Tampa Approved a $100 Million Flood Project. The Lawsuits Arrived Three Weeks Later.

On the night of September 17, 2026, a woman stood before the Tampa City Council and described being trapped for nine hours in her one-story home during Hurricane Milton. Water filled the house while she waited it out with elderly relatives and her dogs. She had been told her property wasn't in a flood zone.

Others followed her to the microphone. Bill Kolega described a foot of water inside the Palma Ceia Pines townhome he shares with his wife and two young kids. David Adams, from nearby Parkland Estates, said his street had gone under two to three feet of water four times in forty days. Jan McCabe has lived on Lakeview Road for 26 years, and her family lost both cars. Beth Steinle, an engineer recovering from cancer surgery, said the flooding kept her from getting to the hospital.

That night the council voted 4–3 to approve a $100.4 million flood relief project for their neighborhoods. At its center is a ten-foot-by-ten-foot underground culvert, essentially an enormous concrete box pipe, running beneath South Howard Avenue and carrying stormwater from those residential streets down to Tampa Bay.

On October 8, three weeks after the vote, two proposed lawsuits were filed against the city. The plaintiffs include Bern's Steak House, the Epicurean Hotel, the Ciccio Restaurant Group, and other property owners along South Howard Avenue, which is where all the digging would happen. Construction is scheduled to run from March 2027 through December 2030.

The businesses on South Howard don't dispute that families in Parkland Estates and Palma Ceia Pines need protection. Their complaints are about whether the city actually owns the ground it wants to dig in, whether it followed the rules for spending the money, and whether a marketing campaign called "SohOPEN" is fair compensation for nearly four years of torn-up sidewalks outside their doors.

Tampa's engineers can move this water. The unsettled questions are who absorbs the cost of getting it built, who has standing to contest the terms, and what happens to the families who keep flooding while the lawsuits play out in court.

The pipe goes where the water goes

The engineering logic is simple enough. Water runs downhill toward the bay, and the most direct path from the flooded neighborhoods to the waterfront runs under South Howard Avenue, a commercial corridor lined with restaurants, shops, and hotels.

The city's computer models lay out what the project is meant to prevent. In a heavy rainstorm, the kind with a one-in-five chance of happening in any given year, 96 homes and businesses currently flood. Water stands four feet deep on Parkland Estates streets and takes eight hours to drain from Swann Avenue. In a storm on Milton's scale, 333 buildings flood, streets go under more than five feet of water, and Swann Avenue stays submerged for nineteen hours.

According to the city, the culvert would eliminate building flooding entirely in the heavy-rain scenario and cut it by about 70 percent in a Milton-scale event, protecting roughly 220 to 230 structures. Those numbers are modeled projections. The families who spoke in September were describing something more immediate: standing inside their own homes while the water came up, waiting for it to stop.

The city studied alternatives: storage basins, pump stations, a culvert under Swann Avenue instead, a route along the CSX rail corridor. Each was rejected for being less effective, more expensive, slower to build, or harder on residents. South Howard moved the most water at the lowest cost with the least disruption to people's homes. That route, however, doesn't pass under the neighborhoods it protects. It passes under the commercial strip, in front of businesses that don't flood themselves and happen to sit where the water needs to go.

Jarrod Dyer, who owns a business on the corridor, said it plainly at the September meeting: the construction burden should fall closer to the neighborhoods getting the benefit, not on a separate commercial street. It's a reasonable thing to ask. The difficulty is that drainage follows the slope of the land, and the slope runs to the bay under Howard.

Three fights before the first trench

The two lawsuits raise different challenges, but they keep circling the same tension. The city approved a project, and the people who will live with the construction say the city skipped steps the law required. Both are proposed class actions, meaning the plaintiffs want to represent a broader group of affected owners. No judge has certified either class or ruled on any claim, so everything in them is, for now, allegation.

Who owns the ground beneath the street?

This is the fight that could stop the project outright. The city says it can build everything inside the existing public right-of-way, the strip of land it controls for streets, sidewalks, and utilities. If any work strays onto the edge of private property, the city says it would go ahead only with the owner's voluntary authorization and a recorded legal instrument. Throughout the design process, city officials have held that the right-of-way is enough for the stormwater system itself.

The businesses read the history another way. They point to plat maps from 1902 to 1924, when South Howard Avenue was first laid out. (A plat is the recorded map that creates a street by dividing land into lots.) Those plats, the businesses argue, gave the public an easement, meaning a right to travel across the surface, without ever handing over ownership of the land itself. Florida law takes that distinction seriously. If the original plat created only an easement, the owners on either side of the street may still own the ground beneath it, out to the road's center line.

In the businesses' view, a culvert ten feet tall carrying stormwater from two neighborhoods and a highway goes well past anything a surface-travel easement allows.

They want a judge to halt construction until the city either buys the subsurface rights or uses eminent domain, the legal process a government uses to take private property for public use while paying the owner fair compensation. The city says it needs to do neither. What the public record holds so far is two opposing assertions; no neutral title determination has been published.

What four years of construction does to a restaurant

The city's construction plan breaks the work into 24 sections over 957 working days. Any single driveway, the city says, would be blocked for five to seven weeks, and work zones would be limited to stretches of 400 to 600 feet that generally have to reopen to traffic before the next section starts.

The lawsuit counts it differently, tallying the working days of construction along each business's frontage: 210 near Bern's, 190 near one of Ciccio's restaurants, 110 near the Epicurean Hotel. Those aren't the same measurement. A blocked driveway is one kind of disruption, and months of active construction out front is another. For a restaurant that depends on people being able to park, walk in, and actually want to be there, the difference may not count for much.

The city's Business Assistance Plan offers a four-person coordination team, help with deliveries, wayfinding signs, quieter backup alarms on equipment, photographs of buildings taken before construction starts, and a customer shuttle from a secured off-site parking area. It does not offer compensation for lost revenue, rent, payroll, or the customers who simply go somewhere else for a few months. The city also hasn't sponsored any independent estimate of what businesses on the corridor stand to lose.

Michael Stewart, who owns AVA and Landin on the corridor, told the council the damage spreads beyond individual storefronts. People who come for dinner at one place browse the shop next door, stop for a drink down the block, walk over to the hotel. South Howard works as a district, and when one block loses foot traffic, the blocks around it feel it too. A shuttle from a parking lot gets people onto the street, but it doesn't recreate the foot traffic and atmosphere that make the district work.

The project that grew

The second lawsuit goes after how the project is paid for.

In 2016, the city created a yearly charge on properties inside a defined improvement area, based on how much of each property is covered by impervious surfaces: roofs, pavement, anything that sheds rain into the street instead of letting it soak into the ground. This charge, called a stormwater improvement assessment, pays for drainage projects. A mid-size single-family home pays roughly $90 a year, and larger properties pay more according to their impervious footprint. The assessment covers about 103,000 parcels across the Central and Lower Basin and brings in about $15.7 million a year.

Under Florida law, a charge like this is legal only if the people paying it get a specific, measurable benefit from the projects it funds. It isn't a general tax, and that difference sits at the center of the second lawsuit.

When the assessment was created in 2016, the South Howard project meant pipes, storm drains, and road regrading. The city says South Howard was on the list of regional priorities from the start. By 2022, the estimate was around $45 million, with a smaller culvert. In 2023 the budget reached $64.5 million. By September 2026 it was $100.4 million, now with a culvert twice the original size plus full road reconstruction, new sidewalks, streetlights, landscaping, permeable pavement, and upgraded water and sewer lines.

The city attributes the growth to engineering refinement and rising construction costs, and says folding the utility work into the same project means the street only gets torn up once. It also says the larger share drawn from the assessment, up from $8.4 million to $33.7 million, would take 28 percent of projected assessment revenue over the next twenty years and leave roughly $85 million for other drainage work in the improvement area.

The businesses say the project changed so much that it's effectively a new one, with little resemblance to the improvements the assessment was authorized to fund. If they're right, the city had to rebid the contract, notify the public again, and show that the bigger project still delivers the specific benefit that justifies the charge. Without those steps, the businesses argue, the assessment starts operating as an unauthorized tax, a legal category with very different rules and limits.

The $11 million that depends on no lawsuits

Money for the project comes from at least six sources, including the stormwater assessment, borrowing against future assessment revenue, other drainage funds, a state resilience grant, and about $11 million from the Tampa-Hillsborough Expressway Authority, or THEA, which runs the Selmon Expressway.

THEA is widening the highway and needs somewhere to send the extra runoff, so paying for capacity in the new culvert makes sense. But the interlocal agreement between THEA and the city comes with a condition. Before THEA pays, Tampa has to show that all other funding is secured, all permits are approved, and no litigation is pending.

That doesn't automatically cost the city the $11 million. Tampa has until December 31, 2027, and can extend in six-month increments. The lawsuits could be resolved, or THEA could waive the condition. Still, the city's budget counts on that money arriving, and public records don't show it has been received. The lawsuits are precisely the situation the agreement was written to guard against.

When a construction schedule and a legal challenge govern the same project, the slower one sets the pace. That has been the pattern in adaptation disputes from Boulder to New Orleans.

The neighborhoods keep flooding while the project gets built

At the September meeting, Brad Baird, the city's infrastructure administrator, acknowledged something the vote couldn't fix: the neighborhoods will keep flooding for roughly two more years after construction begins.

The culvert can't carry water until every section is connected. Work starts at the bay end, on South Howard, and moves inland toward the residential streets, so the last pieces finished will be the ones nearest the homes that flood. Baird was candid about this at the council meeting, and that candor matters. The city isn't hiding the timeline. It also can't change the order, because a drainage line has to be built from the outfall, the point where the water exits into the bay, back upstream.

So the families in Parkland Estates and Palma Ceia Pines are left waiting in a particular way. The project is approved and the money allocated, and the design is 60 percent done. The next heavy rainstorm, which has a one-in-five chance of arriving in any given year, will still put four feet of water on their streets. For people like David Adams, whose street went under four times in forty days, that means several more rainy seasons living with the same risk.

What happened in St. Augustine and New Orleans

Tampa's specific combination of subsurface property disputes, assessment challenges, and business-impact claims may be unusual, but the underlying tensions show up in flood projects across the country.

In St. Augustine, a flood project protecting about 200 acres of the historic downtown needed permanent rights to use parts of private land. Two owners refused. The city turned to eminent domain, the process Tampa says it doesn't need, and ended up paying more than $1.1 million in land costs and legal fees. The project got built, after the city accepted that it needed the very rights it had been asking for.

In New Orleans, eight French Quarter businesses sued the city's water agency after months of construction on Decatur Street left their storefronts fenced off. A court-approved settlement required the agency to take down fencing where no work was actually happening, add pedestrian crossings, and respond within three business days whenever a business contested a specific closure. Loose promises to keep shops accessible became obligations the businesses could enforce, block by block.

Neither case is Tampa's. But both reflect something I keep running into while reporting on flood infrastructure around the country: the legal and property questions have to be settled before the digging can start. When a city skips that order, the courts impose it anyway, on a slower timeline.

Different sides of the same street

The city says it has the authority to build, that the assessment was designed for projects like this one, and that its business assistance plan addresses the construction impacts. The businesses say the city doesn't own what it needs, changed the project beyond recognition without following the required process, and is offering a marketing campaign where compensation is owed. No court has ruled.

Whatever a judge eventually decides, the next heavy rainstorm will put four feet of water on the streets of Parkland Estates. Meanwhile, the businesses on South Howard will go on serving customers on an intact street until someone with the authority says the digging can start, or that it can't.

The families and the business owners are carrying different costs of the same project, and right now there's no mechanism for settling who owes what to whom. Until there is one, the waiting falls hardest on the people who stood at the microphone on September 17.