BALLWIN, Mo. – Residents of a Ballwin neighborhood are struggling as erosion from a creek is washing away their property.
It’s a problem decades in the making. Sharon Mucci is one of those effected.
“It’s taking our property… it’s receding so bad I would say probably two-thirds of our back yard are gone,” she said. “This is our retirement property and it’s pretty scary for us because this is the only place we have to live, so it’s frustrating that we can’t get somebody to listen to us here.”
Mucci, along with others, have been waiting a long time for MSD to act on the problem. And finally, when Prop S was passed, it gave the agency around $35 million a year to tackle these kinds of issues. Despite this, Mucci says the City of Ballwin should share some of the blame, too.
“This is their land basically and when they built some homes up the hill…that’s when they started having the water coming down to our area. That should have been looked at a long time ago,” she said.
Mucci’s neighbor, Susan Grey, shares the same feeling.
“When they started building new homes on the other side of Big Bend…they eliminated the woods and the ground that absorbed all the rainwater and now when we have a heavy storm, it all pours into the creek bed,” Grey said. “Don’t think (officials) have done anything.”
FOX 2 went to talk with Ballwin’s City Administrator, Eric Sterman, about the same neighborhood being annexed in the 1980s. We asked Sterman if developers would be allowed to build houses in the neighborhood under the current laws.
“Potentially they would have been allowed to build homes, but they would have had to elevate the homes or put some remediation in place to address that,” he said.
MSD is now stepping in, identifying 500 projects, which includes Mucci’s home.
“Right now, based on the priorities we have, we have over $700 million of these types of problems. This one looks like it’s somewhere in the neighborhood of 10 years,” MSD Executive Director Brian Hoelscher said. “We’ve got other projects with higher priorities.”
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