July 29, 2026

City Dock Progress Report

Project Remains on Track as Crews Tackle Infrastructure and Weather Challenges

As the City Dock Flood Mitigation Project moves forward, it is important to provide updates. The great news is that we are on schedule to reopen City Dock about a year from now. Crews are working as quickly as they can to get to the phase of the project we are all anxious to see: “completion.”

Throughout the more than six years of planning for the City Dock project, the downtown business community was consulted and informed of what the construction process would entail. Now that the project is well underway, we hear the frustration, which is an understandable part of any infrastructure rebuilding process.

The Mayor, City Council, City staff, and the teams at Whiting Turner care about the impacts on downtown merchants. That is why we are pushing the project forward with such intensity. It’s also why we added 165 additional parking spaces at the rebuilt Hillman Garage (about 500 feet from Market Space). It’s why Whiting Turner has brought in additional crews.  

Tuesday’s short-lived flooding was not an incident of tidal inundation, where the water comes up through the storm drains and into the streets (in prior years, the most frequent cause of flooding at City Dock). What we saw yesterday was Mother Nature delivering unusual flash-flood conditions, not just at City Dock, but at locations around the City and county.

Too much rain fell too quickly for the current infrastructure to handle.

While flash-flood conditions are rare at City Dock, we’ve engineered the new City Dock to withstand both tidal inundations and flash-flood conditions. When construction is complete, both problems will be resolved by a series of engineered floodgates, flood walls, and pumps (each moving up to 10,000 gallons of water per minute; existing pumps can move only around 100 gallons per minute). Apply that to yesterday’s more than 40,000 gallons of rainfall, and you can see how quickly it will be pumped out. In a future City Dock, we’d see only minor surface water during a storm like yesterday’s. 

As far as the sediment controls are concerned, it is important that we are transparent about the facts. In June of 2025, the City was ordered by the Maryland Department of Environment (MDE) to immediately install sediment controls or face both daily citations and hefty fines. The City’s contractor, Whiting Turner, quickly installed the sediment controls to maintain compliance with State-issued directives.

A note on sediment filters: these filters are kept on surrounding drains and are standard best practice to keep construction silt out of Ego Alley, an important environmental aspect. The slow drainage isn’t an issue of filters; it is an issue of pump capacity. Mathematics dictates that even a half-inch of rain across the three acres at City Dock naturally takes time to fully clear. Given the volume of rain that fell in a short window of time, the existing pumps simply couldn’t keep up. The new pumps, once the City Dock project is complete, will have 100 times the capacity.

In the meantime, Public Works is actively inspecting the site during every significant rain event. Last night we checked to ensure the generators for the pumps were working - and they were. 

As we count down the months to completion, we appreciate your patience and partnership as we build a more resilient downtown for everyone. Thank you for supporting our local businesses through the work of building a better Annapolis. We look forward to celebrating a flood-free City Dock with you next year!