Work Status

I’m on the agenda for the quarterly meeting of the California Stormwater Quality Association (CASQA). The meeting is scheduled for March 12 in Sacramento.

The theme for the meeting is “Low Impact Development (LID): Lessons Learned” and the title I’ve been given is “Integrating LID into the Planning Process and LID Site Design.” I thought I might be up there for more time; however, I see I’m one of four speakers in a 105-minute session.

I’m thinking I’ll make the actual title “20 LID Lessons Learned in 20 Minutes,” which should make for a lively and fun time at the podium.

I’m also on an afternoon panel on “The Future and Needs for LID” in the afternoon.

It’s been a great experience being part of the Ohlone Greenway Rain Garden from first concept to completion of construction.

Today, as the rain started, I got up from my desk and walked around the corner to see it christened by its first stormwater flow.

Plug on downstream side

To get runoff from the previously existing storm drain into the rain garden, the contractors plugged the downstream pipe with concrete. We had them put a 4-inch diameter plastic pipe inside the plug, with a cap on it. As long as the cap is on, water will back up, rise in the manhole, and discharge through a connecting pipe that comes in at a higher elevation.

Runoff collecting in the plugged manhole

The connecting pipe leads to the rain garden. When I arrived, it had been raining for a while, but there was nothing flowing into the rain garden. I went back to the house to get a tool to pop the manhole cover. When I looked down, I could see some runoff had started to collect, but was still backing up, filling up the pipe on the upstream side.

I waited a while for the manhole to fill. When runoff had backed up in the upstream pipe all the way to the pipe’s crown, the manhole began to fill quickly. I replaced the manhole cover and headed over to the rain garden.

The first runoff enters the rain garden.

I only had to wait a minute or two before the runoff exited the pipe with a gurgle and a gush and flowed across the mulch.

I went back later, at dusk, to see what the rain garden looked like after receiving runoff for much of the day.

The rain garden after a day of rain.

Here’s what it looks like when it’s not raining: a great place to play.

The rain garden on a sunny day.

Seven years ago, I was involved in a long battle with the staff of the San Francisco Bay Regional Water Quality Control Board over Low Impact Development (LID).

Back then, we (Contra Costa County municipal stormwater NPDES permittees) were the LID advocates. We wanted to disperse runoff to landscaping, infiltrate runoff, and use bioretention to control the rate and duration of runoff flows from newly developed sites. Water Board staff insisted on engineered basins and, despite our entreaties, had their Board adopt technical standards written around the use of engineered basins.

So we had to prove our case that LID could meet those standards. Water Board staff made it tough, sitting on our correspondence for months without bothering to reply, and then recruiting self-interested experts to assist them in making the case against LID.

In the end, we got Water Board staff to take our LID program to their Board for approval. As part of the deal, Contra Costa permittees agreed to do some monitoring to verify the in situ performance of some bioretention facilities.

Now, finally, we’ve got two years of data–well almost two years; I hope it rains at least once more before summer. Even after all this time, there are very few published studies of bioretention performance, and perhaps none that continuously monitored the facilities through an entire season.

Contra Costa County Flood Control and Water Conservation District staff did the monitoring. Brown and Caldwell staff will take the data and compare it the performance predicted by a continuous-simulation model. Then they’ll adjust the model so the output conforms more closely to our data. They they’ll use the adjusted model to predict facility performance over very long periods (including performance during rare, large runoff events that haven’t happened in the past two years).

The kickoff meeting for the modeling part of the effort is tomorrow morning. I’m looking forward to touring the test sites with the whole team.

And that 7-year battle? The San Francisco Bay Water Board staff’s can’t-use-LID, basins-only standard is still in place. And the permit renewal, due in 2014, is coming up fast. We’ll see what we get from the results.

Here are the Powerpoint slides from my presentation to land development professionals in Corona, CA on January 28. I’ll be down there again February 13th for a repeat. Later: Here is a .pdf of the slides as well.

A year ago last summer I helped Riverside County municipalities draft stormwater guidance for new development projects. After many subsequent revisions, the Regional Water Quality Control Board for the Santa Ana Region approved the municipalities’ Water Quality Management Plan on October 22. New permit requirements kick in for projects reviewed on or after December 6&#8212tomorrow&#8212so it’s timely I’m down here to do a training session for staff. Slides are here (20MB .pptx).

I had fun compiling, distilling, and adapting lessons gained elsewhere. The first of two duplicate sessions went well today, and I’ve got a whole new crowd tomorrow afternoon. Training for land development professionals is being scheduled for January.

I’ve posted the Powerpoint presentations from a recent half-day training, &#8220How to Prepare Stormwater Control Plans for Development Projects,&#8221 on the Contra Costa Clean Water Program’s website.

The current statewide stormwater Phase II NPDES permit was issued in 2003 and expired in 2008. It’s been extended administratively while State Water Resources Control Board staff drafts an update.

This permit tells smaller California cities and towns what they must do to reduce the amount of pollutants discharged from their streets, gutters, and drainage pipes.

Tomorrow I’m headed to Sacramento for an all-day meeting to discuss one permit provision&#8212the provision governing how land development projects must be built so that runoff impacts are minimized.

This is my living, and I’m glad to donate a day, serving no client, to assist the State with this project.

But the meeting participants didn’t get the latest draft of the provision until this morning. And it is a very rough draft, with placeholders and sentences that trail off. There are proposed requirements that clearly haven’t been thought through. And this is four years after this permit should have been written, reviewed, debated, settled, and adopted.

I’m embarrassed for Water Board staff, who I know are capable and have good intent.

I can’t help but try to imagine what level of political and bureaucratic dysfunction, what kind of organizational and management clusterf*ck, could be going on behind the scenes at the Water Board.

Tomorrow I’ll put that imagining aside and, once again, focus on the issues: why the proposed criteria don’t make technical sense and can’t be implemented consistently, why the objective of the required studies is unclear and unattainable, how developers’ engineers will game the weak language, why this is an invitation to lawsuits against the Water Boards and the cities. And on. And on.