The same day Cayce confirmed it had completed the announced portion of a years-in-the-making drainage project, its City Council voted to accept $10 million in grant money to fund future work.

The city has been actively working to alleviate stormwater issues in the Cayce Avenues — the residential neighborhood bordered by State Street, 12th Street, Knox Abbott Drive and the Congaree River — since 2020. Before the work began, there were several streets in the area that would flood during heavy rain.

City Manager Tracy Hegler called the work that was just completed the first of what are now three planned phases. That finished work, funded through a $750,000 grant from the state Department of Transportation, installed improvements along Blake Drive, Deliesseline Road and Axtell Drive, which reopened June 6 after the last of the work was completed.

“We've taken choke points and we've expanded the infrastructure, just larger culverts, clearing things out. That water is just going to flow through there in a way it’s never been able to before,” Hegler said of the work that’s been completed.

Now, the city has secured $10 million more to fund improvements in the area through an S.C. Infrastructure Investment Plan grant from the Rural Infrastructure Authority.

Asked how long the city has been working to make improvements to drainage in the Avenues, Hegler joked that it’s been 40 years, explaining that the infrastructure in that area dates back to the 1940s and ’50s when the neighborhood started to be developed.

Cayce has long known drainage in the area, which was not up to modern standards, needed to be addressed. It just needed to figure out how to pay for it.

“I've told our partners for over a decade — the county, the state, federal level, all of them — we will coordinate the solution to this problem, because we know we can do that best within our stakeholders, but we cannot fund it,” Mayor Elise Partin said. “We are the lowest taxing entity of all of them.”

Partin credited the city staff with working to secure funds and said the state has stepped up, crediting state Rep. Micah Caskey and state Sen. Nikki Setzler with pushing to secure money for the drainage work to proceed.

“We've already replaced 75% of the water lines,” Partin said, with Hegler noting that this was also paid for with help from the Rural Infrastructure Authority. “We’ve done a lot of sewer work.”

So addressing these drainage issues was the obvious next step.

The specific needs Cayce is responding to were identified in a comprehensive study conducted about 12 years ago, which covered the drainage conveyance system across the Avenues’ 530 acres. Hegler said that based on that study, and accounting for inflation, the total needed to fully address drainage issues in the neighborhood would be somewhere around $25 million.

For now, though, the city will plan how to best use the $10 million it has secured and see what still needs doing when it’s spent.

“I think this is going to make such a positive impact that we're gonna sit back and watch,” Hegler said. “I think we will have a moment to breathe and see how effective and impactful that work is and really have an opportunity to reassess.

“I think it’s going to be transformative,” she added. “If not, we know how to get money.”

As it has for the past few months, the city will continue to post updates on future plans and progress with drainage work in the neighborhood to the Cayce Avenues Drainage Project page on Facebook.