Fairmount Avenue is pictured Monday afternoon in Lakewood. The village’s Grandview storm water management project to address flooding issues is moving forward. P-J photo by Katrina Fuller

LAKEWOOD — The village of Lakewood will soon be partnering with EcoStrategies Engineering and Surveying on its Grandview storm water management project.

“This is the next step,” said Lakewood Mayor Randy Holcomb. “It’s a big project and it’s a lot of money — a lot of pieces to put in place. This is the next piece, and that’s to get the engineering services in line and by having this on our agenda, we can vote on that and it will put that in place.”

The Lakewood Village Board discussed the project and funding during a meeting Monday.

Holcomb said the project has been in the works for “well over a year,” but has been “talked about several years before that.” He said there has been flooding in the area of a viaduct near Fifties Restaurant on Fairmount Avenue, which the project hopes to address.

“This will do a lot for that whole area of Lakewood and the southwest side,” he said. “That is all coming down the hill from Grandview right down to Fairmount Avenue and then down into the lake. This brand new stormwater management project will help control that (flooding) immensely.”

Holcomb added that the Chautauqua Lake and Watershed Management Alliance is also working on the project.

“There’s kind of three parts of it: the village, the Alliance and Eco-strategies,” he said. “This is really a great, great project. The basis … is to control the water runoff from the high elevations in the south part of Lakewood as it makes its way right down to the lake. I believe there will be a series of retention ponds and engineering so that it is controlled before it makes it down to the lake. It will be a controlled runoff.”

Holcomb said the engineering stage of the project could take many months to complete.

“There have been some properties transferred between the village and the town because a small portion was in the town of Busti and that was transferred to Lakewood,” he said. “They can work that in with this project. This is preliminary work. Right now, we’ll be in the preparation phase and then it will actually happen.”

In 2020, Chautauqua Lake and Watershed Management Alliance prepared and submitted a grant application for the 2021 Occupancy Tax Program, and the village then authorized Holcomb to execute the grant agreement between the village and the alliance for $20,000.