By Steve Plunkett
The Little Club’s golf fairways have been saved.
The town adopted what it once called Plan B and will install water filtration trenches along its roadways to guide excess rainfall to the Intracoastal Waterway. It originally wanted the club to rejigger its fairways in order to enlarge a lake on the golf course to handle additional stormwater.
Gulf Stream “redesigned the project after some discussion with The Little Club to accommodate water quality within our right-of-way through exfiltration trenches,” Assistant Town Manager Trey Nazzaro told town commissioners on Jan. 13. “We have obviated the need for lake expansion.”
The revised plan, good for another 20 years, and the town’s capital improvement project to improve drainage throughout its Core district “will significantly reduce the amount of water that will need to discharge into the club,” Nazzaro said.
“It will adequately allow the town to continue to discharge the limited amount of stormwater drainage in extenuating circumstances.”
Mayor Scott Morgan called the earlier proposal to dig a wider lake “significantly problematic.”
“The engineers went back and reworked it so that … we would not need to enlarge the lake,” he said. “So it works out, it’s a win-win.”
Last June, commissioners fretted that a demand by The Little Club to have its own engineer review the town’s plans would add an extra year to Gulf Stream’s 10-year capital improvement project. The club had agreed a year earlier to accept the town’s plan.
The town’s consulting engineers are scheduled to finish drawing up plans in the spring.
Gulf Stream intends to improve the streets, drainage and water mains on both the west and east sides of the Core. Part of the plan includes replacing a 24-inch drainage pipe from Polo Drive to a canal off the Intracoastal Waterway with a 48-inch pipe. To get the South Florida Water Management District to sign off, engineers proposed enlarging a quarter-acre lake at The Little Club to a half-acre.
The water management district does not consider a lake smaller than a half-acre as helping drainage.
At the time, Gulf Stream Commissioner Paul Lyons said he hoped to live longer than the construction.
“The 10-year CIP plan—that’s a long time. I just want to be sure I have enough years to enjoy it,” he said.
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