Chatham flooding mitigation program flounders, but Oak Park sees success
In October, the city's top environmental official told City Council members that Chicago is "laser-focused on collaboration and bold solutions" to help homeowners battle flooding problems.
Angela Tovar then pointed council members to the program RainReady, created in Chatham to provide grants to homeowners in the South Side neighborhood to install flood-control devices on their properties that can significantly reduce susceptibility to flooding.
RainReady is the brainchild of a local environmental nonprofit group the Center for Neighborhood Technology. The program has had several iterations in Chatham since its development more than 10 years ago by CNT and a group of residents.
RainReady works, according to homeowners - including residents in west suburban Oak Park who benefited from the low-cost flood prevention fixes including rain gardens, backflow valves and cisterns. It is so successful that there is a waiting list, officials said.
But it didn't get the chance to work for most Chatham residents, the Illinois Answers Project learned. Despite Tovar's assertions and the city's promise to launch it in 2019, RainReady has yet to get off the ground. The few Chatham residents who did receive RainReady grants worked directly with CNT prior to 2019.
The different outcomes potentially highlight the difficulty of administering the RainReady program at a larger scale.
While CNT walked away from the city's project in 2021 - citing a lack of "staff capacity" in an email to Sean Wiedel, then an assistant commissioner at CDOT in charge of citywide services - the nonprofit group found a way to work with government agencies outside of Chicago on similar projects. A CNT official suggested that Chicago presents unique challenges.
The village of Oak Park made the project work on a smaller scale. Data shows that its RainReady program that ran between 2017 and 2021, administered by CNT, left neighbors satisfied with the results.
"People were looking for solutions. And this is one of the things that we were trying to ... provide," said Oak Park Neighborhood Services Manager Jeff Prior.
Despite its success, the future of RainReady is unclear in both communities. The village is looking for a new administrator for the program and is uncertain whether grants will be awarded this year, despite opening applications in March.
The city also is searching for a new partner to run its RainReady program. Until it finds one, Chatham will benefit from other programs that the water department has implemented, said Brendan Schreiber, chief engineer of sewers at DWM. Those include Green Alleys and Space to Grow, Tovar said in a statement.
"They're getting resources that we spread across all 50 wards," Schreiber said.