risk of flooding increases.
A breached dam
The residents of Prestonwood West in North Arlington have witnessed that happen.
That’s where Robert Blake lives. A member of Arlington’s planning and zoning commission, Blake created the Arlington Stormwater Alliance because of the damage he’s seen in his neighborhood.
Blake’s backyard used to look out over Prestonwood Lake, created by damming a creek that feeds into nearby, larger Village Creek. There were ducks and geese and other small wildlife. Closer to a large pond in terms of size, the lake was large enough to take out small rowboats and canoes.
He said residents didn’t realize their lake needed to be dredged or that it was the HOA’s responsibility to dredge it. Sediment built up and, in 2018, caused dangerous, damaging floods. The city breached the dam by removing the ground from one side, allowing the water to flow around it and alleviate flooding, according to residents and Galante.
Today, it’s a widening creek gradually consuming backyards of 31 homes on either side, eating away at the soil with each rainstorm. Stormwater has eroded underneath the dam. Fences hang down off the edge, the ground across which they stretched long gone.
There are measures residents can take to mitigate the risk of erosion — retaining walls being one of the easiest options. But they come with problems, too.
Blake said he and other residents have received quotes for putting in retaining walls. In many cases they were more than $100,000 and in some cases were about half the value of the home.
He said that’s not doable, and the city needs to step in to help.
“Why are you sticking 31 homes with a city size problem?” Blake asked. “And there's Johnson Creek that does this. There's Rush Creek that does this. All of these different people are all experiencing the same thing.”
The HOA in his neighborhood filed a lawsuit in 2020 arguing the dam wouldn’t need to be breached if the city properly managed its waterways and that Arlington should pay to fix the damage caused by stormwater erosion after the breach.
The city answered the suit with a motion to have it dismissed, its attorneys writing that the court did not have jurisdiction because it was an emergency measure and the city has immunity from the suit.
The suit was dismissed in 2021. Residents appealed the dismissal, and that appeal is still being processed in the courts.
Who’s responsible?
Around 112 miles of natural creeks and waterways run through Arlington, but only 43 of those miles are on city-owned property, according to a presentation city staff gave to council in June.
Arlington officials say they’re only responsible for maintaining those 43 miles owned by the city. As part of that, the city removes debris, shores up creek banks, dredges creeks when needed and monitors the health of the creeks.
Citing a combination of city policies, HOA agreements and deed requirements, the city says it isn’t responsible for maintaining those creeks and mitigating damages caused by stormwater. That burden lies with the property owners whose land includes the creek.
Property owners said that whether or not their deed or homeowners associations have agreements with the city — some of them around a half-century old — Arlington should take at least some of the responsibility.
They say those agreements were made before Arlington reached its current level of development and suspect that development has contributed to the problem. More parking lots, roads and buildings mean stormwater can’t soak into the ground and ends deposited in creeks.
Rajib, the hydrologist at UT Arlington, said development has very likely contributed.
“I’m not saying commercial development is bad,” Rajib said. “It's the need of society, but there has to be a balance between how much we can take away from nature and how much you need for our benefit.”
Residents said that because developments approved by the city in recent decades likely contribute to the increased water and subsequent erosion, the city should be responsible for fixing it.
The statement Cannon sent did not address concerns about whether or not development in the city has contributed to the troubles faced by nearly 1,000 residents.
She wrote that property owners are responsible for maintaining the creeks on their own property.
But those residents said they can’t afford the work to put in retaining walls.
Even if they could, Rajib said it likely wouldn’t be a long term fix unless every property had them. Without coverage along entire creek banks, erosion would eat away at unprotected property until it got behind neighboring retaining walls.
‘It’s not enough’
Galante said he's visited more than three dozen of those homes and hears from at least one resident almost every week. He said he often goes out to those properties with city staff to look at the erosion, get an idea of the severity and see what the city might be able to do to help them.
But, he said, “it's not enough.”
It comes down, in large part, to an issue of funding. Galante said the city estimates the cost of fixing the waterways at around $2.4 billion.
With current funding, Galante said the city can’t even address a fraction of the work homeowners need done each year. But he thinks there are possible solutions.
“We can tackle not even one or two per year,” Galante said. “I mean, we need to do more like other cities are doing, for sure."
And other cities are dealing with similar issues as Arlington. Irving is one of them.
Dozens of homes in Irving currently face threats from flooding. City officials there have gone to the state for help, receiving $35.6 million in funding from the Texas Water Development Board.
City engineer Walt Thomas said the North Delaware Creek project will help homeowners in the area worry less about heavy rainfall affecting their property.
“At West Irving Creek, it's almost 240 homes we protected from a 100-year flood risk,” Thomas said. “North Delaware is just continuing this program of mitigating those concerns.”
Kenneth Dees, who owns the firm CM2E Engineering, is an engineer and consultant with 40 years of experience in water resource, stormwater, floodplain and drainage engineering and management.
Dees reviewed city documents before speaking with KERA and said that Arlington should be concerned about the impacts of erosion, stormwater and flooding.
He also said the city is on the right track.
“I concur with the direction they're going and they acknowledge that they must approve specific drainage improvement projects,” he said.
He agrees with Rajib that the issues surrounding flood and erosion mitigation need to be addressed soon, though he said he doesn't think the need is as immediate as Rajib estimated.
While a $2.4 billion price tag for fixing all the issues affected houses in Arlington is high, Dees said he would be wary of trusting that estimate.
“That's a tall order for any city,” Dees told KERA.
He said the city should make sure the firm providing the estimate does not also bid on the project to avoid a conflict of interest and should keep in mind that costs only increase over time.
At some point, Dees said the cost of fixing the waterways could grow to more than the value of all the homes combined. At that point, he said, the city would need to consider buying out homeowners in floodplains or areas with devastating erosion.
It’s something the city has done before. Since 2009, the city has spent more than $29 million to buy out 93 high-risk properties in floodplains.
Possible solutions to funding woes
Galante said he would like to see the city explore more grants and external funding that could be used to address erosion and flooding issues in the city, similar to what Irving is doing, and would support efforts in the city council to pursue those funds.
Blake, the planning and zoning commissioner and resident of Prestonwood West, said he would like the city to also consider adding another $10 fee to utility bills to cover repairs.
He argued the repairs are necessary not just for property owners who are affected but for all residents and the city itself.
Echoing Rajib’s concerns, Blake shared worries that if the issues aren’t fixed soon they’ll snowball, damaging more homes, leading to more flooding across the city and threatening infrastructure like roads and bridges.
Cannon said the city would step in at that point.
"When residents contact the City with concerns about erosion, staff can evaluate whether there is a public drainage issues, a threat to public infrastructure, or if there is another condition for which the City has responsibility,' Cannon said. "However, an eroding creek bank on private property does not, by itself, make the stabilization of that bank a City responsibility."
Rajib and residents living along Arlington's creeks still agree, though, that now is the time to do something to prevent threats to public infrastructure.
A bond could also be an option.
Galante said he isn’t certain yet whether he would be able to support a bond the size required to fix erosion in the city, but he does support exploring it as an option.
Hogg didn’t rule out the possibility of exploring a bond, but he doesn’t think it’s necessary at this point.
“We're allocating over $20 million a year towards this, and it seems like that's a good piece,” Hogg said. “We've got to make sure we're doing the right pieces, taking the right strategic approach. We have an approach and it's working.”
He said there are a few neighborhoods having “some real issues” with erosion.
"The more we can do to possibly help them and figure out a better path is something we should always explore,” Hogg said.
Galante also wants the city to explore offering low-interest or no-interest loans to homeowners so they can get done the work they need on their property and pay the city back.
Helena Montgomery said she just wants the city to do something about the erosion damage to her property.
Estimates neighbors got years ago were around $40,000 for a retaining wall, she said. With inflation and the way damage has progressed on her property, she said that number has increased dramatically.
Calvin Montgomery said they aren’t planning on moving anytime soon, but whenever the house is put up on the market they’ll have to disclose the problems with erosion. He worries that will make the house harder to sell, even possibly making it too expensive to move away.
“As of now, hopefully the city will step up and do the right thing,” Calvin Montgomery said. "Then hopefully if they do something that'll fix the problem, then we won't have to worry about it.”
James Hartley is the Fort Worth breaking news reporter and producer for KERA News. Got a tip? Email James Hartley at jhartley@kera.org.
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