It’s a process, and Santa Rosa Groves residents and officials of the Indian Trail Improvement District continue to work the process that would allow the 640-acre community to become a fully activated ITID unit.
At 6 p.m. on Wednesday, March 31, there will be a public hearing before the ITID Board of Supervisors regarding the draft water control plan now being created by the district’s engineering staff. If approved, ITID can move forward with the next steps in activation.
At that point, ITID staff will begin the “legal, survey, engineering, project planning, procurement, resource allocation, billing and other logistics to initiate activation and the eventual capital infrastructure installation for the unit’s drainage and roads,” ITID Executive Director Burgess Hanson told Santa Rosa Groves residents in a recent letter.
Two more public hearings are required before the activation is final. If all goes well, activation could be finalized by late summer, ITID President Betty Argue said.
A Santa Rosa Groves page recently has been created on the ITID web site with detailed information about the steps in the activation process and its history. The page can be found at www.indiantrail.com/departments/santa-rosa-groves-srg.
“We asked staff to create the page so that Santa Rosa Groves residents would have a place to go to fully inform themselves about the process,” Argue said. “We’ll also be adding to it as things move along.”
Created in the 1970s, Santa Rosa Groves is made up of 99 lots ranging from five acres to 20 acres. The area, west of The Acreage and north of White Fences, has a long history of flooding problems. Its roads and swales have deteriorated, and the canals are overgrown to the point that a heavy rain event in the spring of 2018 left some residents up to their waist in stormwater. Still, some property owners have resisted ITID activation, fearful of the assessment increases that likely will be necessary to fund the improvements.
After a March 13 “consensus building meeting” with residents, Argue said that things are looking positive for the activation process.
“We did a lot of talking about easement issues and how to move forward with those,” Argue said about the meeting attended by her, Hanson and ITID Engineer Jay Foy.
At the meeting, residents were asked to decide on the type of roads they wanted in the community — dirt and rock, milled or paved. Among those property owners who attended, milled roads were chosen. In that process, existing roadbeds will be filled, compacted, smoothed and overlayed with asphalt millings.
ITID also would become responsible for clearing canals and installing a new pump to assist in drainage. ITID is committed to, at least, restore the roads and drainage to levels specified in the original community documents, Argue has said.
The March 31 public hearing will be at the ITID offices at 13467 61st Street North in The Acreage. There will be limited seating due to COVID-19. However, it will be broadcast via the Zoom platform, which will allow public comment. Learn more at www.indiantrail.com.
