Floods, Closures and the Money

The system's flood is the flood of February 2018, and it is also the system's vindication, in the city engineer's own account. Record February rain fell on snow; the St. Joseph River crested at 12.7 feet at South Bend — the Tribune's anniversary account dates the crest 21 February, the city's own flood-study minutes give 22 February, and both print here — against a previous record of 10.9 feet, which the Tribune's account records as set in both 1982 and 1993; the U.S. Geological Survey measured a peak flow of 25,300 cubic feet per second at the Niles gauge on 22 February. In Mishawaka the water took the trail system and the parks around it: Kamm Island, Monkey Island and Beutter Park were swamped, the Riverwalk went under the Main Street bridge, parts of Eberhart-Petro Golf Course went under, and volunteers cleaned a mud-filled Beutter Park by spring. Crews sandbagged and pumped at Castle Manor in Merrifield Park and saved the park's roughly $3 million renovation; the wastewater treatment plant ran three times its normal flow for the longest sustained peak in Mishawaka Utilities' history; and the state-owned Lincolnway just west of Logan Street washed out where drainage eroded the embankment, closing a westbound lane from February until the Indiana Department of Transportation finished the repair in September. City engineer Chris Jamrose's judgment, given to the Tribune a year on, is the money sentence of this entry: the flood led to no policy changes in Mishawaka, because "the waters did as expected, hitting the known floodplain where the city had built parks rather than buildings." The trail system is the floodplain's designed use, and 2018 is its proof. The closures of record are construction's, not the river's: the city's notice closed the Riverwalk from Kamm's Island to Beutter Park, and the south end of the cable-stayed bridge, from 8 to 30 August 2019 for the Ironworks Plaza works. The funding course stands in three documented forms: city capital and redevelopment money for the park-and-walk building of the 2000s (the $3,325,842 Beutter Park construction of the 2004 financial report is its priced instance); tax-increment financing for the riverfront works of the following decade — "the city budgets out its tax increment finance dollars, which will cover the costs," city planner Ken Prince told the Tribune in 2019, the year the Board of Public Works awarded the Ironworks ground's parking, sewer, wall and river-race work to C&E Excavating at more than $3.9 million and the biergarten's construction to Ziolkowski Construction at almost $2 million; and the state-federal pass-through, INDOT and MACOG, for the Merrifield extension. A phase-by-phase money ledger beyond those documented figures stands in the city's project files, which are named as its settler in the ledger entry below.