Deborah Henry had never seen such “boot-sucking mud.”
Much like the rest of Henry’s three acres near the edge of Concord, the paddock where her equine companions — horses Cosmo and Goldie — had always lived was peaceful.
Then, the paddock started to flood.
In 2022, seemingly benign maintenance conducted by the city of Concord on a culvert near her home caused erosion and formed a giant ditch, Henry said. The situation made the paddock so unsafe for her horses that she chose to rehome them from the land where she, a self-described animal lover, lives with her pets.
Henry blames the city. She said she’s fought to be listened to for three years. City officials, however, say they’re powerless to do anything about it.
Meanwhile, as Henry has battled with the city over who bears responsibility for the damage, it has only worsened.
In a June email to Concord Mayor Byron Champlin, Henry made her feelings known.
“I feel that the City of Concord is responsible for fixing the flooding issue and repairing my side lawn and the paddock,” she wrote. “The flooding and resulting property damage occurred through no fault of my own, yet I am getting no assistance from the City of Concord — which I believe is in the wrong.”
The ditch
Since before Henry moved to her property in 2017, the culvert that directs water runoff from the hill opposite her house had been blocked with debris.
In 2022, a crew from Concord General Services cleaned out the culvert, which flushes water under Blackwater Road and out to a small trench near the edge of Henry’s property.
All of a sudden, her yard began to flood.
Henry said that, before the culvert work near her home, “In the years that I have been here, I have never seen that overflow, never, not one time.”
Now, whenever there’s heavy rain or snowmelt, the paddock becomes a swamp of mud so thick it squelches the boots off her feet, she said.
The area floods so heavily that waterfalls cascade through the crevasse, which is surrounded by tall, unruly weeds laden with bugs.
The persistent flooding rotted her wooden fence, and the erosion has carved out a ditch so massive that Henry, fearing for her horses’ safety, rehomed them at her daughter’s farm earlier this summer.
In a dry spell, Henry can step down into the ditch, which is so deep it comes thigh-high. That’s also a safety hazard for her horses, she said, especially the miniature one. If they fell in, they might not be able to get out.
“They couldn’t stay out there anymore,” Henry said. “Every time the rain falls, it goes through my paddock. It just digs that ditch bigger and bigger.”
At an impasse
Henry has spent years asking the city to fix the mess by either directing water away from her property or by obstructing the culvert. She considered fixing it herself, or even building an entirely new paddock on the other side of her property, but both would be expensive.
Trying to get help from the city, though, has taken hours upon hours of her time.
“It’s been awful,” Henry said.
She filed four separate service requests on the city’s online portal over the course of a year.
Henry said it often took weeks or months to hear back from the city during that process.
Mayor Champlin, though unfamiliar with the exact communication between Henry and General Services, said he doesn’t want that to be the norm.
“I would always encourage city staff to consider themselves to be in the customer service business,” Champlin said. “My hope would be that when someone has an issue that they receive a speedy response that is as thorough as possible.”
One city worker, Henry said, told her the water remnants on her property could have existed before the culvert work was performed. In response to her first official request made in May 2023, someone from the engineering department told her it wasn’t the city’s problem.
Unsatisfied, she kept filing complaints.
Upon her fourth official request, made in May 2024, former General Services director Chip Chesley visited her property. He was kind and sympathetic, she said, and told her he’d do what he could.
Then, the engineering department told her there was nothing they could do because they didn’t have an easement. Without an easement — permission from a private landowner allowing the government to use the property for a public purpose, like maintenance — the city has no legal right to do work on Henry’s land.
Jeff Hoadley, acting director of General Services, said in an interview that without a drainage easement, any work the city could do would be constricted to the area right alongside the road, called the right-of-way. The trench that’s currently there, he said, is “not a well-defined drainage course.”
Even so, Hoadley maintains that the city didn’t do anything to cause the flooding: Concord merely cleaned out the culvert, which Hoadley said gets checked annually, and did not do anything to impact the direction of the flow of water down into Henry’s yard.
“I could see that the culvert was clear, and I could see there was a ditch there along the right-of-way, but that’s the extent of any work that General Services would ever do,” Hoadley said. “Basically, our job is to go ahead and make sure the culvert is clear and that water is moving in the right way.”
Blocking the culvert, as Henry has suggested, isn’t an option, Hoadley said. The culvert is a necessary piece of infrastructure to preserve road integrity.
To Henry, the easement argument was unacceptable. As she sees it, Concord required no permission to flood her land, so it shouldn’t need permission to fix the mess it caused.
The easement is also somewhat of a moot point, as Hoadley said the city has no plans to request one.
“It would have to come from the property owner, unless we had a specific reason that we would want to go ahead and do more work beyond the right-of-way which, at this point in time, I don’t believe is the case,” Hoadley said.
Henry said the city never informed her she’d need to be the one to request an easement — not that she wants to. In many cases, once the city has an easement, it is attached to the property deed indefinitely.
Instead, city officials suggested she ask her neighbors whether they’d be willing to contribute to the cost of digging a larger trench between their properties to direct water away from the paddock.
Henry found that a disappointing response from her city government.
‘I miss them’
After years of feeling ignored and written off, Henry decided to contact the mayor.
She sent an email to Byron Champlin this June, asking him to look into her case.
“This is very upsetting to me because I cannot currently keep my horses on my property, the lawn and paddock are ruined, it is going to be expensive to build new fencing and I am paying property taxes on a large amount of my property that I am not able to use,” she wrote.
Champlin, in a brief response, told her he’d directed the city manager to look into it.
“Sorry you are going through this situation,” he wrote back.
When the result didn’t change, Henry asked Champlin to explain why the city took no responsibility for the damage. He never replied, she said.
When asked by the Monitor, Champlin said he isn’t an engineer and thus doesn’t feel qualified to make that determination.
“She obviously wants to have her property situation restored to what it was at a time in the past,” Champlin said. “I’m not sufficiently qualified to know whether that’s even possible, whether the city gets involved or not.”
At an impasse with Concord, Henry sees no end in sight for the flooding and no way to bring her horses home.
She still lives with her other pets: a dog named Pixie; a long-haired cat, Clancy; and her rabbits, Riley and Murphy. But after living with her horses for two decades, she can no longer step outside her front door to see them.
Instead, she drives down the street to her daughter’s house several times a week to say hello.
“I miss them,” Henry said. “I feel strange not having them here, and it’s not a good strange. I feel really sad.”
Henry did ask around for an estimate to dig a deeper trench, which landed at about $600.
“He was going to come out that weekend, and really and truly, I started thinking about it, and I said, ‘No. Why should I pay $600?'” Henry said, noting that simply digging another trench would still create a breeding ground for the weeds, mosquitoes and other bugs that currently plague her yard.
“Why should I have a nasty trench down the side of my paddock because they did something that they shouldn’t have done?” she asked. “That’s not fair.”