Powered by Partnership
Phase II communities join forces in the Upper Mississippi Basin.
Water does not obey jurisdictional boundaries,î says Brian Bell, USEPA Region 5 stormwater coordinator.
In most cases, though, Bell says, municipalities have written their National Pollutant Discharge Elimination System (NPDES) Phase II permit applications to correspond to local political boundaries, a convenience allowing agencies to work within established administrative structures. However, some municipal separate storm sewer systems (MS4s) in the Upper Mississippi River Basin have begun experimenting with interjurisdictional partnerships of varied configurations. Bell says, ìIf a sheriffís department has a good program, equivalent to one of the minimum requirements, they can meet that requirement for any number of MS4s in the area.î According to Bell, the Phase II permit process allows enough flexibility to facilitate watershed planning by small MS4s as a means of addressing the sensitivity of local waters. Bell believes joint efforts fostered in response to Phase II permit requirements will facilitate wider regional cooperation while providing opportunities for cost sharing. He notes, ìWhether developed under a watershed or a jurisdictional basis, the stormwater controls in the general permit can be tailored on a case-by-case basis.î
A View From the Top
On the drainage divide between Lake Erie and the Ohio River lies Summit County, OH.“Being at the top of the watershed, we don’t have as many problems with water,” says Greg Bachman, Summit County engineer. “While we’re not receiving runoff from other communities, we do feel a big responsibility to implement the regulations so we don’t make things worse for our neighbors downstream.” Bachman’s office coordinates Phase II stormwater programs for 25 jurisdictions within the northeast Ohio county. “From the beginning we realized each community could have implemented its own program but that a more cost-effective and coherent policy could be achieved through a cooperative effort.”With the exception of the City of Akron, which is regulated under NPDES Phase I, and a “couple of the larger cities,” which, Bachman says, “decided to go on their own,” the majority of the communities in Summit County have opted to join the county’s co-permitting arrangement.
Expedited Mapping Using GPS
The county engineer’s office initiated an effort to map all stormwater discharge points in the county. With somewhere on the order of 10,000 discharge points in the 25 communities, the office purchased four handheld global positioning systems (GPSs) and employed summer help to complete the task. However, Bachman says the county engineer’s responsibility for stormwater infrastructure extends only along county roads and rights of way. “The individual municipalities will be responsible for mapping the remainder of the points within their respective jurisdictions.” He adds, however, that a lot of progress has been made. “The project team has visited every outfall. We have at least located them and taken photographs of the outlets along with qualitative observations of their age and other characteristics.
“We’re working really hard on illicit discharge detection and elimination,” continues Bachman. “Some of these lines go back 100 years or so, and they were never mapped, never put on any kind of plans.” The majority of the outlets, he believes, will be determined to be normal without problems, “but certainly a share of them will have some problems.”
Upon completion of its portion of the mapping project, the county will provide its GPS units on loan to the 25 co-permittees for the purpose of collecting the discharge points within their respective jurisdictions. “All 25 co-permittees should have completed mapping their stormwater systems by sometime in 2007,” Bachman says. After entering the information into a database, he says, “One of the next steps will be to investigate suspicious discharge points.”
Cooperation among the municipalities in Summit County extends beyond mapping infrastructure. “We have monthly meetings where the 25 co-permittees get together and talk about how the program is going and what we need to implement next.” Customarily, he says, each covered community would apply individually for its stormwater permit with a $10,000 permit fee to the State of Ohio, and each would file a separate yearly report. “We file one joint report each year, and we pay the cost of just one $10,000 permit fee per year covering all 25 co-permitted jurisdictions.”
Bachman says, “Building a sense of community and working together on things has been the number-one benefit of the program. It gives us a nice forum to talk about many other things. It’s just how normal human interaction works—when you get that kind of group together, you don’t just talk about stormwater Phase II implementation; you talk about many other common problems.”
These collaborative discussions led to a solution to a flooding problem in the area of the village of New Franklin and its neighbor, Franklin Township. Bachman says the flooding that had plagued the area during heavy rains and had overtopped county roads created a dangerous situation. “We got a grant under Ohio Public Works Issue 1, the school system donated the land, and we all chipped in some money to put in a stormwater detention basin, which has helped several communities.” The ribbon-cutting ceremony for the completed detention basin was held in the fall of 2006. Though the pond was not built specifically to address pollution, Bachman says he has observed a water-quality benefit as well: “Now that the water is being impounded, there’s a lot less sediment and a lot less erosion.”He contrasts the role of the county engineer with the mission of the federal agency.
While the EPA is focused mainly on improving water quality, I have the dual role of trying to control water quality and water quantity.”
Issues Small and Large
Also on the drainage divide in northeast Ohio is Stark County, a small sliver of which
drains north to the Great Lakes area, while the bulk of the county drains south to the Mississippi Basin.
Dan Moeglin, city engineer for Canton, OH, says Stark County recently hired a full-time stormwater engineer who is currently developing the stormwater management regulations for the county. “Through that person, we’re doing reviews of site plans to make sure that builders are incorporating stormwater management into their projects.”However, Moeglin says, this same staff person also works on immediate drainage concerns. “When we have rain and somebody calls up concerned about excessive water in their yard or flooding on roadways, he’ll go out and deal with it. His scope of work covers both the small issues as well as the global, conceptual Phase II issues.”
Quality Relationships
When it comes to new construction, Moeglin takes a very pragmatic approach. “By addressing things in a proactive fashion now, we can avoid future problems,” he says, and he believes the best approach is early communications.“We understand that these developers are in the business of making improvements—of making money for their businesses. We don’t want to be the stumbling block that holds them up or delays projects. We get a far better reception by opening up communications early on than we would by walking out after something is built and saying, ‘Ah, you guys didn’t do this right.’ It’s all about communication.”
This spirit of communication can also generate mutually beneficial relationships with the private sector. Moeglin says that recently a 10-acre parcel of undeveloped land in a rural district of the county became the focal point of one such partnership. The parcel, which had been eyed by the county as a potential site for a regional detention basin, had also attracted the attention of a developer planning a new subdivision.
“The drainage basin went right through this property, and the ditch and the pipe had been closed in several years ago,” Moeglin says. “As a result, the area surrounding the parcel had experienced a 40-year history of flooding. We got together with the developer and discussed the problems that had been going on over the years at the site and suggested we work together. We came to a final agreement where the city, through the Canton Improvement Corporation, provided a grant to the developer to construct a detention basin, and the developer devoted 4 acres of the site to construct the basin.
“It was one of those public/private collaborative efforts that satisfied his needs and our needs. He was able to use some of the dirt that was excavated out of this regional basin to do some leveling and grading work for the area that he finally developed.”
The detention basin is now operational and serving the function for which it was designed. The developer also constructed a separate water-quality basin for the development. When Glen Hollow Subdivision is complete, it will total nine residential lots and one commercial lot—far fewer than the builder’s original vision. “In essence we bought out the majority of the lots,” says Moeglin. But with the flooding problem solved, he says, “It’s going to be a win for the builder, a win for the city, and a win for the residents. That was a great relationship, and we hope to foster these kinds of relationships in the future.”
Managing Growth and Improving Capacity
In Hendricks County, IN, one of the fastest growing communities in that state, new stormwater management initiatives are being continuously added to keep up with expansion.
“Before Phase II, our major responsibility was drainage from a quantity standpoint. We wanted to keep the water moving,” says Bill Hahn, Hendricks County’s NPDES Phase II program coordinator. “We would go to the open ditches, and if a tree fell in it we’d clean it up, or if the bank caved in or a beaver built a dam, we would be responsible for whatever caused that water not to flow. Now we were going to have to deal with water quality.” When the Phase II regulations filtered down from the EPA to the Indiana Department of Environmental Management, Hahn says, the county commissioner authorized a division of the Surveyor’s Office to take on the responsibility for implementation. “Because the Surveyor’s Office already dealt with drainage issues, it was an easy kind of a fit,” Hahn says.
He explains that the six MS4s in Hendricks County include the county’s five incorporated towns and the county government itself. “We wrote a stormwater-quality management plan that stresses the six minimum measures, plus an ordinance to address water quality and an ordinance that addressed illicit discharge.”
 |
Photo: Dakota County, MN |
| Planting trees along the riparian corridor protects the temperature-sensitive trout resource. |
Exceeding the Requirements to Ensure Quality
After a year and a half of implementation, Hahn says the biggest project “other than our public education effort” is a vigorous construction-site inspection program. Whereas NPDES Phase II requires inspection of sites down to 1 acre of disturbed land, Hendricks County inspects sites down to 500 square feet. “We inspect all construction sites within our jurisdiction, whether it’s an overall development, a residential lot, or a room addition—if it’s big enough, we’re there.”
He says the county also exceeds the state’s mandated minimum requirements for frequency of inspections. While state regulations mandate site inspections one and one-half times during the construction period, Hendricks goes further. “For a new home that takes six months to build, we’re probably out there four or five times. For a subdivision that might take a year to build, we may be out there 10 or 15 times checking to make sure the outfalls are protected and we’re not getting any silt-laden or polluted waters leaving those sites.”
The Price of Clean Water
While he believes the tight regulations will prove beneficial, enforcing them will take extra resources, and Hahn’s major concern is the cost of implementing the new stormwater policy. “This whole program is going to be pretty expensive for everybody. Right now we’re basically just doing what we have to do until we can get an adequate funding source set up; it may not be all we’d like to do, but we have limited funds at this point.”
One of the problems Hahn says he hears about constantly is the areas of the county that are on septics. “A lot of the septic systems aren’t put in properly or are not maintained properly; a lot of the pollution in our rivers probably comes from septic effluent. We’ve tried for
the last year to put out brochures to raise community awareness to the proper management of septic systems.”
Once a funding source is secured, Hahn says, the county can conduct dry-weather inspections at the outfalls. “We will take samples and track back through our conveyance mapping system to try and find the source. We’re not very close to that because of the funding issue. It gets pretty expensive hiring people to do the dry-weather screening.” Anticipating that resources will become available, he adds, “We’re probably a year or two down the road from that part of the program.”
He acknowledges, “Everybody wants clean water” but says the difficulty arises “when you start talking about who’s going to pay for it. In our community it’s not going to come from the general fund; they just can’t take that kind of hit. We could be talking from $1 million to $1.5 million per year. We formed a stormwater management board to begin the process of developing a stormwater assessment program. It will be a year and a half before we will be at the point where we can start assessing fees to pay for the department’s activities.
“Right now, we’re borrowing from a fund in the Surveyor’s Office, and that has to be paid back. A lot of communities don’t have the availability of a Surveyor’s Office fund, and they’re going to have a heck of a time getting started.”
Sharing Mascots, Cutting Costs
Bob Newport with the EPA’s Region 5 office says great efficiencies can be generated from partnerships between jurisdictions. “A single brochure or commercial can be developed and shared amongst a number of partners. There can be multiple opportunities for coordination and collaboration across the watershed.”
Of the six MS4s in Hendricks County, Hahn says two cooperate 100% with the county program. “The ordinance that they adopted was pretty much our ordinance. We cooperate on a lot of things,” particularly, he says, in the area of education and public participation. The co-permitting municipalities share a system that tracks these outreach and awareness and other activities to fulfill the MS4 permit requirements.
“We do booths together at the county fair; we all have the same message along with the same mascot and logo.”Hahn says there is also a simple logic for sharing in the costs: “Everybody is affected, and everybody contributes.”
Power Sharing in the Twin Cities Region
According to Trout Unlimited, the Vermillion River watershed in the rapidly developing area 30 miles south of St. Paul, MN, supports the nation’s only world-class trout stream within a major metropolitan area. On its way to converge with the headwaters of the Mississippi, the Vermillion River flows through a mix of rural, agricultural, and urban landscapes. Paul Nelson, natural resources program manager for Scott County, says that the State of Minnesota has mandated protection for this river that goes beyond the requirements of NPDES. Two counties, Dakota and Scott, have empowered the Vermillion River Watershed Joint Powers Organization (JPO) to oversee that effort.
Nelson serves as administrator for the Scott Watershed Management Organization and is also the co-administrator for the Vermillion River Watershed JPO. He says that in broad terms, the Minnesota State Statue 103B, the Metropolitan Surface Water Management Act, mandates watershed management organizations in the Twin Cities metropolitan area. These organizations may follow different administrative models, but each jurisdiction is obligated either to form or to affiliate with one for its area. He says the counties agreed to form a JPO covering the Vermillion River Watershed when a predecessor organization, the Vermillion Watershed Management Organization, disbanded in 2000.
While the Vermillion River Watershed JPO is not an MS4 permittee, the eligible municipalities within the two signatory counties and the counties themselves are individually covered MS4s. According to Nelson, the JPO is governed by a board made up of two commissioners from Dakota County and one commissioner from Scott County. Together they oversee the implementation of the Metropolitan Surface Water Management Act in the Vermillion Watershed.
Building on Local Support
In 2005, the JPO completed its comprehensive surface-water management plan, which differs in a fundamental way from the stormwater pollution prevention plans (known here as Ps) mandated by Phase II. “This is a bottom-up approach. The plan is written locally under the guidance of the Board of Soil and Water,” Nelson says. “The plan reflects the needs of the local resource. It’s different because it’s built on local support first.“The Vermillion River Watershed Joint Powers Organization Technical Advisory Committee, which advises the JPO, has 20 or 30 representatives from the local communities, the
state, and other groups. Representatives of Trout Unlimited often participate, along with other interested groups.”
And participation rates are high. “We’ve had meetings and updates where we’ve had over 100 attendees. There’s local buy-in to the Vermillion River’s valuable and unique resource.”
Developing standards for achieving specific goals and objectives was also an essential component of the plan. Nelson says the standards give considerable guidance for stormwater activities. “The way we wrote the standards for Vermillion JPO, if you meet those standards you’re pretty much meeting the six minimum controls for Phase II.” Under the auspices of the local governments, the cities, townships, or counties within the JPO area also prepare local watershed management plans. “Since they are the same people who are doing the Ps, they can reference things in their surface-water management plan that meet the Ps’ requirements. We’re not making them do duplicate stuff.”
Trading Credits for Best Management Practices
In Nelson’s view, local needs do not always correspond with broader policy recommendations. He says under NPDES Phase II, much of the guidance for meeting the post-construction minimum control measure emphasizes stormwater management ponds, which, he says, “is not necessarily the best thing to do for water that discharges to a trout stream. Ponds collect solar radiation and, potentially, heat,” which, he says, can be detrimental to trout.
Unlike other urbanized areas whose major post-construction concerns may be controlling sediment and erosion, Nelson says in the Vermillion River Watershed, “We’re trying to emphasize measures geared toward protecting the trout resource.” In response to that concern, the Vermillion JPO received an EPA grant to develop a program to explore market-based trading for stormwater quality around temperature issues. Nelson says concept would put less emphasis on typical onsite controls and more emphasis on meeting the overall needs of the resource being protected.The approach of offering credits may be more protective of the natural resource and could also give developers tangible goals. For example, Nelson says, credit-sponsored “tree planting that would offer shading along the riparian corridor could be more effective in protecting the temperature-sensitive trout resource than mandated BMPs [best management practices] on distant sites.” He says credits can also be devised for protecting key areas for groundwater recharge, which would also have additional beneficial impact on trout-bearing streams.“We’re cutting new ground,” Nelson says, adding that there is potential for credit-trading initiatives to come into conflict with NPDES regulations. “If the state’s upcoming revised general permit mandates specific BMPs such as onsite controls, there may be a reduction in the market for credit trading and a loss of interest in the credit trading concept.”
The Push to Streamline
As to the administrative side of things, Nelson indicates the JPO is engaged in a study to determine whether greater efficiencies could be achieved in the management of stormwater- and watershed-related projects. He says there may be duplicative efforts that could be reduced by allowing watershed organizations to administer the Ps for several communities, rather than requiring each municipality to administer its own P.
Nelson says the current permit process shows some level of inefficiency, with multiple permits sometimes required covering the same activity.
“Right now builders need a State Pollution Control Agency general permit for construction, which applies to development activities that disturb over an acre; in addition, the MS4 communities have their permitting programs. So you’ve got to get a second permit for the same things, and, finally, some of the watershed organizations implement their own rules, possibly requiring a third permit for similar activities. There’s a push to streamline that process.”
Putting Partnership in Practice
The EPA’s Brian Bell recommends that MS4s interested in collaborating with their watershed neighbors to fulfill their NPDES obligations as partners should develop a written agreement that outlines the various responsibilities of the parties. “Because the individual MS4s are ultimately responsible for satisfying the regulations, it is important to be sure there is some kind of agreement as to how that’s going to work. If somebody fumbles the ball, it’s got to be clear who was supposed to be carrying the ball.”
Finding Help
According to Bill Hahn, when Phase II first came into play in his area of Indiana, “There was really no place to get together to talk about water-quality issues, particularly during the initial stages of setting up the programs.” Since then, the Indiana Association for Flood Plains and Storm Water Management has created a subcommittee strictly for stormwater quality. “We’ve had pretty good response on everything from how you do your inspections to how you set up your utilities to pay for them.” The Indiana Association for Flood Plains and Storm Water Management also sponsors an annual conference, which Hahn says will include presentations by a number of water-quality specialists.Bell says he frequently receives queries from covered entities, developers, and contractors. “I try to make sure I understand what the issue is; if there is federal policy that addresses the issue, then we go from that point. I get a lot of calls that I just refer back to the state because there’s just a misunderstanding of who issues the permit.”
“In the earlier stages of Phase II implementation, the EPA provided extensive outreach to the states just to help get them started in the process,” says Bob Newport, also with the EPA. “By now, a number of the MS4s have received their initial five-year permits and are somewhat familiar with the program.
“Although all of the basic resources such as Getting in Step With Phase II training are still available on Web sites and Webcasts, the EPA’s current outreach effort is gravitating toward updates and emerging issues. For example, we’ve added some new BMPs to our list that we believe may be effective for dealing with stormwater; and those changes can be reflected in updates to the individual stormwater plans.”
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Otherwise, Newport says, the states are a good source for Phase II information. Wisconsin offers training through the University of Wisconsin–Madison, and “Minnesota has developed a very nice guidance manual for their Phase II MS4s available from the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency Web site,” he adds.
As the natural resources manager for Scott County, MN, Paul Nelson says it pays to start thinking about stormwater quality early. “Communities that don’t yet have stormwater programs—for example, those that fall just under the population criteria—should look at it as a way of protecting their water resources. Natural resources add value to your development and to your community.”
Author's Bio: David C. Richardson is a journalist based in Baltimore, MD.
July-August 2007
Powered by Partnership
Phase II communities join forces in the Upper Mississippi Basin.
Water does not obey jurisdictional boundaries,î says Brian Bell, USEPA Region 5 stormwater coordinator.
In most cases, though, Bell says, municipalities have written their National Pollutant Discharge Elimination System (NPDES) Phase II permit applications to correspond to local political boundaries, a convenience allowing agencies to work within established administrative structures. However, some municipal separate storm sewer systems (MS4s) in the Upper Mississippi River Basin have begun experimenting with interjurisdictional partnerships of varied configurations. Bell says, ìIf a sheriffís department has a good program, equivalent to one of the minimum requirements, they can meet that requirement for any number of MS4s in the area.î According to Bell, the Phase II permit process allows enough flexibility to facilitate watershed planning by small MS4s as a means of addressing the sensitivity of local waters. Bell believes joint efforts fostered in response to Phase II permit requirements will facilitate wider regional cooperation while providing opportunities for cost sharing. He notes, ìWhether developed under a watershed or a jurisdictional basis, the stormwater controls in the general permit can be tailored on a case-by-case basis.î
A View From the Top
On the drainage divide between Lake Erie and the Ohio River lies Summit County, OH.“Being at the top of the watershed, we don’t have as many problems with water,” says Greg Bachman, Summit County engineer. “While we’re not receiving runoff from other communities, we do feel a big responsibility to implement the regulations so we don’t make things worse for our neighbors downstream.” Bachman’s office coordinates Phase II stormwater programs for 25 jurisdictions within the northeast Ohio county. “From the beginning we realized each community could have implemented its own program but that a more cost-effective and coherent policy could be achieved through a cooperative effort.”With the exception of the City of Akron, which is regulated under NPDES Phase I, and a “couple of the larger cities,” which, Bachman says, “decided to go on their own,” the majority of the communities in Summit County have opted to join the county’s co-permitting arrangement.
Expedited Mapping Using GPS
The county engineer’s office initiated an effort to map all stormwater discharge points in the county. With somewhere on the order of 10,000 discharge points in the 25 communities, the office purchased four handheld global positioning systems (GPSs) and employed summer help to complete the task. However, Bachman says the county engineer’s responsibility for stormwater infrastructure extends only along county roads and rights of way. “The individual municipalities will be responsible for mapping the remainder of the points within their respective jurisdictions.” He adds, however, that a lot of progress has been made. “The project team has visited every outfall. We have at least located them and taken photographs of the outlets along with qualitative observations of their age and other characteristics.
“We’re working really hard on illicit discharge detection and elimination,” continues Bachman. “Some of these lines go back 100 years or so, and they were never mapped, never put on any kind of plans.” The majority of the outlets, he believes, will be determined to be normal without problems, “but certainly a share of them will have some problems.”
Upon completion of its portion of the mapping project, the county will provide its GPS units on loan to the 25 co-permittees for the purpose of collecting the discharge points within their respective jurisdictions. “All 25 co-permittees should have completed mapping their stormwater systems by sometime in 2007,” Bachman says. After entering the information into a database, he says, “One of the next steps will be to investigate suspicious discharge points.”
Cooperation among the municipalities in Summit County extends beyond mapping infrastructure. “We have monthly meetings where the 25 co-permittees get together and talk about how the program is going and what we need to implement next.” Customarily, he says, each covered community would apply individually for its stormwater permit with a $10,000 permit fee to the State of Ohio, and each would file a separate yearly report. “We file one joint report each year, and we pay the cost of just one $10,000 permit fee per year covering all 25 co-permitted jurisdictions.”
Bachman says, “Building a sense of community and working together on things has been the number-one benefit of the program. It gives us a nice forum to talk about many other things. It’s just how normal human interaction works—when you get that kind of group together, you don’t just talk about stormwater Phase II implementation; you talk about many other common problems.”
These collaborative discussions led to a solution to a flooding problem in the area of the village of New Franklin and its neighbor, Franklin Township. Bachman says the flooding that had plagued the area during heavy rains and had overtopped county roads created a dangerous situation. “We got a grant under Ohio Public Works Issue 1, the school system donated the land, and we all chipped in some money to put in a stormwater detention basin, which has helped several communities.” The ribbon-cutting ceremony for the completed detention basin was held in the fall of 2006. Though the pond was not built specifically to address pollution, Bachman says he has observed a water-quality benefit as well: “Now that the water is being impounded, there’s a lot less sediment and a lot less erosion.”He contrasts the role of the county engineer with the mission of the federal agency.
While the EPA is focused mainly on improving water quality, I have the dual role of trying to control water quality and water quantity.”
Issues Small and Large
Also on the drainage divide in northeast Ohio is Stark County, a small sliver of which
drains north to the Great Lakes area, while the bulk of the county drains south to the Mississippi Basin.
Dan Moeglin, city engineer for Canton, OH, says Stark County recently hired a full-time stormwater engineer who is currently developing the stormwater management regulations for the county. “Through that person, we’re doing reviews of site plans to make sure that builders are incorporating stormwater management into their projects.”However, Moeglin says, this same staff person also works on immediate drainage concerns. “When we have rain and somebody calls up concerned about excessive water in their yard or flooding on roadways, he’ll go out and deal with it. His scope of work covers both the small issues as well as the global, conceptual Phase II issues.”
Quality Relationships
When it comes to new construction, Moeglin takes a very pragmatic approach. “By addressing things in a proactive fashion now, we can avoid future problems,” he says, and he believes the best approach is early communications.“We understand that these developers are in the business of making improvements—of making money for their businesses. We don’t want to be the stumbling block that holds them up or delays projects. We get a far better reception by opening up communications early on than we would by walking out after something is built and saying, ‘Ah, you guys didn’t do this right.’ It’s all about communication.”
This spirit of communication can also generate mutually beneficial relationships with the private sector. Moeglin says that recently a 10-acre parcel of undeveloped land in a rural district of the county became the focal point of one such partnership. The parcel, which had been eyed by the county as a potential site for a regional detention basin, had also attracted the attention of a developer planning a new subdivision.
“The drainage basin went right through this property, and the ditch and the pipe had been closed in several years ago,” Moeglin says. “As a result, the area surrounding the parcel had experienced a 40-year history of flooding. We got together with the developer and discussed the problems that had been going on over the years at the site and suggested we work together. We came to a final agreement where the city, through the Canton Improvement Corporation, provided a grant to the developer to construct a detention basin, and the developer devoted 4 acres of the site to construct the basin.
“It was one of those public/private collaborative efforts that satisfied his needs and our needs. He was able to use some of the dirt that was excavated out of this regional basin to do some leveling and grading work for the area that he finally developed.”
The detention basin is now operational and serving the function for which it was designed. The developer also constructed a separate water-quality basin for the development. When Glen Hollow Subdivision is complete, it will total nine residential lots and one commercial lot—far fewer than the builder’s original vision. “In essence we bought out the majority of the lots,” says Moeglin. But with the flooding problem solved, he says, “It’s going to be a win for the builder, a win for the city, and a win for the residents. That was a great relationship, and we hope to foster these kinds of relationships in the future.”
Managing Growth and Improving Capacity
In Hendricks County, IN, one of the fastest growing communities in that state, new stormwater management initiatives are being continuously added to keep up with expansion.
“Before Phase II, our major responsibility was drainage from a quantity standpoint. We wanted to keep the water moving,” says Bill Hahn, Hendricks County’s NPDES Phase II program coordinator. “We would go to the open ditches, and if a tree fell in it we’d clean it up, or if the bank caved in or a beaver built a dam, we would be responsible for whatever caused that water not to flow. Now we were going to have to deal with water quality.” When the Phase II regulations filtered down from the EPA to the Indiana Department of Environmental Management, Hahn says, the county commissioner authorized a division of the Surveyor’s Office to take on the responsibility for implementation. “Because the Surveyor’s Office already dealt with drainage issues, it was an easy kind of a fit,” Hahn says.
He explains that the six MS4s in Hendricks County include the county’s five incorporated towns and the county government itself. “We wrote a stormwater-quality management plan that stresses the six minimum measures, plus an ordinance to address water quality and an ordinance that addressed illicit discharge.”
|
Photo: Dakota County, MN |
| Planting trees along the riparian corridor protects the temperature-sensitive trout resource. |
Exceeding the Requirements to Ensure Quality
After a year and a half of implementation, Hahn says the biggest project “other than our public education effort” is a vigorous construction-site inspection program. Whereas NPDES Phase II requires inspection of sites down to 1 acre of disturbed land, Hendricks County inspects sites down to 500 square feet. “We inspect all construction sites within our jurisdiction, whether it’s an overall development, a residential lot, or a room addition—if it’s big enough, we’re there.”
He says the county also exceeds the state’s mandated minimum requirements for frequency of inspections. While state regulations mandate site inspections one and one-half times during the construction period, Hendricks goes further. “For a new home that takes six months to build, we’re probably out there four or five times. For a subdivision that might take a year to build, we may be out there 10 or 15 times checking to make sure the outfalls are protected and we’re not getting any silt-laden or polluted waters leaving those sites.”
The Price of Clean Water
While he believes the tight regulations will prove beneficial, enforcing them will take extra resources, and Hahn’s major concern is the cost of implementing the new stormwater policy. “This whole program is going to be pretty expensive for everybody. Right now we’re basically just doing what we have to do until we can get an adequate funding source set up; it may not be all we’d like to do, but we have limited funds at this point.”
One of the problems Hahn says he hears about constantly is the areas of the county that are on septics. “A lot of the septic systems aren’t put in properly or are not maintained properly; a lot of the pollution in our rivers probably comes from septic effluent. We’ve tried for
the last year to put out brochures to raise community awareness to the proper management of septic systems.”
Once a funding source is secured, Hahn says, the county can conduct dry-weather inspections at the outfalls. “We will take samples and track back through our conveyance mapping system to try and find the source. We’re not very close to that because of the funding issue. It gets pretty expensive hiring people to do the dry-weather screening.” Anticipating that resources will become available, he adds, “We’re probably a year or two down the road from that part of the program.”
He acknowledges, “Everybody wants clean water” but says the difficulty arises “when you start talking about who’s going to pay for it. In our community it’s not going to come from the general fund; they just can’t take that kind of hit. We could be talking from $1 million to $1.5 million per year. We formed a stormwater management board to begin the process of developing a stormwater assessment program. It will be a year and a half before we will be at the point where we can start assessing fees to pay for the department’s activities.
“Right now, we’re borrowing from a fund in the Surveyor’s Office, and that has to be paid back. A lot of communities don’t have the availability of a Surveyor’s Office fund, and they’re going to have a heck of a time getting started.”
Sharing Mascots, Cutting Costs
Bob Newport with the EPA’s Region 5 office says great efficiencies can be generated from partnerships between jurisdictions. “A single brochure or commercial can be developed and shared amongst a number of partners. There can be multiple opportunities for coordination and collaboration across the watershed.”
Of the six MS4s in Hendricks County, Hahn says two cooperate 100% with the county program. “The ordinance that they adopted was pretty much our ordinance. We cooperate on a lot of things,” particularly, he says, in the area of education and public participation. The co-permitting municipalities share a system that tracks these outreach and awareness and other activities to fulfill the MS4 permit requirements.
“We do booths together at the county fair; we all have the same message along with the same mascot and logo.”Hahn says there is also a simple logic for sharing in the costs: “Everybody is affected, and everybody contributes.”
Power Sharing in the Twin Cities Region
According to Trout Unlimited, the Vermillion River watershed in the rapidly developing area 30 miles south of St. Paul, MN, supports the nation’s only world-class trout stream within a major metropolitan area. On its way to converge with the headwaters of the Mississippi, the Vermillion River flows through a mix of rural, agricultural, and urban landscapes. Paul Nelson, natural resources program manager for Scott County, says that the State of Minnesota has mandated protection for this river that goes beyond the requirements of NPDES. Two counties, Dakota and Scott, have empowered the Vermillion River Watershed Joint Powers Organization (JPO) to oversee that effort.
Nelson serves as administrator for the Scott Watershed Management Organization and is also the co-administrator for the Vermillion River Watershed JPO. He says that in broad terms, the Minnesota State Statue 103B, the Metropolitan Surface Water Management Act, mandates watershed management organizations in the Twin Cities metropolitan area. These organizations may follow different administrative models, but each jurisdiction is obligated either to form or to affiliate with one for its area. He says the counties agreed to form a JPO covering the Vermillion River Watershed when a predecessor organization, the Vermillion Watershed Management Organization, disbanded in 2000.
While the Vermillion River Watershed JPO is not an MS4 permittee, the eligible municipalities within the two signatory counties and the counties themselves are individually covered MS4s. According to Nelson, the JPO is governed by a board made up of two commissioners from Dakota County and one commissioner from Scott County. Together they oversee the implementation of the Metropolitan Surface Water Management Act in the Vermillion Watershed.
Building on Local Support
In 2005, the JPO completed its comprehensive surface-water management plan, which differs in a fundamental way from the stormwater pollution prevention plans (known here as Ps) mandated by Phase II. “This is a bottom-up approach. The plan is written locally under the guidance of the Board of Soil and Water,” Nelson says. “The plan reflects the needs of the local resource. It’s different because it’s built on local support first.“The Vermillion River Watershed Joint Powers Organization Technical Advisory Committee, which advises the JPO, has 20 or 30 representatives from the local communities, the
state, and other groups. Representatives of Trout Unlimited often participate, along with other interested groups.”
And participation rates are high. “We’ve had meetings and updates where we’ve had over 100 attendees. There’s local buy-in to the Vermillion River’s valuable and unique resource.”
Developing standards for achieving specific goals and objectives was also an essential component of the plan. Nelson says the standards give considerable guidance for stormwater activities. “The way we wrote the standards for Vermillion JPO, if you meet those standards you’re pretty much meeting the six minimum controls for Phase II.” Under the auspices of the local governments, the cities, townships, or counties within the JPO area also prepare local watershed management plans. “Since they are the same people who are doing the Ps, they can reference things in their surface-water management plan that meet the Ps’ requirements. We’re not making them do duplicate stuff.”
Trading Credits for Best Management Practices
In Nelson’s view, local needs do not always correspond with broader policy recommendations. He says under NPDES Phase II, much of the guidance for meeting the post-construction minimum control measure emphasizes stormwater management ponds, which, he says, “is not necessarily the best thing to do for water that discharges to a trout stream. Ponds collect solar radiation and, potentially, heat,” which, he says, can be detrimental to trout.
Unlike other urbanized areas whose major post-construction concerns may be controlling sediment and erosion, Nelson says in the Vermillion River Watershed, “We’re trying to emphasize measures geared toward protecting the trout resource.” In response to that concern, the Vermillion JPO received an EPA grant to develop a program to explore market-based trading for stormwater quality around temperature issues. Nelson says concept would put less emphasis on typical onsite controls and more emphasis on meeting the overall needs of the resource being protected.The approach of offering credits may be more protective of the natural resource and could also give developers tangible goals. For example, Nelson says, credit-sponsored “tree planting that would offer shading along the riparian corridor could be more effective in protecting the temperature-sensitive trout resource than mandated BMPs [best management practices] on distant sites.” He says credits can also be devised for protecting key areas for groundwater recharge, which would also have additional beneficial impact on trout-bearing streams.“We’re cutting new ground,” Nelson says, adding that there is potential for credit-trading initiatives to come into conflict with NPDES regulations. “If the state’s upcoming revised general permit mandates specific BMPs such as onsite controls, there may be a reduction in the market for credit trading and a loss of interest in the credit trading concept.”
The Push to Streamline
As to the administrative side of things, Nelson indicates the JPO is engaged in a study to determine whether greater efficiencies could be achieved in the management of stormwater- and watershed-related projects. He says there may be duplicative efforts that could be reduced by allowing watershed organizations to administer the Ps for several communities, rather than requiring each municipality to administer its own P.
Nelson says the current permit process shows some level of inefficiency, with multiple permits sometimes required covering the same activity.
“Right now builders need a State Pollution Control Agency general permit for construction, which applies to development activities that disturb over an acre; in addition, the MS4 communities have their permitting programs. So you’ve got to get a second permit for the same things, and, finally, some of the watershed organizations implement their own rules, possibly requiring a third permit for similar activities. There’s a push to streamline that process.”
Putting Partnership in Practice
The EPA’s Brian Bell recommends that MS4s interested in collaborating with their watershed neighbors to fulfill their NPDES obligations as partners should develop a written agreement that outlines the various responsibilities of the parties. “Because the individual MS4s are ultimately responsible for satisfying the regulations, it is important to be sure there is some kind of agreement as to how that’s going to work. If somebody fumbles the ball, it’s got to be clear who was supposed to be carrying the ball.”
Finding Help
According to Bill Hahn, when Phase II first came into play in his area of Indiana, “There was really no place to get together to talk about water-quality issues, particularly during the initial stages of setting up the programs.” Since then, the Indiana Association for Flood Plains and Storm Water Management has created a subcommittee strictly for stormwater quality. “We’ve had pretty good response on everything from how you do your inspections to how you set up your utilities to pay for them.” The Indiana Association for Flood Plains and Storm Water Management also sponsors an annual conference, which Hahn says will include presentations by a number of water-quality specialists.Bell says he frequently receives queries from covered entities, developers, and contractors. “I try to make sure I understand what the issue is; if there is federal policy that addresses the issue, then we go from that point. I get a lot of calls that I just refer back to the state because there’s just a misunderstanding of who issues the permit.”
“In the earlier stages of Phase II implementation, the EPA provided extensive outreach to the states just to help get them started in the process,” says Bob Newport, also with the EPA. “By now, a number of the MS4s have received their initial five-year permits and are somewhat familiar with the program.
“Although all of the basic resources such as Getting in Step With Phase II training are still available on Web sites and Webcasts, the EPA’s current outreach effort is gravitating toward updates and emerging issues. For example, we’ve added some new BMPs to our list that we believe may be effective for dealing with stormwater; and those changes can be reflected in updates to the individual stormwater plans.”
Otherwise, Newport says, the states are a good source for Phase II information. Wisconsin offers training through the University of Wisconsin–Madison, and “Minnesota has developed a very nice guidance manual for their Phase II MS4s available from the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency Web site,” he adds.
As the natural resources manager for Scott County, MN, Paul Nelson says it pays to start thinking about stormwater quality early. “Communities that don’t yet have stormwater programs—for example, those that fall just under the population criteria—should look at it as a way of protecting their water resources. Natural resources add value to your development and to your community.”