Studer Community Institute

Shannon's Window: Looking for the little things to battle stormwater

May 27, 2015
/ Shannon Nickinson
/ training-development

Mother Nature always provides a test. It may not be in the form or fashion you expect, but it comes nonetheless. All of those restored curbs, gutters and storm drains in Pensacola and Escambia County that were rehabbed following last April’s deluge could get a workout this week. Early indications seem good that, but most of the work done now is the low-hanging fruit. The real progress in stormwater management depends on both interested citizens and our public officials have two things that are often in short supply. Foresight and patience. To try to keep some of the focus on the future is Bob McLaughlin. A former Escambia County Administrator and an engineer by trade, McLaughlin was hired on contract by the city as a sort of stormwater consultant, tasked with identifying pots of money for improvement projects and points of cooperation between the city and county. He has his eye on a couple of interesting possibilities that, if they come to pass, could be a victory for forward-thinking planning and development. If we keep our eyes on the prize. One is a grant application to the Florida Department of Environmental Protection for $600,000 for the museum planned at the Chappie James House on Martin Luther King Jr. Drive. The grant would build the parking lot and walkways out of pervious (porous enough to allow rainwater to percolate through it as it falls) material, put cisterns on the gutters, build swales and a rain garden that captures excess water, he says. Such construction strategies and materials fall into the category of low impact design — using materials and strategies that try to treat stormwater as much as possible where it falls. As opposed to paving everything in sight and hoping for the best. McLaughlin will know in the fall if that grant is approved; it could be completed in fall of 2016. When the conversation about dealing with runoff began following the April 2014 floods, one of the hot topics was the idea of tearing up some of our communities large swaths of asphalt and replacing them with material that allows water to flow into the ground where it falls — rather than sending every drop into storm drains aimed at downtown. “The challenge,” McLaughlin says, “is to take (the Town and Country Plaza) parking lot or any portion of it and engineer it for pervious pavement raises the cost 10-1 per square foot. Or the parking lot at Cordova Mall or the Chappie James Building, or the Bank of America building.” McLaughlin says it would cost between $1.5 million and $1.6 million to convert the parking lot of City Hall to pervious pavement. “I don’t think there’s any cost benefit in doing that other than it being a showcase, but, the idea is good in the fact that we’re talking that any future retrofits, or new facilities that are public, could incorporate low impact designs. “So if you’re going to build a new jail, the jail would have as many of those (low impact design) features incorporated into the overall template and that would help,” he says. So a grant for the parking lot at the future Chappie James Museum may sound like a small thing. But McLaughlin says there’s merit in looking at how the small things can add up. Take the Escambia County Central Office Complex near Town and Country Plaza. “We have data that when that event took place last April, no water that fell on that site went off site,” McLaughlin says. “It has pervious pavements, swales in the parking lot, it has a green roof.” That low impact design stuff — it worked. McLaughlin has submitted a grant application to Tallahassee for federal dollars to do a pilot project that will complete all of the features on the central office complex. It would take the rest of the concrete on site — about 6,600 square feet on the northern portion of the site — and make it porous concrete. It would expand swales and add the vegetation that will help take the water on and also to put cisterns on the roof that will irrigate the green roof. “All were part of the original design, but were too expensive to do at the time,” McLaughlin says. The 4-H building on Stefani Road, McLaughlin notes, has a lot of the same features. It even hosts classes for homeowners on how to apply those strategies to their home. The West Florida Homebuilders Association agreed to build in education component for builders as part of their continuing education requirement, to highlight the benefits of low impact design in construction. Pensacola City Administrator Eric Olson says projects like those two can be used as examples to show such efforts can work, and to build leverage for future grants to demonstrate success. For example, Olson says, the city has the Government Street Stormwater pond project soon to begin at Corrine Jones Park. Through that, Olson says, the city has credit dollars for match that could be used for the match of the Central Office Complex. How does that benefit the city “proper”? “This is an area upstream so the more of that water we can keep on that site, it has a benefit for the city,” Olson says. If such coordinated projects work, they could be leverage for more, bigger ideas, Olson says. Like the possibility of a Rebuild Northwest Florida model-stormwater mitigation project, the way that Rebuild worked to encourage people to do windstorm mitigation work on their property. “Can we find homeowners who would buy into the idea?” Olson asked. “If you are willing to put in 25 percent, here’s a list of things you could do, and that’s still an idea. “We’d like to think about how we could fund this as a flood prevention model.” Might that be an ounce of prevention for a pound of cure we could all get behind?

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Shannon's Window: Looking for the little things to battle stormwater

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