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University City homeowner urges clarity on flood-buyout timeline after USGS gauge outage
Summary
A homeowner on Wilson Avenue urged the council to ensure the flood-buyout process accounts for a neighbor's pending foreclosure and to confirm the reliability of local USGS streamgage data after a January outage left a real-time data gap during heavy rain.
Homeowner Hannah Brick told the University City Council on Feb. 23 that residents in a planned flood-buyout area are anxious about timing, compensation calculation and the status of a neighbor whose property is scheduled for foreclosure.
Brick, who lives at 1079 Wilson Avenue, said the buyout “continues to move along” and that residents are “eager for continued progress,” but she raised a series of specific concerns: how final buyout offers will be calculated, how a foreclosure scheduled for March 4 on a neighboring property (1083 Wilson) might affect the buyout list and whether a home sold at auction would be included in the buyout.
She also said local reliance on USGS streamgage data was undermined by a January malfunction: the USGS River De Pere gauge near University City failed to report real-time data during a heavy-rain event on Feb. 15 and the agency later backfilled the missing readings. Brick said the lack of live data at a critical time left residents without information they use to decide whether to take protective actions.
Brick asked the council and economic-development staff (she said she had contacted interim planning and zoning director Becky Alvin) to continue to advocate for homeowners and to provide clarity on how the buyout timeline and participant list will be handled if properties change ownership before offers are made.
Mayor Crowe and the council did not provide a detailed response during the citizen-comment period; city staff contact names were referenced in Brick’s remarks.
