Jacksonville officials want a new city panel to recommend steps to manage flooding issues that have multiplied in growing numbers of neighborhoods as those areas develop.

City Council President Aaron Bowman said he’ll appoint a council member to sit on an “Adaptation Action Area Workgroup” that will look at the city’s handling of coastal flooding, storm surge and sea level rise.

The group’s members haven’t been finalized. Bowman said that will be done by the end of January, and he expects the panel will meet for at least six months.

That panel will fill at least part of a role the Jacksonville Waterways Commission had recommended be tackled by the council creating a board to look at how drainage, loss of wetlands and changing tide levels in the St. Johns River are affecting flooding across the city.

The commission had looked into flooding concerns intermittently over the past year, and council members who are part of the commission talked to Bowman in October about problems with existing drainage systems.

“All the ideas of catching the water and draining it, it’s not working. They’re flooding out existing neighborhoods,” Councilman Al Ferraro told city officials during a meeting with Bowman and Councilwoman Lori Boyer, the commission chair, about the task force idea.

Ferraro, the commission’s vice chair, said North Jacksonville communities in his district are inundated during hard rains by water that appears to come from new subdivisions, even though developers build storm water systems that the city approves.

At last two trends seem to be increasing flooding around the city, Boyer said.

Part of the problem, she said, is that in some areas, low patches of land that used to absorb rainwater have been filled in and paved as more neighborhoods have been developed. Read more