Regional Stormwater Project
Oct. 2014 — The Neponset River Watershed Association has partnered with 12 of the 14 communities in the Neponset Valley, and our regional planning agency the Metropolitan Area Planning Council, on a regional collaborative that would work across town lines to curb stormwater pollution.
The collaborative, referred to as the Neponset Stormwater Partnership, includes the communities of Canton, Dedham, Foxborough, Medfield, Milton, Norwood, Randolph, Sharon, Stoughton, Walpole, Westwood, and the Boston Water and Sewer Commission.
All of the participating communities, with the exception of Boston which is participating as a technical adviser, are facing significant new mandates to address stormwater pollution, as the US Environmental Protection Agency prepares to issue more stringent municipal stormwater permits.
The focus of the Neponset Stormwater Partnership is to improve effectiveness and reduce the cost of efforts to comply with the new mandates.
Because the new EPA stormwater permits will require similar work across all communities, there are significant opportunities for cost savings and quality improvements through the economy of scale that comes with a regional approach, rather than having every community re-create the same work using its own consultants or staff.
To help fund the first year of the collaborative’s work, the group received a grant from the Commonwealth’s Community Innovation Challenge Grant program, and each participating community also contributed $5,000 toward completing the first year’s work plan.
The goals for the first year of the plan are to:
- Formalize the Collaborative structure and develop work plans for future years
- Develop an integrated, region-wide outreach and education campaign to inform residents, commercial and industrial property owners, and developers about the problem of stormwater pollution and the steps they can take to prevent or reduce the problem.
- Analyze the drainage collection infrastructure in each community to identify what steps communities will need to take at each of their drainage outfalls to comply with the new permit and prepare some of the key planning documents that will be required.
- Evaluate local stormwater bylaws as well as zoning and other rules in each community and identify changes that may be required or beneficial to help reduce polluted runoff at non-municipal sites.
- Prepare a preliminary evaluation and ranking of publicly-owned parcels that may be suitable for the installation of new measures to intercept and clean up polluted runoff before it enters local streams and wetlands.
- Assemble a variety of model policies and procedures required to comply with the “good housekeeping” provisions of the new municipal stormwater permit.
- Evaluate options for creating a regional database that would make it possible for communities to track whether local developers are keeping up with requirements to perform ongoing maintenance of stormwater pollution control infrastructure.
- Conduct a pilot project in two communities to use the forthcoming MAPC Stormwater Financing Toolkit to evaluate the likely cost of complying with new municipal stormwater permit requirements and evaluate a variety of options for financing those costs.
To learn more, please contact Executive Director at the Neponset River Watershed Association, Ian Cooke, at cooke@neponset.org.
