- December 4, 2025
CMT engineer Robby Schoonmaker talking to Hammock residents Janet Sullivan and Peter Wentworth about the flooding on First Avenue. Photo by Sierra Williams
First Avenue resident Joyce Dobbs with her friend Joyce Skaff talk to a design firm representative about flooding on First Avenue in The Hammock. Photo by Sierra Williams
Flagler County Commissioner Greg Hansen talking to a Hammock resident. Photo by Sierra Williams
Residents who live in The Hammock near Mala Compra road got a chance on Sept. 30 to talk to county engineers about several major projects planned for the area.
The three projects featured at the open-house event were a resurfacing for Jungle Hut Road, the expansion of the Mala Compra Canal and fixing drainage issues on First Avenue. The open house was held at the Mala Compra Community Center.
The project to fix the drainage issues on First Avenue was especially important to residents.
County engineer Hamid Tabassian said the county did a previous project to regrade First Avenue, but had to design the project around the budget that was available in 2020, when the county was initially working on it. The budget at the time, he said, did not provide enough to do what is being proposed now.
The county is at 30% completion for design and representatives from the design teams for all three projects were at the open house to answer questions and receive comments from residents who live in around the project areas.
“So we are tweaking this and finalizing it,” Tabassian said. “We're going to make sure that the job, what is being designed and what will be constructed, is going to work.”
Robby Schoonmaker, a project engineer with design firm CMT, said the First Avenue project is still in its conceptual phase. The plan so far is to place a deeper swale to hold back more water and then address the grading. As it is, the swales are not holding enough water, which is then going on to people’s properties and staying.
First Avenue resident Joyce Dobbs said the county should have “done it right to begin with.” Her home is in the center of First Avenue, so receives flooding from both ends of the roadway.
“So when it rains, it's like a waterfall coming down my driveway,” Dobbs said.
Dobbs said “it depends on who's doing the designing as to whether it's gonna work or not,” but that she appreciated the open house and the ability to see what is being planned.
“I feel like they listened,” she said.
Resident Dennis Wilson said he was not convinced the design plans will fix the problem. The road was raised on First Avenue two years ago with the initial project, and he said he would like to see the road lowered. He doesn’t understand how no one saw the problems in the first project design two years ago.
“To see it went through permitting, planning and everything, and nobody realized that water, water doesn't flow uphill,” he said.
Project manager Richard Zion said it could be another year and a half to two years before construction is completed.
Flagler County Commissioner Greg Hansen, The Hammock’s county representative, attended the open house to talk to residents. The three projects are ones he said he has personally pushed for with the county.
He said the outcome of the original First Avenue project is “painful.”
“We got it all funded, and we paid for it, and we built it, and it didn't work,” Hansen said. Now, though, the county has the funding to redesign it. “We scraped the money together, and we're redesigning it, and that's what's going on now. Now my next project is to get enough money to, whatever the fix is, to pay for it.”
Zion said the community has provided a lot of good information for the county to work off of to address all the issues.
“We have a lot of support from the residents,” he said. “These folks are good neighbors and they’ve been honestly wonderful to work with and to meet and get to know.”
