OVIEDO, Fla. – With aging infrastructure and rising costs, it’s no wonder cities across Central Florida are struggling to keep up with stormwater projects.
Oviedo raised their rates late last year and promised to start tackling a list of infrastructure improvements. Our News 6 team followed up this week to see how that money is being used now.
On Town and Country Road, work is already complete on a culvert repair. Over on Orange Avenue, pipe rehabilitation work is being done near Sweetwater Creek.
Mayor Megan Sladek shared a list of more than 70 stormwater projects that the public works staff is working on.
“It’s sort of like repainting your house, but what we’re doing is re-piping the rivers that we put underground,” said Mayor Sladek. “After about 30 to 40 years, they start to fail. So, all of the infrastructure everywhere needs to be addressed all at once, and that is what we’re doing in Oviedo.”
It wasn’t long ago that the city’s finance director told the council there wasn’t much money available for the list of repairs and maintenance that was needed in the coming years.
The city council voted to increase utility rates, including a 25% increase of the stormwater rate in 2026. Rates will keep going up even as the percentage of the rate adjustment lowers to 15% in 2027-2029.
The city also chose to borrow $9.5 million to jumpstart the work that needed to be done.
“We’re charging a rate that’s high enough to do ‘pay as you go’ for over half of it,” Mayor Sladek explained. “But we’re still planning to take out another $8 million loan because it’s just not fair to pick who goes last.”
Mayor Sladek says it’s a $40 million investment into stormwater infrastructure over the next 10 years that allows the city to address a multitude of needs all at once.
[WATCH: Oviedo residents see 25% stormwater bill hike (from 2025)]
“We’ve had a prioritized list for quite some time now; we just didn’t have the funding,” said Sladek. “All of the things that truly need to be done right now, they’re getting done. All of the things that can wait up to 10 years, they are on the docket, and they will be done before they fail. And that keeps the cost down. And it’s what we should have been doing all along. But, you know, until you get to the end of the first lifecycle of all of your infrastructure, you don’t realize that, ‘yeah, we’re going to need to save up for this, too.’”
Mayor Sladek says the stormwater improvements that are complete, underway, or on the list for the months ahead should give citizens more confidence in future storm seasons.
“There’s a lot of places that we’ve already got feedback, and they’ve been flooding a lot less — even with the storms in the recent days,” said Sladek.