Frederick Street Stormwater Park Targets Rose Drive Flooding

A few inches of water separate dry homes from flooded ones near Rose Drive. Designers planned the new Frederick Street Stormwater Park, on 3.9 acres between First Street and Pine Street, to catch that water before it gets there. If the state’s oil spill restoration money comes through by the end of this year, crews could start building it by March or April.

When the City applied to the state for help paying for this park, it called the neighborhood around Rose Drive “one of the more critical areas in the city.” In that application, the City wrote that residents there “deal with flooding on a regular basis” and that “Flood waters enter their homes causing damage to property.” State planners noted in their draft restoration plan that during storms, the sewers downstream of the site overflow, “occasionally causing sewer clean-out pipes in residential yards to overflow in the Rose Drive area.”

How Frederick Street Stormwater Park will work

The heart of the park will be a shallow, planted basin fed by the ditches along the surrounding streets. Stormwater spreads out across it and soaks into the ground, and the native plants the designers chose draw it up through their roots and pull nutrients out of it. When a storm brings more water than the park can hold, the rest flows on into the City’s existing storm drains, the way it does now.

As drawn now, the park would hold about 252,000 cubic feet of water, and the designers’ goal for the final plan is 364,000 cubic feet, about 2.7 million gallons. Margo Posten, Coastal Training Program coordinator at the Grand Bay National Estuarine Research Reserve, which leads the project, said ponding “will be limited and temporary and occur primarily during rain events and brief periods after a storm event.” She said the park, like a rain garden, is meant to drain within about 72 hours.

What it could mean for Rose Drive

Posten described what the park could mean for the families downstream.

“It is my hope that the stormwater park will capture surface water that typically flows into the Rose Drive neighborhood in order to provide some relief to that community. If it can collect 2 to 4 inches, as has been modeled, I think the residents will see an impact and hopefully a reduction in the frequency of flooding. Just a few inches can be the difference in homes being flooded.”

The soil and plants in the park also filter sediment and pollution out of the water that soaks in, so less of it reaches the Escatawpa River, where the area’s ditches and storm drains empty by way of Rhodes Bayou. Posten said that cleaner water will mean better habitat for the wildlife that lives in and along the river.

Who pays for it, and when work could start

The City of Moss Point has already purchased the land, and the money to build the park is coming from the Deepwater Horizon oil spill settlement. The Mississippi Department of Environmental Quality proposed the project to the Mississippi Trustee Implementation Group, the state and federal trustees who decide how to spend Mississippi’s share of that restoration money, and the public comment period on their draft plan closed July 29. The trustees are writing the final plan now, and the project team expects the money by the end of the year.

Once it arrives, MDEQ will pass the funds and the management of the work to the Grand Bay reserve through the Mississippi Department of Marine Resources and keep watch over the project as it goes. Posten put the cost of building the park at about $5 million, counting the engineering, design, project management and community outreach along with the construction itself. In the draft restoration plan, the trustees set aside $6 million for the whole Moss Point project, a sum that also covers planting trees across 10 acres of Khayat Park and seven years of work and monitoring.

The designers have carried the plans 30 percent of the way to a final, buildable design, and they will finish them in the next phase, once the money comes in. “If we get the funding by the end of the year we should be ready to start construction by March or April,” Posten said.

The walking path, the lighting and the benches are in the budget and in the design. Playground equipment is the one piece the restoration money cannot buy, and the project team is looking for another way to pay for it.

A park the neighbors helped design

Neighbors have shaped this park from the start, through a community advisory committee whose input, Posten said, helped create the current design. According to the project’s page on River City Flood Ready, residents asked for an accessible, safe walking path where older neighbors could get their exercise. They also wanted to see clear across the park, so the designers chose pond cypress and slash pine and left out the shrubs that block the view.

In the drawing, you can also see flowering meadows of native plants, a nature play area, an open lawn and parking along First Street, and the designers favored native meadow and evergreen trees so the park needs as little upkeep as possible. Posten said the team plans community meetings in the next phase and wants anyone who would like to help with the planting to join in. “This is their park and we want them to take ownership of it and to be involved,” she said.

A year of results from Kreole Elementary

You can already see this approach at work at Kreole Elementary School, where the Grand Bay reserve’s rain gardens and bioswale, a planted channel, catch runoff from nearby roads. Sensors there have logged rain, water levels, soil moisture and water quality every 15 minutes since May 2025, and through July 2026 the system captured 80 storms and about 71 inches of rain. After a typical storm, the bioswale drained in about three and a half hours, and on May 28, 2026, when 4.8 inches of rain fell, it filled and drained the same day.

The water the bioswale held was also far cleaner than the water in the enclosed storm drains it connects to, with a small fraction of their dissolved solids. It carried about 6.7 milligrams of oxygen per liter, a healthy level for aquatic life, while the drains held almost none. Posten said early readings also point to the gardens removing nutrients, and her team hopes to share more results soon.

Where to follow the park’s progress

River City Flood Ready, the Grand Bay reserve’s flood resilience campaign for Moss Point, shares news on this park, the Kreole rain gardens and its other projects in the city. Follow it at rivercityfloodready.com and on Facebook, Instagram and X for updates on the park through design and construction.

If a ditch or storm drain near you is clogged, or your street floods in a storm, you can report it to the City’s Public Works team through Report an Issue.

To stay up to date on news from the City, download the City of Moss Point app on the App Store or Google Play.

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