Latest / Clean Water Works / Ten Years of Regional Stormwater Management

Transcript

Ten Years of Regional Stormwater Management · Clean Water Works

• 0:00
  Mike Uva: Welcome to Clean Waterworks, a podcast.
• 0:03
  Donna Friedman: I'm tapping the table.
• 0:04
  Mike Uva: Welcome to Clean Waterworks, a podcast of the Northeast Ohio Regional Sewer District, all about clean water.
• 0:09
  Mike Uva: We have a very special topic today, celebration.
• 0:12
  Donna Friedman: Mm-hmm.
• 0:13
  Mike Uva: Ten years of the sewer district's Regional Stormwater Management Program.
• 0:18
  Donna Friedman: Um we have Kim Colech, PE, with us here today.
• 0:23
  Donna Friedman: She is our stormwater program manager here at the Northeast Ohio Regional Sewer District.
• 0:28
  Donna Friedman: Kim, welcome.
• 0:28
  Donna Friedman: Thanks, Donna.
• 0:29
  SPEAKER_02: Good to be here.
• 0:30
  Donna Friedman: Would you like to say anything about yourself?
• 0:32
  SPEAKER_02: No.
• 0:34
  Donna Friedman: Great.
• 0:35
  SPEAKER_02: Just glad to be here.
• 0:36
  SPEAKER_02: Sure.
• 0:36
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 0:37
  SPEAKER_02: I have been here at the Sewer District since 2012.
• 0:39
  SPEAKER_02: I was hired as a stormwater project manager originally.
• 0:42
  SPEAKER_02: I have been here working on stormwater projects since 2012, and I'm excited to be here and talk about the program 10 years after its full implementation.
• 0:50
  Donna Friedman: That's great.
• 0:50
  Donna Friedman: Well, thank you for joining us.
• 0:51
  Donna Friedman: And we also have Kyle Dreyfus Wells, who is our fearless later, our CEO here at the Sewer District.
• 0:57
  Donna Friedman: Kyle, thank you for coming on the pod.
• 0:59
  Donna Friedman: Yeah, thanks for having me.
• 1:01
  Donna Friedman: Would you like to add anything about yourself?
• 1:04
  SPEAKER_01: I'm Kyle Dreyfus Wells.
• 1:06
  SPEAKER_01: I'm the Chief Executive Officer of the Northeast Ohio Regional Sewer District.
• 1:10
  SPEAKER_01: But like Kim, I came over.
• 1:12
  SPEAKER_01: I was with the Chagrin River Watershed Partners.
• 1:14
  SPEAKER_01: I came over in 2008 to help set up the regional stormwater management program.
• 1:19
  SPEAKER_01: And then I became the manager of watershed programs, deputy director of watershed programs.
• 1:23
  SPEAKER_01: So I come up through the stormwater line.
• 1:27
  Mike Uva: For listeners who are just tuning in for the first time and maybe know a little bit about the Northeast Ohio Regional Sewer District, but aren't too familiar with the term stormwater, what is stormwater?
• 1:39
  SPEAKER_02: Go ahead.
• 1:39
  SPEAKER_02: You want to start, Kim?
• 1:40
  SPEAKER_02: I'll go first.
• 1:41
  SPEAKER_02: I'll give a maybe a basic general definition.
• 1:44
  SPEAKER_02: And stormwater is really the runoff that happens when rain falls on the ground.
• 1:48
  SPEAKER_02: So whether it's overland flow into creeks and streams or it's piped to different locations, it's really that flow of water from rain events.
• 1:57
  Mike Uva: And why is it an issue?
• 1:58
  SPEAKER_02: It's an issue here and in many areas, mostly because our built environment, when it was developed, didn't account for that stormwater.
• 2:07
  SPEAKER_02: And so over the years and decades, as development occurred, especially before there were any kind of stormwater regulations, there was no ability to treat or detain that water.
• 2:17
  SPEAKER_02: And so you end up with flooding and water quality problems.
• 2:21
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I think the way to think about it is stormwater is just a natural part of a watershed, but there's only three places that water can go.
• 2:28
  SPEAKER_01: It can soak into the ground, which is infiltration, it can run off, or it can evapotranspirate, you know, up through plants and into the atmosphere.
• 2:36
  SPEAKER_01: And as Kim said, when you harden the surface of the ground through development, you cut off that infiltration pathway and you minimize the evapotranspiration.
• 2:46
  SPEAKER_01: So you're just left with more runoff, which is what causes flooding, causes erosion, and leads to both public safety issues and public health and water quality problems.
• 2:57
  Mike Uva: And we know that the City of Cleveland Division of Water handles our drinking water, and we, of course, handle sewers.
• 3:03
  Mike Uva: But how does stormwater management fall under our responsibilities?
• 3:08
  SPEAKER_01: So when the sewer district was formed in 1972, we were given the job of solving intercommunity drainage problems, both storm and sanitary.
• 3:17
  SPEAKER_01: So it's in the very foundational documents of the sewer district.
• 3:20
  SPEAKER_01: And obviously, we started where the public health issues were the biggest, which is related to sanitary sewage.
• 3:26
  SPEAKER_01: Anything related to E.
• 3:27
  SPEAKER_01: coli should be kind of a red flag, something that you want to focus on.
• 3:31
  SPEAKER_01: So anything related to sewage.
• 3:33
  SPEAKER_01: And so we started there with the wastewater treatment plants, the collection system, the large interceptor sewers, and then moved our focus to stormwater management as we came into the late 1990s and then into the early 2000s.
• 3:49
  SPEAKER_01: So it's always been there.
• 3:51
  SPEAKER_01: We just moved the work over time.
• 3:53
  Donna Friedman: Can you talk about some of the founding days, I guess, of the RSMP?
• 3:58
  Donna Friedman: What were some of the driving factors for creating a program?
• 4:03
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, so the regional stormwater management program really came out of a lot of work on stormwater, both within the district and across the country.
• 4:11
  SPEAKER_01: This understanding that impervious surfaces, driveways, rooftops, parking lots, other things that don't absorb water lead to increases in flooding and increasing increases in erosion, which causes these water quality and public safety issues like backyard erosion, threatening people's homes, threatening structures, threatening roads, threatening bridges.
• 4:31
  SPEAKER_01: And so the sewer district had been working on this for a long time and had done an inventory of problems across our service area, which is the foundational document that you do when you're setting up a stormwater management program.
• 4:43
  SPEAKER_01: So that work was going on, some good work across the district.
• 4:46
  SPEAKER_01: And then we looked at how you'd actually bring this into operation.
• 4:50
  SPEAKER_01: What would the fee be?
• 4:51
  SPEAKER_01: What would the structure be?
• 4:52
  SPEAKER_01: And that work was happening with folks that were here before before Kim and I.
• 4:57
  Donna Friedman: Okay.
• 4:57
  Donna Friedman: And so stormwater programs were sort of popping up across the nation at that time?
• 5:02
  SPEAKER_01: Well, stormwater programs were popping up across the nation and had popped up across the nation, but from the very beginning, ours was different because we took, we take a holistic watershed-based approach.
• 5:15
  SPEAKER_01: Stormwater management programs commonly had just moved problems from one community to the next by making a bigger pipe or uh taking a natural stream channel and turning it into a concrete channel.
• 5:27
  SPEAKER_01: So this idea of moving problems faster.
• 5:30
  SPEAKER_01: And we, from the very foundations of the program, we understood that we needed to take this watershed approach where we were looking for where is the problem being caused?
• 5:40
  SPEAKER_01: And how can we go back to that sort of first cause location and provide a solution that's going to solve the problem holistically and for the long term and not just move the problem from one community to the next.
• 5:54
  Donna Friedman: Okay.
• 5:54
  Donna Friedman: It's a very regional approach, which fits into our regional management style.
• 5:59
  Donna Friedman: Kim, can you weigh in on how we physically do that?
• 6:04
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, I can kind of continue where Kyle ended there, in that when our program really got initiated in 2016, we really focused on those stormwater master plans.
• 6:13
  SPEAKER_02: So we had master planning efforts along all of our watersheds within our service area, which were again super important because we needed to understand exactly where these issues were, what they were being caused from, without looking at community boundaries, looking at it from a watershed uh scale basis.
• 6:30
  SPEAKER_02: And that's what we did with the stormwater master plans.
• 6:34
  SPEAKER_02: Um, it basically developed 34 different hydraulic models, um stormwater models that we now use to design projects, and we continue to refine and update as we move along in our program.
• 6:43
  SPEAKER_02: So it really was the base of that establishment of the program because we needed a you could call it like a blueprint for how we wanted to move through the program and start growing it.
• 6:54
  Mike Uva: When it comes to the cost of handling these problems, why is it a benefit to have a regional program?
• 7:00
  SPEAKER_01: Because the problems are complex.
• 7:02
  SPEAKER_01: And as Kim just pointed out, to really solve these stormwater management problems, you're essentially knitting these urban watersheds back together, kind of one project at a time.
• 7:12
  SPEAKER_01: And so you want to have a planning effort in the beginning that is really informed by data, by smart folks looking across a watershed to understand these problems.
• 7:22
  SPEAKER_01: And it's just really bigger than any one community.
• 7:25
  SPEAKER_01: So I think what we've seen in the past, you know, Donna asked questions about stormwater management programs before ours or older programs.
• 7:33
  SPEAKER_01: And one individual community is not going to be able to say, hey, you know, the really the issue is that there's no detention upstream in this watershed because the upstream in that watershed may be outside of their community boundaries.
• 7:45
  SPEAKER_01: So when you have a regional solution, not only can you have the dollars that are available to solve these problems for the long term, you can actually solve them in a way that is the most cost effective.
• 7:57
  Donna Friedman: People have heard about the district's uh major tunnel projects and the enormous infrastructure investment happening underground.
• 8:04
  Donna Friedman: But Kim, how are stormwater projects different?
• 8:07
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, I think there's a lot of similarities as well as differences.
• 8:10
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, similarities that they're large construction projects, regardless of what we're doing on the stormwater side, they are construction projects.
• 8:17
  SPEAKER_02: I think one of the big differences is that a lot of our projects are more visible on the ground because they aren't underground.
• 8:23
  SPEAKER_02: We do some underground projects, we do work on culverts and pipes, but many of our projects are looking at that more holistic uh natural-based solution of stream restoration, floodplain reconnection, riparian corridors.
• 8:35
  SPEAKER_02: And so they are more impactful to the environment, the visible environment that the residents and the ratepayers actually see.
• 8:42
  SPEAKER_02: Do you feel like it's easier or harder to explain?
• 8:44
  Donna Friedman: Because you were, were you ever on the gray side of the house?
• 8:47
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, I've done a lot of work on gray infrastructure in my career.
• 8:49
  SPEAKER_02: And when I started at the Sewer District, I did a mix of the stormwater and wastewater side of work.
• 8:55
  SPEAKER_02: A lot of people would define that as more traditional structural uh improvements to systems, like the color of concrete.
• 9:02
  SPEAKER_02: Correct.
• 9:02
  SPEAKER_02: I think that's where it comes from.
• 9:03
  SPEAKER_02: We're green and gray, right?
• 9:04
  SPEAKER_02: So green, you think of green infrastructure or riparian corridors.
• 9:08
  SPEAKER_02: Um, yeah.
• 9:09
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, I think look, at the end of the day, to Kim's point, these are all large infrastructure projects.
• 9:15
  SPEAKER_01: And so while uh the tunnels are dealing with combined sewer overflow, the wastewater treatment plant upgrades are dealing with combined, you know, having the capacity at the plant to treat that additional flow as we bring the combined sewer overflow into the plants as opposed to directly to the environment.
• 9:30
  SPEAKER_01: So that's dealing with on the sanitary side, and the regional stormwater management program is dealing on the stormwater side.
• 9:36
  SPEAKER_01: But at the end of the day, it takes really smart people to do this.
• 9:40
  SPEAKER_01: So it takes good planning, it takes good engineering, it takes uh innovative problem solving.
• 9:46
  SPEAKER_01: So all of the same skills are coming on both sides of the sewer district's work.
• 9:52
  Mike Uva: Is it fair to say that gray infrastructure is carrying the water or conveying, I guess it would be the word, conveying the water somewhere, and green infrastructure is trying to keep it at its source, like where it falls on the ground?
• 10:05
  SPEAKER_01: So the sewer district really has two lines of business, is one way to explain it, right?
• 10:10
  SPEAKER_01: We have two separate utilities.
• 10:12
  SPEAKER_01: We have a wastewater or a sanitary uh sewer utility, and we have the regional stormwater management program.
• 10:18
  SPEAKER_01: So all the work that we're doing for combined sewer overflow control is coming out of the sanitary sewer or the wastewater side of the house.
• 10:25
  SPEAKER_01: That's funded by the sewer fees that folks pay.
• 10:28
  SPEAKER_01: The regional stormwater management program is funded by a fee based on impervious or hard surface that's on your on your property.
• 10:36
  SPEAKER_01: On the sanitary sewer side, obviously the goal is to get sanitary sewage to a wastewater treatment plant so it can be treated and discharged to the environment.
• 10:44
  SPEAKER_01: On the stormwater side, I think to your point, Mike, the the idea is to keep that stormwater as close to its source as possible.
• 10:52
  SPEAKER_01: So infiltration, bioretention, rain gardens, anything that we can do as you go up on the watershed scale, then you're gonna have a retention basin or a detention basin.
• 11:02
  SPEAKER_01: So yeah, I mean you you want to keep that stormwater and allow it to soak in or evapotranspirate as much as you can so that you minimize that rushing water.
• 11:13
  SPEAKER_01: Water rushing downstream in a stream is what causes the water quality and the erosion issues.
• 11:21
  SPEAKER_02: During the first decade, did we try to address the most severe problem sites, or did we try to tackle the low-hanging fruit problems that we could just kind of Yeah, I can start with the answer to that one because when the program started, we still needed to develop our stormwater master plans.
• 11:40
  SPEAKER_02: And without the hydraulic models set up, it was hard to identify the worst or the most impactful flooding problem areas.
• 11:48
  SPEAKER_02: And so early in the program, there were projects that we knew we had to address from an erosion perspective.
• 11:54
  SPEAKER_02: So several of our early projects were really based upon erosion mitigation of some of these streams and channels, where we knew whatever project we implemented wouldn't necessarily get in any way of a future flood reduction project that would come out of the master plans through the modeling efforts.
• 12:11
  SPEAKER_02: So there was a way that we started the program to address those known erosion issues as most of our projects, although we had a scattering of other types of projects early on as well, um, before we had the models done to really look at those flood prone areas and the problem problems of flooding in our region.
• 12:29
  Donna Friedman: I think the program now has really developed to be based, like we said, on risk.
• 12:35
  Donna Friedman: And we have a whole calculation for that.
• 12:37
  Donna Friedman: We have a whole prioritization process that we go through every year to look at the different problem areas that came out of the stormwater master planning.
• 12:44
  Donna Friedman: Um and now that's really the rubric that we use because we have established the master plans and we are continually uh improving those models.
• 12:55
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 12:55
  SPEAKER_02: And we've like you said, it's a very robust system of prioritization and scoring, but it's also a system that's not static as we're going through every year determining how the scoring's laid out and does it really meet the needs of the program in our communities.
• 13:09
  SPEAKER_02: We're continuing to look at ways that we can modify that system in the future to make sure we're addressing the largest problems or the riskiest problems first, especially on a uh cost-benefit analysis as well, because we have limited dollars.
• 13:23
  SPEAKER_02: And so we got to make sure that we're using our dollars the best we can to mitigate all those risks, whether they be structural or hydraulic.
• 13:30
  Donna Friedman: Kim, can you talk about some of uh your favorite projects we've done today?
• 13:33
  Donna Friedman: 10 years.
• 13:34
  Donna Friedman: Take your pick.
• 13:35
  Donna Friedman: It's been a long time, right?
• 13:37
  Donna Friedman: Good projects.
• 13:38
  SPEAKER_02: Great projects.
• 13:38
  SPEAKER_02: I think I've got a uh a few of them.
• 13:40
  SPEAKER_02: I think the first was one of my first projects when I came here was uh restoration of Done Brook uh in the um uh Rockefeller Park.
• 13:48
  SPEAKER_02: Rockefeller Park.
• 13:49
  SPEAKER_02: Thank you.
• 13:49
  SPEAKER_02: I was like, what park is that?
• 13:50
  SPEAKER_02: Yes.
• 13:50
  SPEAKER_02: Um so that was a project um that we did to help enhance Stone Brook through that reach.
• 13:56
  SPEAKER_02: And it was um it was an interesting project because we had to deal with a lot of historic structures out there.
• 14:01
  SPEAKER_02: We had to deal with the flashiness of Done Brook.
• 14:03
  SPEAKER_02: So during construction, we had a lot of storm events that caused a lot of issues during construction that we had to um, you know, address.
• 14:10
  SPEAKER_02: And so that was a challenging project, and it was uh my first stream project here at the district, and so it was exciting to get through that project.
• 14:17
  Donna Friedman: Is it fun to come back to a watershed project-wise?
• 14:20
  Donna Friedman: Like we have other projects that we've done on.
• 14:22
  SPEAKER_02: It is because it's it's kind of like building blocks, right?
• 14:25
  SPEAKER_02: Because you are addressing uh a problem in one section of the watershed, and then you get to go back and do other problems in the watershed.
• 14:32
  SPEAKER_02: And so, as Kyle was saying about stitching these watersheds back together, that's what we're doing with all these projects.
• 14:37
  SPEAKER_02: So going back to a watershed is really nice because you can build upon what what you've already done.
• 14:42
  SPEAKER_01: And Dome is this amazing urban watershed, right?
• 14:45
  SPEAKER_01: So it starts in Beachwood, it comes down through uh Cleveland Heights, Shaker Heights, into the city of Cleveland.
• 14:50
  SPEAKER_01: It has a ton of grade change as it comes down.
• 14:53
  SPEAKER_01: So you have just sort of a natural, fast movement of water, and then it's 40% imperviousness in Dome.
• 15:00
  SPEAKER_01: So you've got a lot of developed spaces.
• 15:02
  SPEAKER_01: So the project that Kim's talking about, that's 963 linear feet of stream restoration.
• 15:08
  SPEAKER_01: It's this amazing restoration project that opened up Dome and gave it floodplain and dealt with a real issue, which was the erosion of behind the Cleveland Museum of Art.
• 15:18
  SPEAKER_01: So it's a cool project solving a problem in a pretty complicated watershed.
• 15:23
  Donna Friedman: Can you talk about some retrofitting we've done?
• 15:25
  Donna Friedman: And why do we need to do it?
• 15:27
  SPEAKER_02: Uh well, I'll start with why we need to retrofit some of the system that's out there already that we didn't build, that others built along the way.
• 15:34
  SPEAKER_02: One of the reasons we need to look back at these watersheds and what was put in was because our stormwater regulations really didn't begin until the 1980s.
• 15:42
  SPEAKER_02: And I think about 80% of our area was developed prior to the implementation of stormwater management regulations.
• 15:49
  SPEAKER_02: And so there was no detention requirements or water quality requirements for development in our region.
• 15:56
  SPEAKER_02: And so going back to areas where there are opportunities to go back and add in this uh volume of storage to Kyle's point earlier about making sure we're holding back some of that water and allowing it to infiltrate or evapotranspirate is really important in solving some of these problems because we don't have a lot of space anymore.
• 16:16
  SPEAKER_02: So finding locations where you can expand or retrofit are important.
• 16:20
  SPEAKER_02: We've had a couple of projects in Parma, which are great examples of that.
• 16:23
  SPEAKER_02: One is the Upper Ridgewood Basin along the Big Creek watershed, and then we also have Veterans Basin, which is in West Creek.
• 16:29
  SPEAKER_02: And so those were existing retention ponds that we were able to modify, make larger, uh, reduce the water that they were holding previously to allow more what we call active storage, which really reduces the flood impacts downstream.
• 16:43
  SPEAKER_02: So those were two of our really great projects that we used existing infrastructure that was already there in order to improve the flood um reduction possibilities that they had.
• 16:54
  Donna Friedman: Those are great projects, in my opinion, too, because they are real assets of the community.
• 17:00
  Donna Friedman: We worked very closely with the city of Parma in order to put in storybook trails, in order to put back more benches, in order to put in, you know, garbage cans and educational signage and all kinds of things to really bring the space to a more complete project.
• 17:17
  Donna Friedman: You know, we weren't just doing the stormwater elements, we were working to make sure that the project as a whole would serve the community.
• 17:23
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 17:23
  SPEAKER_02: And I I think that one, we did a great job.
• 17:26
  SPEAKER_02: I've seen those projects, you know, just this summer and early fall.
• 17:29
  SPEAKER_02: They look amazing too.
• 17:30
  SPEAKER_02: They're great community assets.
• 17:32
  SPEAKER_02: And I think it's a couple of examples of projects that we hadn't done before.
• 17:36
  SPEAKER_02: So it was our uh for our program able to show what we can do with those types of projects.
• 17:41
  SPEAKER_02: We had a lot of opposition to some of those projects.
• 17:44
  SPEAKER_02: Residents were not happy about losing the Ridgewood Lake, right?
• 17:48
  SPEAKER_02: We had a lot of opposition.
• 17:49
  SPEAKER_02: And I just remember there was a news story after construction, and they were interviewing someone who had been a very vocal opponent of our project.
• 17:57
  SPEAKER_02: And he basically said, it's not an eyesore, right?
• 18:00
  SPEAKER_02: And while that might sound bad, we kind of convinced him that we replaced what was there with something as or better than it was before from a visual perspective.
• 18:11
  SPEAKER_02: And it was something that he thought was okay after all that opposition.
• 18:16
  Donna Friedman: The other thing that he said in that in the interview.
• 18:18
  Donna Friedman: And it was just like, wow, you came.
• 18:20
  Donna Friedman: I remember him coming to a council meeting very upset, very upset.
• 18:26
  Donna Friedman: And to see that turnaround of him being like, actually, now I walk my dog around it every day, and it's kind of okay.
• 18:31
  SPEAKER_02: And that's great.
• 18:32
  SPEAKER_02: And one of the struggles of a relatively new program is showing what we can do and allowing people to see the work that we do and having enough examples of the different types of projects so that they can feel comfortable with us leading these projects.
• 18:48
  SPEAKER_02: With a new program, it takes a while for people to understand what exactly you're doing and how it benefits the communities.
• 18:55
  SPEAKER_01: And I think that was uh when we started the program, two things that were very important.
• 18:59
  SPEAKER_01: So, stormwater programs in the past have started, collected funds from ratepayers, and then not done anything uh with any sense of urgency.
• 19:08
  SPEAKER_01: So when we come to our work at the district across all of our programs, it's this sense of urgency.
• 19:14
  SPEAKER_01: Like we need to deliver and we need to deliver in a very sensitive way, which goes into the second part, which is this idea of service.
• 19:21
  SPEAKER_01: So we are here to work for our customers with the communities, making sure that we're explaining things, that we're available and we put ourselves in places to answer people's questions.
• 19:31
  SPEAKER_01: And I think that's how you get a customer who's comfortable, one, bringing his concerns and then also having conversation afterwards where he's like, hey, this is actually okay.
• 19:41
  Donna Friedman: Yeah.
• 19:41
  Donna Friedman: I think, Kyle, you've really emphasized how much of a relationship-driven program we have and the partnerships and how important they are.
• 19:49
  Donna Friedman: Can you talk a little bit more about some of our partnerships?
• 19:51
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 19:52
  SPEAKER_01: So I would say it's not so much that, to your point, Don, it's not so much that it's relationship driven, is that it's respect driven, right?
• 19:58
  SPEAKER_01: So it's this idea that we need to deliver the best technical service.
• 20:03
  SPEAKER_01: So it's technically driven, it's driven by science, it's driven by modeling.
• 20:07
  SPEAKER_01: Where are the problems?
• 20:08
  SPEAKER_01: Where's the greatest risk across our the watersheds that we serve in our 363 square mile service area?
• 20:15
  SPEAKER_01: And that leads to where regional dollars are focused.
• 20:19
  SPEAKER_01: It's based on risk, it's based on the problem.
• 20:22
  SPEAKER_01: Um, in terms of partnerships, that's one of the amazing things about Northeast Ohio.
• 20:26
  SPEAKER_01: There are so many good folks that are doing this work.
• 20:29
  SPEAKER_01: So you have the Cleveland Metro Parks, uh, a great partner on stream restoration, partnered with them early on the Watershed Stewardship Center at West Creek and that whole West Creek reservation.
• 20:40
  SPEAKER_01: Then you've got all the watershed organizations like West Creek, Chagrin River Watershed Partners, Tinkers Creek, these really grassroots organizations that have been great partners.
• 20:49
  SPEAKER_01: And then you've got the larger ones, Ohio Department of Natural Resources, um, uh, and then some of our federal partners, USGS is a great partner.
• 20:58
  SPEAKER_01: So it's all these folks kind of pulling in the same direction.
• 21:01
  SPEAKER_01: And the thing that's wonderful about that is that you're spending public dollars.
• 21:05
  SPEAKER_01: So we have a responsibility to be as coordinated and as efficient as possible, and I think we're really doing that.
• 21:12
  Mike Uva: Compared to the tunnel projects, these stormwater projects, as you mentioned, are more surface and visible to people.
• 21:20
  Mike Uva: What do people see?
• 21:22
  Mike Uva: Like, can you give some examples of what a typical stormwater project looks like and are they recognizable or do they kind of blend in?
• 21:30
  Mike Uva: And when you're walking through a neighborhood, can you see a stormwater project and I and say that the stormwater project is a good thing?
• 21:35
  Donna Friedman: Kim, I can't.
• 21:35
  Donna Friedman: I can't.
• 21:36
  Donna Friedman: I will say before you start, I was walking the tow path.
• 21:40
  Donna Friedman: We did a project in Valley View along the towpath to protect the towpath because it was a road of the Chicago River a meander had been eroding very heavily towards the towpath.
• 21:50
  Donna Friedman: And I walked past it.
• 21:52
  Donna Friedman: I walked right past it.
• 21:53
  Donna Friedman: And then I turned around and I was like, wait a minute.
• 21:56
  Donna Friedman: And I had to like turn around and look at the the like the whole picture and be like, Like, oh yeah, this is where the restoration was.
• 22:02
  Donna Friedman: You really couldn't tell.
• 22:03
  Donna Friedman: It was all grown in.
• 22:04
  Donna Friedman: It looked great.
• 22:05
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, it does look great.
• 22:06
  SPEAKER_02: I've seen it too.
• 22:07
  SPEAKER_02: It looks great there.
• 22:08
  SPEAKER_02: I think it depends on the project, though, right?
• 22:10
  SPEAKER_02: There are some that are uh obviously projects and others that blend in very well.
• 22:14
  SPEAKER_02: Obviously, in the national park, they would probably blend in a little bit better over the years as they become established.
• 22:20
  SPEAKER_02: I think in projects where we've done restorations in neighborhoods, I think it is visible that we did a project there.
• 22:29
  SPEAKER_02: Um I think a lot of the neighborhoods that we do projects uh are a little bit more manicured.
• 22:34
  SPEAKER_02: And so we go in there with the approach of allowing the stream to have its space, to create those riparian corridors so it looks more natural, which is fantastic for the neighborhood, but it is a little bit of a difference from what they had seen before.
• 22:46
  SPEAKER_02: And so I think time will tell on some of those because some of those neighborhood restorations are relatively new.
• 22:51
  SPEAKER_02: But I think one of the great things that we're also doing is really looking now into adaptive management of these sites, looking years after construction, you know, one year, three years after construction, going back and evaluating the sites and saying, what else do we need to do?
• 23:05
  SPEAKER_02: Where do we want this site to be in 50 years and how do we establish things today in order to get it there?
• 23:11
  SPEAKER_02: So this adaptive management approach is something that we're really leaning into now, 10 years into the program, to make sure that what we've built is sustained over time and and meets the goals that we had in the beginning.
• 23:23
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, and I think not only is Kim's team building things, but our watershed programs department is also purchasing land, like straight up sometimes if it's just a large wetland complex that we can purchase with a partner, or if it's a section of stream that can be purchased and remain as open space, that's always your first best stormwater management.
• 23:43
  SPEAKER_02: Yep.
• 23:43
  SPEAKER_02: And I brought a stat with me, 170 properties to date.
• 23:46
  SPEAKER_02: So quite a few doing to protect um our communities to set up for future projects or just to remove the structures and the property from being in harm's way, like Kyle said.
• 23:56
  SPEAKER_01: Always done in collaboration with an interested property owner to do that.
• 24:01
  SPEAKER_01: Correct and the community and with the community that we're in.
• 24:04
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 24:05
  Mike Uva: Do you have other stats that you want to share about the successes over the last decade?
• 24:10
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, I can.
• 24:10
  SPEAKER_02: We we were talking a little bit about maintenance, so I just wanted to lean a little bit more into maintenance because it is such a critical part of the work we do.
• 24:17
  SPEAKER_02: We construction is not the end for our program, it's it's ongoing maintenance because projects that we construct, we either own the property or have easements on, and so it's really important for us to continue to maintain those.
• 24:27
  SPEAKER_02: And so for 2025 alone, we had over 1,500 inspections along the regional system and uh 434 maintenance work orders.
• 24:37
  SPEAKER_02: So whether those are regional assets like culverts or crossings or streams or projects we've constructed, we're out there inspecting them consistently and maintaining them consistently.
• 24:48
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 24:48
  SPEAKER_01: And I think that's maintenance is, I feel, like, you know, a human weakness.
• 24:55
  SPEAKER_01: Like you can get the money that you need to do to build a project.
• 24:58
  SPEAKER_01: You may be able to get a grant for that, you may be able to win something, but it's this idea of sustained maintenance, which one protects the public investment and then also makes sure that those things continue to function.
• 25:09
  SPEAKER_01: So we are really big on maintenance.
• 25:12
  SPEAKER_01: And we're the Northeast Ohio Regional Sewer District, so we're gonna be here and we're committed to maintenance.
• 25:18
  SPEAKER_01: And when we have our grant programs, we make sure that the folks that we're granting to are also committed to maintenance.
• 25:23
  SPEAKER_02: One more thing on maintenance that I think is really valuable to add is that over the 10 years, we've learned where maintenance needs to happen after storm events.
• 25:32
  SPEAKER_02: We've gotten the experience of where we see debris accumulating, sediment accumulating, where we know we need to address after storm events, where the storm happened, where we need to go, so that like storm response is uh really a well-oiled machine at this point.
• 25:48
  SPEAKER_02: And then on top of that, we have over 40 trail cams in our system.
• 25:52
  SPEAKER_02: So we have cameras on a lot of these areas that either accumulate debris or sediment or flood frequently so that we have our eyes on it at in real time and we don't have to actually go out to the site.
• 26:03
  SPEAKER_02: And so it really has made our process incredibly efficient at um addressing issues after storm events.
• 26:09
  Donna Friedman: It's kind of leading me into my next question.
• 26:10
  Donna Friedman: I think, you know, when I started here a minute ago, I don't know if I would have thought, oh yeah, of course we would use trail cameras, right?
• 26:17
  Donna Friedman: So has there been anything that surprised you about how the program has evolved?
• 26:21
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, for me personally, it's a sophistication that the team has now.
• 26:25
  SPEAKER_01: So, you know, I came in from running a small nonprofit.
• 26:28
  SPEAKER_01: So, like, I mean, we just did stuff, right?
• 26:30
  SPEAKER_01: And then now it's actually quite a sophisticated um organization that we have, which is what you need to be able to push out this level of construction and this level of work.
• 26:41
  SPEAKER_01: So it's the evolution and sophistication of the program.
• 26:45
  SPEAKER_02: Yes, that's a perfect summary of where we're at.
• 26:48
  SPEAKER_02: We we obviously have evolved from establishing a program and looking at planning and construction to really looking at this maintenance, these partnerships with these agencies that provide data to us and we collaborate with.
• 27:02
  SPEAKER_02: We've been working with research universities to look at rainfall patterns, rainfall data, forecasting, um, prediction of flooding.
• 27:09
  SPEAKER_02: And so all of that is going to build us to be in even a much better position in the future as our programs evolve and as we've collaborated and continue to gain more data and information.
• 27:21
  Mike Uva: But let's go a little bit deeper into the benefits that these projects provide, both for people who are directly impacted by some of the problems you mentioned and people who aren't directly impacted.
• 27:34
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, for the people that are directly impacted, so maybe your house is being threatened by an eroding stream, or for those of us that travel on the roads, which is everybody, you know, maybe a bridge is being undercut or a road is uh facing erosion.
• 27:48
  SPEAKER_01: So those are obviously sort of public safety um uh structural safety issues that happen right away.
• 27:56
  SPEAKER_01: But I think for those of us, everyone that lives in Northeast Ohio, we rely on Lake Erie, we rely on the rich water resources that we have, and maintaining that system by building uh redundancy back into the system, by building retention and detention back into the system, restoring streams, reclaiming floodplains, protecting wetlands, it all goes to having a resilient Lake Erie watershed.
• 28:19
  SPEAKER_01: And that's what we all need to keep this abundant supply of clean, fresh water.
• 28:24
  SPEAKER_01: It all keys back to that.
• 28:27
  SPEAKER_02: I I will mention a specific project that kind of shows the benefits to Kyle's point about like Lake Erie and water quality.
• 28:34
  SPEAKER_02: So we completed a West Creek stabilization in Brooklyn Heights in 2024, and this project was uh more than a mile long of stream restoration in a corridor where West Creek had been manipulated by construction of interstates and commercial development.
• 28:49
  SPEAKER_02: There were vertical drops that did not allow passage of fish through the area, and it's only about a half mile from the confluence of the Cuyahoga.
• 28:57
  SPEAKER_02: So it's really important.
• 28:58
  SPEAKER_02: That stretch is really important to try and provide an ecological uplift and allow the fish to be able to move through the system.
• 29:05
  SPEAKER_02: So we were able to do that in with a uh$7 million US EPA uh Great Lakes uh Restoration Initiative grant, as well as funding from ODOT.
• 29:15
  SPEAKER_02: And restoring that whole stretch of West Creek really provided that ecological uplift from a stream restoration project that we could get through that area.
• 29:22
  SPEAKER_02: So that's just another example of the benefits of our program for all of our ratepayers.
• 29:28
  SPEAKER_01: And it's a system, right?
• 29:29
  SPEAKER_01: So West Creek is a tributary to the Cuyahoga River, which goes into Lake Erie.
• 29:33
  SPEAKER_01: And the way we kind of think about it at the sewer district is that Lake Erie is the end of the conversation, not the beginning of the conversation.
• 29:40
  SPEAKER_01: So the beginning of that conversation is across the watersheds: Rocky River, Cuyahoga River, Chagrin River, all those watersheds, what's happening way upstream in the headwaters is determining the water quality in Lake Erie.
• 29:53
  Donna Friedman: Was there a particular moment when you realize that this is exactly why we do this work?
• 29:58
  SPEAKER_01: Every day, Donna.
• 30:01
  SPEAKER_01: Every single day.
• 30:04
  SPEAKER_02: I'm gonna give a really specific example if that's okay.
• 30:07
  Donna Friedman: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 30:07
  Donna Friedman: Is it gonna be sappy?
• 30:08
  Donna Friedman: Are you gonna make me cry?
• 30:09
  Donna Friedman: No, is that why you brought the tissues?
• 30:11
  SPEAKER_02: In March of 2020, we all know what was going on, right?
• 30:14
  SPEAKER_02: Well, two weeks after we all just needed to work from home remotely because of COVID, we got a huge rain event in in Northeast Ohio.
• 30:21
  SPEAKER_02: It was March 28th, March, March 29th.
• 30:23
  SPEAKER_02: It was a two-day event uh that year.
• 30:26
  SPEAKER_02: And uh it was such a significant event that the river um gauge at Independence in the Cyugar River, it was the seventh highest reading ever, ever, ever um recorded.
• 30:38
  SPEAKER_02: Recorded, thank you.
• 30:38
  SPEAKER_02: Ever recorded there.
• 30:39
  SPEAKER_02: So it was a it was a huge rain event.
• 30:41
  SPEAKER_02: Well, we had been working on a project uh to reduce flooding uh along a roadway and through uh people's uh homes.
• 30:49
  SPEAKER_02: Uh we were we're under design.
• 30:51
  SPEAKER_02: We had a resident call us and say, I need you to come out here.
• 30:53
  SPEAKER_02: Something happened in my basement.
• 30:54
  SPEAKER_02: Well, the culvert itself went around this person's home, around the corner of their home, and was probably just a few feet from their foundation.
• 31:03
  SPEAKER_02: Well, that storm event was so intense that the water had pushed out of that culvert and knocked down his basement wall.
• 31:10
  SPEAKER_02: We went to go visit him, we went into his basement and saw his wall had been collapsed from the force and pressure of that water in that culvert.
• 31:18
  SPEAKER_02: So that was just an incredibly powerful experience to see how these systems that weren't necessarily designed the way we would today have impacted people's homes, people's roadways, um, and the communities they live in.
• 31:35
  SPEAKER_02: So what's really interesting about that project too is it has a good, a good message in the end was that we were able to complete the project.
• 31:42
  SPEAKER_02: The water no longer flows through that pipe or next to his house.
• 31:44
  SPEAKER_02: It's completely abandoned.
• 31:46
  SPEAKER_02: And he still calls us and thanks us for the project because every time it rains, he sends us photos of how our system's functioning and that there's no more flooding on the road.
• 31:54
  SPEAKER_02: So I think those are the impactful stories that I take with me because especially when it's that person-to-person interaction that you've improved someone's life by doing the work that you're doing.
• 32:05
  Donna Friedman: Absolutely.
• 32:06
  Donna Friedman: Mine's very similar.
• 32:07
  Donna Friedman: A property acquisition that we did over in Seven Hills.
• 32:10
  Donna Friedman: Yeah.
• 32:10
  Donna Friedman: Where the stream was probably a foot and a half from their foundation.
• 32:14
  Donna Friedman: I remember that.
• 32:15
  Donna Friedman: It was a family, you know, and he was just like, I don't, I will never be able to sell this house.
• 32:20
  Donna Friedman: And it was because the stream had been very manipulated to put in the development.
• 32:25
  Donna Friedman: And we purchased the property, obviously voluntary.
• 32:29
  Donna Friedman: He was very happy to sell to us, and we restored the stream through that section.
• 32:34
  Donna Friedman: He's right, it would have been very difficult to sell his home, how close the erosion was to his home.
• 32:40
  SPEAKER_01: And folks can hear that story and they can say, well, they shouldn't have bought that house in the first place.
• 32:45
  SPEAKER_01: And the answer to that is quite often people have no idea that this is the situation.
• 32:50
  SPEAKER_01: And it's not really individual residents who have whole other professions and whole other areas of expertise that they somehow need to be a hydrology expert.
• 32:59
  SPEAKER_01: That stream could have been many, many feet from that home when he bought it, right?
• 33:04
  SPEAKER_01: And then you have upstream development in the watershed, things happening outside of that community that that community has no control over that can cause that stream to move around.
• 33:13
  SPEAKER_01: So uh these issues are not unique to any one community, and they're happening all over.
• 33:18
  SPEAKER_01: And our approach at the sewer district is to take a very much like this is what's happening on the ground, how do we solve it in the most economical way?
• 33:26
  SPEAKER_01: And we have this great tool on our website, NERSD.org.
• 33:29
  SPEAKER_01: It's called FeeFinder.
• 33:30
  SPEAKER_01: You can go in there, you can look up your parcel, you can look up anybody else's parcel.
• 33:35
  SPEAKER_01: It's very, very cool.
• 33:36
  SPEAKER_01: It is hand-digitized impervious surface.
• 33:39
  SPEAKER_01: I think the thing to keep in mind about the fee is that it is a fee for service.
• 33:44
  SPEAKER_01: It is not a tax.
• 33:46
  SPEAKER_01: It's a fee based on the service that we're providing of managing the stormwater that's flowing from that property.
• 33:51
  SPEAKER_01: Impervious surface driveways, parking lots, rooftops are a proxy for the amount of stormwater that's leaving a property and uh, you know, are a proven and you know, scientifically connected good proxy for that.
• 34:03
  SPEAKER_01: We do have ways for folks to reduce those fees by uh uh getting a credit for rain gardens, rain barrels, disconnecting their downspouts, and all of that is helping folks understand how stormwater leaves their property.
• 34:16
  Mike Uva: Hand digitized.
• 34:17
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, we've got a great team.
• 34:19
  SPEAKER_01: It means we have a uh GIS services team that works in the same department um with Kim, and they have gone through all the parcels in our service area and made sure that the impervious surface calculation is correct.
• 34:33
  SPEAKER_01: It's not just computer generated, and then every year we update it and correct it.
• 34:39
  SPEAKER_02: 25% of the revenue that we bring in from our communities goes into a community cost share account.
• 34:46
  SPEAKER_02: And that community cost share account can be used by each individual community, and again, it's 25% of the fees that their residents pay.
• 34:53
  SPEAKER_02: They can use that money for projects that are related to stormwater.
• 34:57
  SPEAKER_02: So they could be local stormwater projects, local catch basin cleaning, anything that's related or equipment necessary in order to maintain their local stormwater systems.
• 35:06
  SPEAKER_02: It's been a really great program to allow the communities to prioritize their own local stormwater needs as we work on more of the regional needs.
• 35:15
  SPEAKER_02: The program's been really successful.
• 35:17
  SPEAKER_02: We've had about$76 million reimbursed through the community cost share program back to the communities.
• 35:23
  SPEAKER_02: And so it's a really great way for continued progress on all stormwater levels.
• 35:28
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 35:29
  SPEAKER_01: Right, because as I said at the top, we were formed to solve inner community drainage problems, both storm and sanitary.
• 35:35
  SPEAKER_01: There's a lot of intra-community problems.
• 35:38
  SPEAKER_01: Basically, we solved the big stuff, big stormwater issues, big sanitary sewer issues, and our member communities solve the local stuff, local sanitary issues and local storm issues.
• 35:48
  SPEAKER_01: And it's a great partnership and it's worked really well on both sides of the house.
• 35:52
  SPEAKER_01: And the community cost share program came out through the development of the program with our member communities.
• 35:58
  SPEAKER_01: When when we originally thought of it, it was 7.5% of the dollars.
• 36:01
  SPEAKER_01: And then we talked more and more with the communities because there was a lot of communities at the time in 2013 that were already doing a lot of stormwater.
• 36:08
  SPEAKER_01: And they they thought, you know, look, we're already ahead.
• 36:12
  SPEAKER_01: So that's where we came in with the 25%.
• 36:14
  SPEAKER_01: And it's been a really great uh part of the program.
• 36:18
  Donna Friedman: So I think, you know, in this first decade, wow, um, of establishing the program, we there was a lot of foundational work laid, right?
• 36:26
  Donna Friedman: What do you think the next 10 years of the regional stormwater management program will look like and how may it be different from the first 10 years?
• 36:34
  SPEAKER_01: Well, I think for sure we're moving into some very large and expensive projects.
• 36:40
  SPEAKER_01: So uh figuring out over the next 10 years what the funding and financing looks like for the program, there may be some evolution on that.
• 36:48
  SPEAKER_01: Um, not necessarily any specific increases to fees, but figuring out exactly how we're gonna fund some of these large projects.
• 36:56
  SPEAKER_01: So when you're able to have modeling and master planning, you then can solve some bigger problems.
• 37:04
  SPEAKER_01: So we have a couple very large projects.
• 37:06
  SPEAKER_01: Obviously, the Domebrook Restoration at Horseshoe Park is gonna be a large project and a couple other really large projects.
• 37:12
  SPEAKER_01: So it's figuring out those.
• 37:15
  Donna Friedman: Kim, what about you?
• 37:16
  SPEAKER_02: I I think the next 10 years will be really focused on data, um, changing data that we're getting in, as well as how to interpret the tools we use to have better design standards to make sure that our solutions are um addressing real life concerns.
• 37:36
  SPEAKER_02: Um, you know, I think, as we I think we've all seen, you know, Mother Nature really hasn't decided to uh comply with our current stormwater design standards, right?
• 37:46
  SPEAKER_02: And so looking at those standards and figuring out what they should be moving forward.
• 37:51
  SPEAKER_02: We've got so much data here at the sewer district, level monitors, flow monitors, uh the trail cams, and understanding our models, calibrating them based on all of our data, and then using all of our rainfall information that we've acquired over the really the past, you know, 12 to 14 years of uh really detailed radar rainfall data to be able to actually understand individual storms and the data we've collected for them to be able to project where we should be designing for tomorrow and also 20 years from now, 50 years from now, and making sure our systems projects and systems are resilient to those future-changing conditions.
• 38:32
  Mike Uva: Kyle Dreyfus Wells is the CEO of the Northeast Ohio Regional Sewer District, and Kim Kohlich is a stormwater program manager.
• 38:39
  Mike Uva: Congratulations on the first decade of our stormwater management program.
• 38:42
  SPEAKER_02: Thanks.
• 38:43
  SPEAKER_02: Thanks for having us.