After an independent retired engineer got involved, an Olathe woman feels even more confident that the city should address flooding on her property that has damaged her family’s home multiple times.
That’s because David Silverstein, the engineer, found that the city signed off on neighborhood stormwater plans that show Kate Guimbellot’s property was always designed to flood. He also found evidence that the city’s nearby work to widen College Boulevard made matters worse.
All of that leads Silverstein to conclude that her lot, as well as a neighboring one, should never have been developed.
Guimbellot said she has been frustrated over the past several years as her family has dealt with this, but now she’s just “angry.”
“They have let us down,” she said. “This is gross inadequacy in taking care of us and this neighborhood.”
The city declined to comment, citing an open tort claim — a type of civil claim that alleges one party harmed another, potentially opening the door for some kind of compensation — filed by Guimbellot and one of her neighbors. (Guimbellot says the tort claims were filed at the city’s behest, but she’s skeptical that they will help address the flooding concerns long-term.)
Her home in College Meadows has flooded 3 times
Guimbellot and her family first moved into the home in the northern Olathe College Meadows neighborhood located off College and Woodland Street in 2016, but a major rainstorm the following year led to significant flooding in their home.
Their home flooded again in 2021, and Guimbellot’s family shelled out thousands to repair the damage and had crews address some construction shortcomings — like a too-short foundation — that engineering firm HNTB found were making her home more flood-prone. Still, the home flooded a third time in 2024.
Eventually, the city contracted with HNTB twice to study the stormwater issues in the College Meadows neighborhood.
The first time, in 2022, the firm identified a series of problems, including that the developer’s engineers designed the stormwater system with faulty calculations. HNTB suggested upgrading the stormwater drainage system by adding a much larger reinforced concrete box (a piece of infrastructure that lets stormwater flow under the street) to work alongside the existing undersized drain. That work was never completed.
The second time, in 2025, HNTB suggested flood-proofing the home as the primary solution, using a berm up against the house and a 5-foot-tall concrete flood wall across the backyard, though the firm warned that wouldn’t be a perfect solution.
(Read more about Guimbellot’s experiences here.)
“Never should have been built”
After seeing local news coverage of Guimbellot’s situation, Silverstein, who lives in Olathe but has experience as a city engineer in Missouri, reached out to her on social media in May.
He volunteered for free to look at the documents and plans she’d acquired related to her neighborhood and home. Silverstein also came out to her property during a rainstorm to see how the water moved through her property.
“My first inclination,” he told the Post, “was that it was clear that the entire house was located in an area where it never should have been built.”
For one thing, Silverstein said, it appears from the developer’s stormwater plans that the lot where Guimbellot’s home and the neighboring lot were located was intended to flood during large storm events (as shown on Pg 6 of Silverstein’s report embedded below).
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Open in new tab “It was clear, based on the documents that [the developer] submitted to the city for approval, that the house and the lot were designed to flood, and that really should never have been designed that way,” Silverstein added. “[The developer was] already predicting it would flood, and it clearly has and will continue to do so unless significant changes are made.”
Silverstein also agreed with HNTB’s 2022 report that found the neighborhood stormwater plans were drawn up with faulty calculations. (As is standard in the development process, the city reviews stormwater and other infrastructure plans tied to proposed projects.)
Silverstein said he’s seen stormwater systems designed and built with bad calculations before, but he’s never seen a lot set to be developed that was designed to flood like he says Guimbellot’s was.
“That’s a recipe for disaster,” he said.
He also said that it “should have been a big red flag” to anyone with engineering experience who reviewed the plans, including city engineering staff, who sign off on these types of plans as part of the development process.
“If the person at the city was experienced and opened up that set of plans and saw that, they would have questioned, ‘Wait a minute, what’s going on here?’” Silverstein said. “I don’t know who reviewed it, what their level of expertise was, and so forth.”
Previously, a city spokesperson told the Post that Olathe “reviews plans to ensure they meet general conformance to City standards and that plans are then stamped by a private engineer. The City then signs the plans with the expectation that construction meets the standards set forth in the plans. City staff does not re-run hydraulic models to review the private engineer’s assessment.”
At the time of publication, Ron Vanlerberg, the developer of College Meadows, had not returned the Post’s request for comment.
Engineer also found widening College Blvd contributed to flooding
Around the same time Guimbellot’s home flooded for the first time, the city completed a project widening College Boulevard nearby, doubling the amount of impervious surface — hard, manmade surfaces, like paved streets and parking lots, that interfere with the ground’s ability to absorb stormwater.
“It probably significantly increased, not only the volume of water, but the rate that the water gets downstream, down to the subdivision,” Silverstein said.
He said it’s normal to build some kind of stormwater detention apparatus to go with road expansions and other public infrastructure projects if there could be “a downstream impact.” However, sometimes municipalities don’t do that, but instead send excess water to the nearest creek or stormwater detention facility.
In this case, there was already a potential flooding problem downstream, Silverstein said, and adding the runoff from the road expansion could have had the effect of “exacerbating the problem.”
In a written report explaining his findings that he drafted in June and in an interview with the Post, Silverstein seemed skeptical about HNTB’s study earlier this year, which proposed floodproofing Guimbellot’s home.
He said he doesn’t think that will do enough to stop the flooding that Guimbellot has experienced, and it will do nothing to address the source of the problem.
Instead, he believes the “viable solution” is for someone to upgrade the stormwater system near Guimbellot’s home and make additional adjustments in the College Meadows neighborhood, which is what HNTB originally proposed in 2022.
Now what?
Guimbellot still feels like the city should take the lead on fixing the shortcomings of the stormwater system, since it’s now considered public infrastructure.
She also thinks the city bears the responsibility of addressing any stormwater implications from College Boulevard, because Silverstein concluded in his report that the work from nearly a decade ago is making flooding on her property worse.
“All of that responsibility remains, but this makes it 10 times worse,” she said.
At the same time, Guimbellot said she’s lost hope that she can strike a deal with the city to address these flooding issues.
“I really wanted to partner with the city of Olathe and have believed right up until now that in some way we would be able to figure this out together,” she said, adding that she’s “disappointed” with how things have been handled. “I am frustrated and angry and even more determined to make them do what is right.”
Since the tort claims she and her neighbor filed in the spring are still working their way through the process, Guimbellot said she’s unsure what kind of recourse she has at this point. She also said the city has become increasingly unresponsive to her in the past several weeks.
“They are duck and covering,” she said. “I think it’s just a stall tactic.”
Looking back: Olathe woman wants city to fix stormwater issue that causes home to flood. The city says it won’t
