Board hears flooding concerns as City prepares to receive drainage study

By Clinton Courier | August 7, 2025 |

By Randy Bell

For years, the City of Clinton has told local residents in flood-prone neighborhoods that public funds couldn’t be spent to alleviate drainage issues on private property. But now, it’s looking at possible exceptions to that rule, a development which will likely come as welcome news to the Clintonians who crowded into a Board of Aldermen work session on July 14 to complain that the City has “dropped the ball” in maintaining the drainage systems across Clinton.

Sherman Barnes, who lives on Diane Place, says his home hasn’t flooded because it’s on higher ground, but neighbors’ homes have taken on water “over and over again.”
He mentioned one family in particular.

“[They’ve] been there about three years. They’ve been flooded four times.”

Barnes said the water hits his neighborhood from four different directions. He told the Board that some people have already moved out because of the continual flooding and that “it doesn’t make sense” that the neighborhood can’t get some help with its drainage problems.

“We’re going to be dissatisfied if nothing happens after this meeting,” Barnes said.

Other citizens voiced concerns about how the flooding is affecting their property values, and one said she was worried that climate change will bring an increase in rain and even bigger problems for her neighborhood.

Ward 4 Alderman Chip Wilbanks told the audience it’s possible, under certain circumstances, for the City to work on private property without running afoul of state law.
Following the meeting, he provided more details.

“There are situations where an improvement needs to be made and it’s on private property, but it’s for the public good. And there may be an opportunity for the City to come in and spend public funds,” said Wilbanks.

Mayor Will Purdie put it this way: “While there may be some ancillary value to private property owners, certainly the City can derive a value in some instances from fixing some of these problems.”

But Purdie warned that Clinton could spend its entire budget and use every available man-hour from its public works crews and still not solve all of the city’s drainage issues. The mayor said the key is finding the projects which can have the most impact – and the City is getting a new tool to help make those determinations.

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers has spent two years examining Clinton’s four major waterways to give the City a roadmap for drainage improvements. The computer models of Lindsey Creek, Bogue Chitto Creek, Straight Fence Creek and French Creek will show how those drainage basins could be affected by any work that’s done.

“If we go in here and widen this ditch and improve a creek,” Purdie explained, “this is the impact it will have on drainage and water flow through the city. It will allow us to see what some of the downstream impacts would be. Certainly, we don’t want to do anything that might improve [drainage] somewhere but create a huge problem somewhere else.”

Purdie said it’s not a “magic plan” to fix the city’s drainage problems but is “a good first step.”

Consulting City Engineer Bill Owen said the Corps’ computer models will also be a valuable asset for emergency planning.

“If we know that we’re going to get four and a half inches of rain, we can look at that model, and it’ll say that [a certain] street will potentially overflow, [so] we can make accommodations and notify the people.”