R’boro residents piggy-backs wife’s request

ROSEBORO — After coming before the town board last week, the Hosking family finally got assistance in solving parking issues at their home, issues, they say, have caused ongoing property damage.

While support on the one front helped, their problem from the incidents are two-fold.

At the recent meeting, Jennifer Hosking told the board her family’s home at 301 South Church St. had been damaged due to parking issues that had gone on for years. Their residence is near the gym at Roseboro Middle School, and during high activity events, such as games, the influx of people parking there extended into their yard, causing multiple instances of property damage.

She said her family had exhausted all their options to remedy the situation and, after four years, they felt their last option was to come to the town board. After pleading their case, board members agreed to try whatever measures they could to ensure the annoyance didn’t persist.

While pleased that the first part of their issue was being looked into, the parking problem, the board soon learned, was also causing drainage backup and overflow onto their property.

In the same Aug. 13 meeting, Hosking’s husband, Lee, came before the board to ask for further assistance.

“When it comes to the parking issues, aside from the damage, it’s not always a problem if it’s only a few minutes, but it usually ends up being hours at the time, ” he stressed. “For them to avoid parking fully in the road they get onto our yard which, frankly, really isn’t the problem either, but it becomes a time issue, and on top of that it’s then leading into the drainage issue.

“That’s when we get into things getting torn up and/or the water meter being damaged, which we’ve had to repair multiple times as well.”

Hosking said the drainage problem started at the school’s parking lot which backs up due to lack of draining. That flows into the ditch at their home, where it pools, then floods their yard.

“So where the front door of the gym is, there’s a high spot there, everything is sloped and drained back towards our yard,” he said. “Whenever we get more than about an inch or so of rain, the drains that are in the parking lot of the school immediately back up and do not drain.

“Then we’ve got, facing our house on the right hand side, an actual ditch which backs up. That ditch feeds the drain, then the water goes under to a buried drain then to a drain beside our driveway. From the front portion of our yard, which is all underground, then to the side portion, there’s an actual ditch. The water running from the front portion of the gymnasium to our yard cannot drain, and it crosses over the street into our yard, it pools, then floods the yard.”

Hosking said they’ve had an excess of six-plus inches of standing water in their front yard, running up to their residence. “And that gets into the crawl space causing issues of flooding underneath our house.”

While no definitive way to solve the issue was discussed during the meeting, Hosking did suggest the board simply consider cleaning the drains, something, he said, would probably fix the issue since he believed that was the main cause of the problem.

“I don’t know if it’s a possibility but I’d suggest we see if we can have the underground drainage cleaned out so that we can increase the flow. The open portion of the ditch on the other side of the property, when it does drain, it’s very rarely half of the height of the culvert, meaning that it can hold the flow; the flow is just not getting there. So if it can be cleaned out, I say go that route and let’s see what we can get from that.”

The board discussed briefly where they thought the drain issue might have originated and whether it was on the school property.

“The drains are on the school side and they just do not drain,” Hosking acknowledged. “The drains on t he school side feed underneath the road, and they’re not draining at all. They back up which causes it to overflow over the road onto our side, so it’s essentially getting doubled up on.”

Board members said Hosking’s thoughts needed to be clarified before they could act, but they did assure the Roseboro resident that his concerns would be addressed.

“Let’s get (Bill) Poole, our public works director, to go out there and look at it so we can see if we can tackle getting these drains cleaned out and see where that leads us,” commissioner Ray Clark urged. “We will definitely see what we can do.”