Ann Bates will celebrate Christmas in Georgia in her rented condo. She would rather be at her Pinon Sun townhome in Colorado Springs, near North Carefree Circle and Oro Blanco Drive, which she bought new in 1984.
But she hasn’t been able to live in her home for years and she fears she never will again.
Bates was forced by chronic flooding to abandon it. Water ruined her basement walls, carpeting and furniture, repeatedly, and eventually led to the growth of mold that, during years of sitting vacant, spread through the three-bedroom home.
“I bought that townhome to retire in,” Bates said. “I love the community. I love my neighbors. Now I don’t know if I’ll ever be back.”
The reason: Every time we get a classic Colorado cloudburst, Bates gets a basement full of water.
Water roars down Picturesque Circle, a city street uphill to the north, onto private Los Pinos Trail on a neighboring condo complex. It pours over curbs and across tennis courts, blows past a privacy fence on the property line and gushes into the ravine behind Pinon Sun’s buildings.
By the time it reaches Bates’ unit at the bottom, it has enough velocity to dislodge basement windows. Water turns the ravine into a lake, quickly fills her window wells and pushes into her basement. A neighbor’s home suffers the same trouble.
For more than 10 years, Bates said she worked with her homeowners association to resolve the problem. Three times she remodeled her basement. The fourth time, she became angry.
Unable to get relief and unwilling to remodel again until the problem was fixed, Bates moved out and sued her HOA in 2004. She also sued the neighboring condo HOA, an apartment complex and a church. Her attorney hired water engineers who determined that uncontrolled runoff from neighboring properties was to blame for the flooding.
Eventually, she won a $118,000 settlement. In addition, the HOA’s insurance company spent $270,000 to enlarge a storm sewer system. The project was complete in April 2009.
By then, Bates had left Colorado and spent two years living with her sister in her native Georgia. While the lawsuit dragged on, moisture in her vacant townhome spawned mold that contaminated the entire home.
And guess what happened in July 2009, after the sewer project was finished? A cloudburst flooded Bates’ and her neighbor’s places again.
“I still have the flooding,” she said. “I can’t live there and I can’t sell it.”
Even worse, Bates said her HOA is punishing her for suing. It refuses to pay any more to repair her home and, most recently, ripped the deck off the back of her unit.
“There was nothing wrong with that deck,” she said. “There was no reason to remove it.”
HOA president Bob Podunovich, who moved in six years ago, blames Bates and her deck for the flooding.
“I played detective and determined her deck was acting as a dam and causing the water back-up in her unit,” said Podunovich. “It sat on the ground. It was obvious. But she’s too stupid to see that.”
He also is angry she never protected herself by buying flood insurance and instead demanded the HOA pay for damage.
“You’d think anybody with common sense would buy flood insurance,” he said.
Of course, it’s not that simple.
Experts agree the deck wasn’t the cause of the flooding.
“Removing the deck is not going to resolve the issue,” said Lisa Ross, city stormwater engineer. “The water should not be there to begin with. Water is coming off Picturesque Circle. A significant volume is overtopping the curbs and going into people’s yards.”
She said the city agrees with water experts who testified in Bates’ lawsuit that city street runoff is the problem.
City engineers studied the problem and had plans to fix it — perhaps by building a berm or raising the curbs to 12 inches to protect Bates and Pinon Sun.
“We need to keep that water on the street until it reaches an inlet,” she said.
The city reached that conclusion a year ago, when the city still was collecting a stormwater fee to pay for drainage issues.
“It was a high priority for us to address,” Ross said.
Then the stormwater fee ended in January.
“Unfortunately, it went away and we don’t have funding available anymore for the work,” Ross said.
So Bates, a former health care company executive, sits in Georgia, working part-time jobs. Most of her settlement went to pay legal fees. She said it would cost $15,000 to $30,000 to clean the mold from her townhome and she doesn’t have the cash.
And as long as her basement continues to collect city runoff, would it be wise?
“What’s the use?” she said. “It’s still flooding. And I don’t have any money anymore. I’m just piecing my life back together.”
So she can’t live there. She can’t lease it and she can’t sell it. Her HOA blames her for the problem. And the city acknowledges it’s causing the problem but can’t afford to help. Still, she’s hopeful.
“These last few years have been like living in some bad dream from which I haven’t awaken,” Bates said. “I miss my home in Colorado and still hope to figure out a way to return this next year.”
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