TALLAHASSEE, Fla. (WCTV) – The Tallahassee Region Environmental Group (TREG) is warning that a dam in Tallahassee’s Canopy Neighborhood remains at risk of flooding, and that one of the possible causes from the Miccosukee Greenway flooding of 2024 hasn’t been fixed.
According to the National Inventory of Dams, the Dove Pond Dam remains a “high-hazard potential dam.” That means “those where failure or mis-operation will probably cause loss of human life.”
According to Terry Ryan, the president of TREG, a report prepared by Leon County shows the dam either failed in 2024 because of valve failures or “seepage” through the dam. That report, however, notes that “step one” would be to check the valves to see if they malfunctioned, or, in Ryan’s view, were potentially left open on accident.
According to that report, “(the flooding was) likely caused by seepage through the Dove Pond Dam and/or by clogging of the natural percolation in the Greenway Wetland due to siltation in the area.”
As recently as January of 2026, private dam inspectors from Florida Environmental Land Services Inc said “Opening of 24-inch gate valve annually under supervision of (an) engineer,” was “currently due.”
According to a spokesperson for the City of Tallahassee, it’s actually the North Florida Water Management District that regulates the dam. We’ve reached out to regulators, but haven’t yet heard back.
Ryan said Leon County commissioned the report, which is saved as a “final report” but also a “draft” in places, because they manage the Miccosukee Greenway and wanted to learn the cause of the 2024 flooding, even though the county doesn’t directly regulate the structure.
He also wonders if the owners of the dam could be open to any liability if another flood occurs and they know of even a potential problem with the dam but don’t fix it.
“The flooding we saw was immediately on April 11th (2024) and thereafter for at least another year,” Ryan said. “It went all across the Miccosukee Greenway, probably three feet (or) four feet over the trail system.”
Inspection reports Ryan said he obtained via an open records request show the dam itself and surrounding vegetation has consistently been inspected since the flooding, though private inspectors make no mention of inspecting the valves.
More Tallahassee news:
Who owns the Dove Pond Dam?
The dam sits amid a jurisdictional quagmire. “No trespassing” signs placed by the City of Tallahassee show the owner is “Dove Pond LLC.” In practice, Ryan said the dam is owned either by the Canopy Community Development District or the developer of the Ox Bottom neighborhood.
Steve Drurie, the assistant secretary to the CDD board, said the board actually doesn’t own the dam yet but will in a year or two. In effect, the CDD acts as a supersized HOA where residents gain seats on the board as more homes are built while the developer, Premier Fine Homes, loses seats.
Ox Bottom Title Manager Jason Ghazvini, who is also the president of Premier Fine Homes, hasn’t responded to our request for comment for this story.
In 2024, he told us the dam and stormwater pond had held up, and that if it hadn’t, flooding would’ve been worse. Ryan said that just isn’t accurate, as the water didn’t overtop the dam or even leak onto the spillway.
“The facility held back substantial volumes that would have otherwise resulted in a drastically different flooding experience for our community,” Ghazvini wrote in a statement in 2024.
Back then, Kelly Godsey with the National Weather Service in Tallahassee said it’s unclear if the nearby development impacted flooding at the greenway.
“Of course any time you do have development it does change the way water runs off a little bit, but we don’t want to lose sight of the fact that this was an exceptionally heavy rainfall event,” Godsey said at the time.
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