Life is full of seemingly boring, trivial things that if you think about them, you’d realize they’re actually profoundly important. Like preparing your business’ balance sheet. Tedious, but neglect it and you might end up bankrupt. Getting the oil changed. Mundane, but don’t do it and your car becomes a driveway ornament.
Stormwater is sort of like that. It’s that trickle of water running along the curb and into the storm sewers, but don’t manage it well when there’s a heavy rain and you get polluted streams, flooding, landslides, property damage and sometimes death — literal disaster.
The Lehigh Valley Planning Commission recently embarked on a two-year process of updating the Lehigh Valley’s Act 167 Stormwater Management Plan for the 15 watersheds serving the area and its nearly 700,000 residents. Rather than the 15 separate management plans we have now, we’ll have a single, global plan.
Five decades ago, at the advent of the Clean Water Act of 1972, followed by Pennsylvania’s Stormwater Management Act of 1978, society generally treated stormwater runoff as a nuisance that should be shuttled away where it couldn’t cause damage. Now we know it can be a resource usable for drinking water, irrigation and recharging underground aquifers. That means we have a golden opportunity to update these watershed management plans — most of which were last updated in the 1990s — to evolve with our changing development patterns.
In today’s world of more extreme weather and rapid development, it’s an incredibly complex undertaking — much more like balancing the finances of a Fortune 100 company than changing out the 40 weight in your Ford. Over the past month, we’ve been meeting with municipal, public and private stormwater stakeholders from across the region. We need a raft of data from all 62 of our municipalities, including land use changes, soil data, zoning changes or anything else that could impact the rate at which water flows after a storm.
In places where there’s little or no development, a storm happens, and the rain or snow filters through the natural system and finds its way into the ground or to the stream or river network. But where there’s development, impervious surfaces prevent the water from filtering through that system. Over the past three decades since most of these plans were updated, we’ve seen a lot of development, that includes nearly 50,000 new homes and more than 100 million square feet of non-residential development. While stormwater in new development is now required to be managed onsite, many legacy issues from combined municipal stormwater and sewer infrastructure to older sites being regraded affect proper management. In addition, poor and outdated systems cost taxpayers millions of dollars, to fix problem areas.
How communities, businesses and developers manage where stormwater runs is the difference between a two-inch rainfall being a water-in-the basement minor nuisance or a major flood that closes roads, damages property or worse. It can also send pollution into our streams and rivers.
Systems to manage stormwater runoff include both gray and green infrastructure such as storm sewers, retention ponds, detention basins and underground tanks, and these are always going to be key ingredients. But today we know we can design systems that mimic the natural water cycle, capturing and managing rain where it falls using vegetative components. These systems, known as green stormwater infrastructure or GSI include rain gardens, bioswales, green roofs and riparian buffers. As part of our update, we now have a chance to shine a greater focus on them. Think vegetation instead of pipes, bioswales instead of drainage ditches, green instead of gray. It’s also cheaper to install and maintain. Green infrastructure supports better air quality, greater biodiversity and reinforces our quality of life.
Liesel Gross, chief executive officer of the Lehigh County Authority, knows better than most why all this matters. The water and sewer authority serving 270,000 people in 15 municipalities has embarked on a 10-year, $600 million plan to preserve capacity and upgrade its aging network. The upgrades include 1,000 miles of underground pipes. Its treatment capacity is 87 million gallons a day — plenty to serve its customers — but during heavy storms it can be inundated with up to 160 million gallons in a day. All that overflow, including raw sewerage, goes rushing into the river untreated.
“What happens with our rainwater and stormwater directly impacts our drinking water,” Gross said. “Rainwater entering the sanitary sewer system is a big issue. This is incredibly important.”
It’s important enough that 98 municipalities across Pennsylvania — including all three Lehigh Valley cities, Bethlehem Township, Fountain Hill and Palmer Township — adopted stormwater management fees to collect money from residents, businesses and institutions, based on the amount of runoff they generate from their buildings and parking lots. Revenue generated from these fees are typically used to supplement stormwater management related costs. New communities adopt fee programs every year, and in most every case it’s controversial. I get it. People with stretched budgets don’t need another fee. But this is one of those hidden issues that impacts our everyday life, and if neglected, could leave a community feeling like that company headed for bankruptcy.
In the coming months we’ll be holding public meetings to collect data, determine community trouble spots and develop the best plan for the future. I invite everyone to participate. I promise, it won’t be boring. In fact, you may learn things about your community that you didn’t realize are incredibly important. Next time you grab a glass of water remember, it’s drinkable because of integrated water resource management, which includes stormwater.
Becky Bradley is executive director of the Lehigh Valley Planning Commission.
