Independence Drainage & French Drain Installation

Of Independence's 57,699 housing units, 15.2 percent were built in 1939 or earlier, 7.1 percent in the 1940s, 15.1 percent in the 1950s and 17.2 percent in the 1960s. That is 54.6 percent built before 1970, with a median year of 1967 and only 4.4 percent built since 2010. Foundations of that age were built with drain tile that has silted shut, or with no drain tile at all.

Independence also carries its own federal sewer consent decree, separate from Kansas City's. In March 2009 the city agreed with EPA Region 7 and the Justice Department to upgrade a system covering more than 515 miles of sanitary sewer and six pumping stations, estimated at over $35 million, centered on the Rock Creek treatment plant basin serving roughly 55,000 residential customers.

USGS studied six sites on five named waterways here between 2005 and 2018: Rock Creek, the East Fork Little Blue River, Adair Creek, Spring Branch Creek and the Little Blue River. Rock Creek is the one that defines local drainage, draining about 9.5 square miles almost entirely inside the Independence city limits and running roughly 5.7 miles to the Missouri River as a direct tributary, bounded by the Little Blue to the north and the Blue River basin to the south.

The city's storm system is a Phase I Medium MS4 with more than 13,800 structures, 230 miles of stormwater pipe and 19 regional detention basins across 23 local watersheds. USGS credited more than $35 million in stormwater and wastewater improvements between 2009 and 2015 as contributing to improving water quality trends, while still finding both Little Blue River sites exceeding recreational E. coli criteria.

This is the sharpest regulatory fact in the metro. Independence City Code Sec. 20.02.001 adopts the Design Criteria for Storm Drainage Systems and Facilities, Section 5600, as approved and adopted on March 21, 1990 by the Kansas City Metropolitan Chapter of APWA. Overland Park, forty minutes southwest, enforces the February 15, 2006 revision of the same regional document. Same standard, sixteen years apart.

The grading rules are equally specific and equally dated. Sec. 20.05.001 adopts APWA Section 2100 grading specifications approved October 21, 1981. Sec. 20.05.003 adopts Appendix J of the 2006 International Building Code. Sec. 20.05.004 requires a professional engineer's grading plan above 5,000 cubic yards. The clause that catches homeowners is the exemption in Sec. 20.05.005: excavation or fill less than one foot deep and under 50 cubic yards on any one lot is exempt, but only if it does not obstruct a drainage course. Cross that last condition and a weekend regrade becomes a permitted job.