At the March 21 meeting of the Saugerties Village Board, resident Francine Kolbanski asked the trustees to find an answer as to why her driveway has started flooding. At the board’s meeting on Monday, April 18, Trustee Terry Parisian reported that he had checked the driveway, both on a clear day and “in pouring rain,” and he came up with an answer. First, the problem was not the village’s storm drains, three of which were installed “in front of that driveway.” The water is going straight up into the driveway, not over the drains, Parisian said. He has videos he took during the storm that show this clearly. “The water is going into the driveway; it is not going past those manholes,” he said. “They apparently put a carport in there at some time and chipped that curb away. So the water does not follow the curb line and go into the drains, it goes up on the sidewalk, down the driveway and she has no gutters on her house, so the water is pouring down from the house. The village water is not going into the driveway per se, it’s where they chipped out the driveway to put a carport in,” explained Parisian. “I don’t really know what Rich [Public Works Superintendent Richard Forbes] can do.”
“The only thing I can come up with is to put in a couple of catch basins up where that carport is, like we did in front of her driveway, to try to catch the water before it hits the sidewalk,” Forbes said.
Mayor Bill Murphy said Kolbanski should also be advised that she needs to install roof drains because the water from her roof is coming down.
Kolbanski rents the house, and it’s not clear who put the carport in, Parisian said. Councilman Jeff Helmuth asked whether the board should also reestablish the curb where it was removed, but this would cause a bump when carts drive-in. The trustees agreed that one solution would be to put in drains to catch the roof runoff.
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