By John Howell
Batesville Mayor Jerry Autrey has resubmitted application to the Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS) for stream bank stabilization funds to curb erosion in three city locations.
Autrey said that in April, 2014 the city submitted application for work on Sand Creek near Acorn Lane and also near Turner Street and Walgreens and for a project near Pine Place in Dogwood Hills. Action on that application was deferred. The mayor said that NRCS representative Terry Meyers recently advised the city to reapply for the project funding.
The projects would add rip rap or gabion walls to stabilize the stream banks. The Pine Place project is budgeted at $220,000; the Turner Street at $180,000 and the Acorn Lane project at $370,000, Autrey said, for a total over $761,000. The city will match with 15 percent or $114,243 in funds or in-kind work.
“The engineering has all got to be done by us,” Autrey said, which will count as in-kind contribution.
“Maintaining this stuff is the city’s,” City Engineer Blake Mendrop said.
The engineer cited the construction challenges posed by the narrow width  of Sand Creek next to Acorn Lane.
“That’s tight down there; you’re not going to have a lot of room to get a whole lot of rock in there, you may be talking about some gabions or something else,” Mendrop said.
“That’s a vertical bank right there; you start laying it back and you’re backing up into people’s yards,” Mendrop continued.
Gabion structures contain rip rap with wire baskets and allow for more vertical walls with less sloping.
“He (Meyers) said he’ll know something in two weeks,” the mayor said, …whether we’ll get it or not.”
Acorn Lane residents have repeatedly asked for city help with flooding and the bank erosion from heavy rains. When the subdivision was built, the Flood Insurance Rate Map (FIRM) in effect had been adopted in 1989 and designated the entire area along Sand Creek as outside the 500-year flood plain. The new FIRM maps currently in process of adoption place Acorn Lane and most areas of Batesville near Sand Creek into a flood hazard zone which will prompt federally-insured mortgage lenders to require flood insurance.