The Augusta Commission and Richmond County School Board officials will have to decide what to do about an eroding bank on the Augusta Canal beside John S. Davidson Fine Arts Magnet School to avert a potential catastrophe.
The bank on the second level of the canal is undermining the Davidson building, according to Dayton Sherrouse, executive director of the Augusta Canal Authority.
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Sherrouse and Benton Starks, senior director of facilities for the school board, attended the Augusta Commission’s Administrative Services Committee meeting Tuesday to discuss whose responsibility it is to repair the longstanding problem.
“This is an issue that’s been around since 2016,” Sherrouse said after showing a picture of the eroding bank.
“If you look that picture, you see where it’s undermining the building, and if it’s not corrected, the risk of the building collapsing and falling into the second level of the Canal,” Sherrouse said.
Sherrouse and Abie Ladson, the city’s former engineering director, met at the site in 2016, along with Mayor Hardie Davis Jr., and he has met more recently with current city Engineer Hameed Malik, to get the failing bank corrected before “we have a catastrophe down there,” Sherrouse said.
Neither the Canal Authority nor the Board of Education owns the Canal. The city owns the Canal, he said.
The school board agreed to contract with Cranston Engineering to come up with a plan to correct the problem.
“Unfortunately, the last cost estimate was prepared in 2017, and we’re in the process of getting that estimate upgraded due to the time that has elapsed since the estimate was done,” Sherrouse said. “But what I wanted to do, number one, was to bring it to your attention, and hopefully you’ll consider it a priority to do something about it, and then perhaps come out with a plan to provide the financing for it.”
Sherrouse said his approach with city engineers has been to use the stormwater fee to pay for the repair since the second level is part of the city’s drainage system.
“But ultimately, that is your decision, not mine,” Sherrouse said. “But that was my proposal I made to Abie and then to Dr. Malik. Abie told me when the storm drainage was first being put in they were putting in money in the storm drainage fee budget to correct damage on the canal. But whether that ever remained in there or got removed, or whatever, I don’t know. It just seems to me that’s an appropriate use of that money.”
Starks said the school system had agreed to pay for the engineering studies and the design.
“We’ve talked about this over the years,” Starks said. “It’s become a funding issue. The school board’s done the part we were requested to do. We have the engineering study, the design. We’re waiting for the pricing to come in to see what today’s pricing is. And we’re hoping we can continue to partner to get this repaired. It’s not the school board’s property, which is why we have not pursued repairing it ourselves.”
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Commissioner Ben Hasan said the Canal Authority was essentially an overseer of the Canal but received a substantial amount of money from Georgia Power from the turbines to clean the waterways and such. He said he had always been adamant that the authority should give the city some of that money, an assertion Sherrouse quickly countered, saying it hardly breaks even.
Malik said the failure of the bank is due to the activity around it.
“The runoff and the drainage goes through that,” he said. “In my opinion, the city should not be paying that bill because the bank is not failing because of the Canal itself. It’s failing because of what’s happening around it.”
Starks asked, since it was not the school board’s property, whether the city would let the school board repair the bank if the city decided not to.
“Would that be appropriate?” Hasan asked.
“Yes,” said Malik. “We will work with them.”
The city’s General Counsel Wayne Brown said, “The devil’s in the details.”
Hasan said they need to sit down and work out the details, and the committee agreed.
Sylvia Cooper is a columnist with The Augusta Press. Reach her at sylvia.cooper@theaugustapress.com
