Lubbock Mayor Glen Robertson Discusses Flooding and Other City Issues [INTERVIEW]

On Friday's edition of Lubbock's First News, Mayor Glen Robertson joined Tom Collins for a discussion about Thursday's City council meeting (May 28, 2015), the recent street flooding, and many other issues facing the city of Lubbock.

Robertson addressed criticism of the city's handling of storm water, and city's ability to deal with the large amounts of rainfall from the many storms that have drenched the South Plains recently. Robertson said,

If you look at the last thirty days, I think we've got a lot of proof that our storm water mitigation has worked. South Loop and Quaker, twenty years ago if we'd had this type of rain event, we'd be under water 30 to 45 days. We're moving that water out of that intersection in less than five hours. Now, I'm still getting emails of people complaining that in a 6-inch rain, we've got flooded intersections. But what's amazing is we're literally within hours, sometimes one or two hours, moving all that water out of the city, moving it downstream.

Also discussed was Lubbock's plans for renovating Citizen's Tower (the old Omni Building), as well as plans for the new police department and city hall.

In answer to a caller's question about the amount of parking that will be available at the new locations, Robertson said,

It's about double the parking capacity at the current city hall. 

The Mayor and Collins also talked about another item from the Council agenda,  which was the transfer of the Landwer House located in Guadalupe Park, on which the city of Lubbock has spent a large amount of money restoring. Mayor Robertson described the decision saying,

Last night on a four to three vote, we voted to literally hand this over to a non-profit organization, that Mr. Hernadez used to be the director of, a non-profit that we gave a building to in 2003 that they haven't been able to maintain. So now we're giving them another building that cost the taxpayers a little over 800,000 dollars, and we're assuming they're going to maintain this one.

Robertson continued,

I thought it was a terrible deal for our taxpayers, but Mr. Hernandez gathered four votes, so it's a done deal.

Listen to the entire interview with Mayor Glen Robertson in the video box above.

Tune in to Lubbock’s First News with Tom Collins and Laura Mac each weekday morning from 6:00 am to 8:30 am on NewsTalk 790 KFYO or online at KFYO.com