City of Dubuque officials held a kickoff ceremony for the Bee Branch Gates and Pumps project at the Sixteenth Street Detention Basin, announcing $24,650,000 in state and federal grants to support the next phase of the Bee Branch Watershed Flood Mitigation Project.

The project matters because it is intended to increase pumping capacity and redundancy at the detention basin to reduce the risk of damaging floodwaters reaching Dubuque’s North End. City officials and the project manager described the facility as a key piece of long-term flood resilience following multiple major flood events in the area.

An unnamed city official, City official, City of Dubuque, said the city had secured $24,650,000 in state and federal grants for the Gates and Pumps Project, including what the official described as an $8,700,000 FEMA Community Project Grant and a $7,700,000 U.S. Economic Development Administration disaster recovery grant. Claire Naber, district representative for Congresswoman Ashley Hinson’s Cedar Rapids office, read a letter from Hinson saying she had helped secure federal dollars for the project. In the letter Naber read, Hinson was credited with $8,000,000 in federal funding; the letter was read aloud by Naber at the ceremony.

“Thank you all for being here today,” Claire Naber said as she read the letter. “As a member of the House Appropriations Committee, I was able to secure $8,000,000 to help fund this project and will continue advocating for bringing federal dollars back home to Iowa.”

Jim Bosley, project manager in the City of Dubuque engineering department, described the technical scope and timeline. He said the existing pump station is about 50 years old and contains two 90,000-gallon-per-minute pumps and one 20,000-gallon-per-minute pump with limited redundancy. The new facility is proposed to use 100,000-gallon pumps with roughly 1,000-horsepower motors on each pump; Bosley said the new configuration would provide about 400,000 gallons per minute total capacity, roughly double the prior effective capacity.

Bosley said the project team is installing interlocking sheet pile walls and a diversion (bypass) channel to keep the existing pump station operating while piles and the new station are constructed over the detention basin. He described backup generators that are “small locomotive engines” to maintain operation during power outages.

On schedule remarks and completion dates were provided by Bosley: construction started in May (year not specified in remarks), with substantial completion scheduled for March 19, 2027, and a later contractor schedule item referenced as July 2, 2027. Bosley characterized the work as a roughly two-year construction effort and said Origin Design (formerly IIWPC) is the engineer of record and that the low bidder/contractor on the project is listed in the remarks as Ports and Construction (contractor representatives were present at the ceremony).

Speakers at the event repeatedly linked the Gates and Pumps work to the broader Bee Branch Watershed Flood Mitigation Project and to a multi-year community effort to reduce flood damage after events from 1999 to 2011 that prompted six presidential disaster declarations, remarks at the ceremony said.

City officials encouraged attendees to view project renderings and speak with engineers and contractor staff present at the kickoff. No formal legislative action or vote was taken at the event; the program was a ceremonial and informational kickoff and presentation of project details and funding.