There’s an old saying in national politics: “As Maine goes, so goes the nation.” That may also become true for stormwater management. A prime example is the restoration of Maine’s Long Creek, a first-in-the-nation effort to address stormwater issues through a watershed approach, using a collaborative structure with public entities and private businesses.
Long Creek, a small urban stream with four primary branches, flows through four cities in southern Maine. Increases in the cities’ impervious surfaces and attendant volumes of stormwater runoff have impaired Long Creek and its ability to offer wildlife habitats and recreation for the area’s residents.
Volunteers planted hundreds of trees and shrubs.
The Long Creek watershed covers 3.45 square miles. It includes the cities of South Portland (2000 population 23,324), Westbrook (16,142), Portland (64,249), and Scarborough (16,970).
The Maine Department of Environmental Protection (MEDEP) divides the Long Creek watershed into seven subwatersheds. Most of the watershed (62%) is in South Portland, a small residential city until a shipyard opened in 1940 to build cargo ships for Great Britain and then the 440-foot-long cargo-carrying “liberty ships” for the US.
In the mid-1960s, South Portland leaders foresaw economic growth from development of the nearby interstate and the Portland International Jetport. The city bought about 130 acres of a former pig farm. On that land, a developer built the Maine Mall, now the largest retail, office, and commercial complex north of Boston. Its retail space measures 1.2 million square feet.
Except for Scarborough, the population of the cities in the Long Creek Watershed has remained relatively stable. What has increased tremendously is the number of commercial buildings, roads, and other infrastructure, all contributing to the polluted stormwater runoff. Now the watershed has more than 640 acres of impervious surfaces.
Records kept from 1940 through 2008 show that the average annual precipitation for the area is 45.83 inches of rainfall and 66.4 inches of snowfall. On average, 11 days have an inch or more of rainfall.
To deal with all of that runoff and pollution, the Long Creek Restoration Project was created. It is a collaborative effort, with representatives from the four municipalities, area businesses, nonprofit organizations, and state agencies. The project will take 10 years to complete and cost about $14 million.
Nonprofit and governmental agencies involved in the project include South Portland Land Trust, Casco Bay Estuary Partnership, ecomaine, the Maine Wetlands Bank, the Conservation Law Foundation, Maine Department of Transportation, Maine Turnpike Authority, MEDEP, and Cumberland County Soil and Water Conservation District (CCSWCD).
“South Portland served as the catalyst for involving the three other watershed communities in the watershed management plan [WMP] development process,” says Frederick Dillon, stormwater program coordinator for South Portland (and previously with the consulting firm FB Environmental, which helped develop the watershed management plan).
He adds that the 319 grant the four cities were awarded provided funds to hire technical consultants to develop the plan (FB Environmental and Woodard & Curran), facilitation consultants to coordinate the extensive stakeholder process (Gosline & Reitman), project grant administrators (CCSWCD), and geomorphology consultants (Field Geomorphology).
The consortium was able to save both time and money because mapping of the catchment areas had been done earlier by MEDEP. Its goal, with the watershed approach, is to clean up Long Creek more effectively and more cheaply than could be done on an individual regulated basis.
The watershed management plan ranked catchment areas in priority for their restoration potential to the overall watershed. Factors that determined priority included “cost, ease of constructability, presence of existing stormwater infrastructure, extent of impervious area directly connected to the stream, and extent of degradation to riparian and instream habitat,” says Dillon.
In October 2009, EPA established residual designation authority (RDA) that meant all properties in the Long Creek watershed with an acre or more of impervious surface had to obtain National Pollutant Discharge Elimination System (NPDES) permits. MEDEP issued a general permit allowing individuals to join the group project. In March 2010, MEDEP issued an individual permit for landowners who do not want to join the group permit.
Each municipality is also responsible for sweeping all of its publicly owned streets and vacuuming publicly owned catch basins annually. That maintenance work may have to be performed more often, depending on the improvement of water quality in Long Creek.
While some private landowners hesitated or just plain delayed joining in the general permit, Dillon says, “There was never serious consideration on the part of any municipality to oppose the watershed approach in favor of developing a restoration plan solely for the watershed area within its own municipal borders.”
EPA approved the Long Creek Watershed Based Management Plan on July 1, 2009. The Long Creek Watershed Management District (LCWMD) was created in August 2009 by agreement among South Portland, Portland, Westbrook, and Scarborough. CCSWCD was chosen to administer the project, with the agency’s Tamara Lee Pinard as project manager.
The next hurdle was establishing a participating landowner agreement. Stakeholders held numerous meetings over the next few months. Pinard credits Ann Gosline of Gosline & Reitman Dispute Resolutions for the facilitating work she did.
Gosline “worked tirelessly and donated many hours in order to do one-on-one outreach to key stakeholders as a kickoff to the project, which provided us with great insight into the drivers for businesses in the watershed. Having a neutral facilitator was extremely important and allowed Ann to develop great relationships with businesses large and small,” says Pinard.
Dillon agrees. “Skilled facilitation was perhaps the most critical aspect in successfully engaging the diverse group of stakeholders with such a wide variety of often-competing interests.”
A significant amount of the 319 funding was spent to hire Gosline & Reitman, but the company’s work “proved indispensable in getting the various stakeholders to participate meaningfully in the process,” says Dillon. “The resulting WMP was widely perceived as a genuine community-based effort.”
He adds, “Creating the management plan was a relatively straightforward process from a technical perspective. However, getting stakeholders to buy into the notion that it would generally be in their best financial interests to collaborate in the plan’s development, particularly in terms of establishing the fee system, proved to be the biggest challenge.”
Some stakeholders who had installed stormwater treatment systems mandated by MEDEP in the 1980s and 1990s were unhappy that these systems were considered inadequate based on the latest technology and science.
The 10-year restoration project involves four cities, local businesses, nonprofits, and state agencies.
“There was a fair amount of concern that stormwater treatment practices being advocated by the MEDEP for the Long Creek WMP would also eventually prove to be inadequate and that landowner investments would be wasted,” says Dillon.
The first phase of bringing stakeholders on board was focused on the largest landowners in the watershed, most of whom had representatives on the steering and/or technical advisory committees. The second phase involved one-on-one contact.
Pinard called landowners and set up meetings, held conference calls, and sent e-mails to provide information on the upcoming permit and what would be required of watershed landowners with one acre or more of impervious surface.
Installation of StormTech storage chambers with isolator row to the left
Restoration involved modifying drainage, adding underground storage, and planting vegetation.
From Gosline’s outreach efforts, Pinard and the other stormwater officials learned that area business people are “eager to be good corporate citizens, must answer to their organizations, need to show a benefit to the business, seek a strong measure of certainty in order to budget and plan, and want to understand the relationship between this effort and enforcement issues,” explains Pinard.
“We spent 10 months and went through 20 drafts of the participating landowner agreement before it was finalized,” she adds.
Spending that much time and attention to detail was worth it, however. “It allowed for landowners who had not yet been part of the process to recognize that they had a voice in how this was going to work,” she says.
After the draft of the agreement was finished and the final permit was issued, “the last stragglers finally came to the table acknowledging that this was not going away and they would have to deal with it,” says Pinard.
Considering the different priorities of businesses and environmental groups, she says, “What we have learned as we are implementing the plan is that you need to balance water-quality needs with the needs of business.” For example, she says, “We have riparian plantings that are being designed to provide shade and habitat for the stream while maintaining a line of sight to the business.”
Pinard is quick to acknowledge help from other agencies. “We would not have been able to accomplish what we did without EPA 319 and 604(b) funding, administered through Maine DEP, that supported the development of the plan and provided support for the startup phase of the project.”
EPA chose the Long Creek Restoration Committee to receive an environmental merit award.
Long Creek was a first-in-the-nation effort to address stormwater issues through a watershed approach, using a collaborative structure with public entities and private businesses.
Another agency important to the project is Casco Bay Estuary Partnership (CBEP), a program funded through federal CWA 320 funds. CBEP “provided staff and financial support at critical junctures to keep the project moving forward,” she says.
The physical restoration of Long Creek began with two retrofit projects funded by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, aka federal economic stimulus funds, through the Maine State Revolving Loan Fund. The no-interest loan was for $2,095,000 with forgiveness of 27.7% of the principal.
Pinard says receiving those funds while negotiating the interlocal agreement and participating landowner agreement was particularly helpful to the process: “The ability to show results before people were even signed on was incredibly compelling.”
In the summer of 2009, the Maine Department of Transportation (MDOT) reconstructed a portion of Maine Mall Road in South Portland, the first retrofit project. This heavily traveled road runs along the front of the huge shopping mall.
MDOT workers replaced traditional pavement with porous pavement. This was the first use of porous pavement on a highly traveled public road in the Northeast, thus breaking ground in more than one way.
Two layers of permeable paving material totaling 9 inches were placed above a 15-inch bed of reservoir stone, which rests upon 6 inches of sand filter material. Underdrain pipes were installed to capture the filtered water. The total area of the retrofit was about 1.5 acres.
MDOT project manager Peter Newkirk describes the repaving as “an innovative engineering solution to improve our environment. There’s been a great sense of partnership in the planning
for this.”
The second project, also in South Portland, took place along Philbrook Avenue, where the existing drainage system was modified to store and treat runoff. This project also involved planting 2,000 feet of streamside vegetation to provide wildlife habitat and food for aquatic species and shade for lowering the temperature of the stream during hot weather.
In September 2009, volunteers turned out to plant about 350 native trees and shrubs along the south branch tributary of Long Creek. Employees of major area businesses, members of environmental groups, and families helped with the planting.
Stimulus funding is also being used for the Darling Avenue and the Mall Plaza improvement projects, which will also store and treat polluted runoff. The Darling Avenue work involves installing Filterra tree boxes as well as regrading and stabilizing the road shoulder and open ditches to eliminate erosion. At Mall Plaza on Maine Mall Road, piping is being installed to capture stormwater and send it to a sand filter for treatment.
The chance to save money by joining with other landowners in a group permit was obviously a factor in its popularity. As EPA notes on its Web site, “Stormwater management planned on a cost-optimized watershed basis is estimated to cost roughly half as much to implement as controls on an individual parcel basis.”
“This was new and different, and people did not know what would come of this,” says Pinard, “but they definitely had a huge financial driver to work together to find a common solution.”
She and other members of the Watershed Management District noticed that detail helped draw in participants. “More people came into the fold when we were completing the plan and actually had estimate numbers that we could attach to both individual permits and participating in the general permit,” she says.
Owners of more than 91.04% of the impervious surface in the watershed signed up to participate in the group permit. That number is expected to increase. Landowners who sign the agreement must pay an annual fee of $3,000 per acre of impervious surface for 10 years. Those who have installed stormwater detention ponds or other BMPs receive credit and pay less.
The $3,000-per-acre figure compares favorably with estimates for individual permits. That figure ranges from $3,000 to $11,000 per acre.
One of the largest private landowners is Fairchild Semiconductor. Under the group agreement, the corporation’s fee will be $40,000 per year. “We estimate that to be about half of what it would have cost if we were under the individual permit,” says Fairchild spokesperson Patti Olson. “However, cost savings was not the key driver for us in deciding to go with the group participation. Fairchild decided early on that being part of the community project was the primary reason to go with the group. We want to be a good corporate citizen.”
As the creek flows through urban areas, some sections are in better shape than others.
Stimulus funding paid for Mall Plaza improvements.
Pinard says that maximum assessment for the first year will total $1.6 million. Those incoming funds will be used for other parts of the Mall Plaza project, including the large sand filter behind Dick’s Sporting Goods store.
CBEP has been “closely involved with the development of the Long Creek Watershed Monitoring Plan and will continue to be involved with it as it continues to evolve during its first year of operation,” says Curtis Bohlen, CBEP’s director.
In the spring of 2010, while the watershed district was getting started, CBEP funded data collection. Now that collection is done by the LCWMD. Funds to cover future required monitoring of Long Creek have been written into the LCWMD’s long-term budget.
So, although the CBEP has no formal plans to be involved with monitoring activities, Bohlen says the organization “expects to be playing a supporting role wherever we can.”
That involvement might include, he says, “funding data collection that is not required under the Long Creek permits, but that would increase our understanding of what’s going on in Long Creek; working with local academic institutions to encourage faculty and student research projects addressing questions in Long Creek; and providing short-term loans of equipment to facilitate or enhance the work required under the plan.”
The CBEP might also fund work in other urban streams around the region to test out alternative–possibly more efficient–monitoring approaches that might be implemented at Long Creek. “Working in other streams in the region to gather data puts results of monitoring in Long Creek into a regional context,” says Bohlen.
Now that the legal agreements and entities are in practice, Bohlen sees the biggest challenge in next year or so as implementation. “On that front, we will be approaching the limits of what we know about urban watershed restoration. The LCWMD needs to learn to operate effectively and constructively under considerable technical uncertainty, without having the still-fragile institutional structure that has been built come unraveled.”
Bohlen observed the whole process from a unique perspective. “CBEP is a National Estuary Program; we are not a traditional environmental advocacy group. We are funded largely by EPA and advised by a local stakeholder committee with respect to our year-to-year priorities. We take the “˜Partnership’ in our name quite seriously and see our role as facilitating good work on behalf of the bay, wherever it occurs.”
That degree of distance meant that CBEP’s role in the Long Creek process “was largely to be present at the table, but without a particular axe to grind. We were neither regulators nor were we going to end up paying for watershed restoration.”
The advantage of being in such a position allowed Bohlen and others from CBEP “to propose novel ideas without having to worry about whether particular ideas would be accepted. We really were there to help facilitate a search for solutions, and most stakeholders trusted us to play that role,” he explains.
Having worked with representatives of other groups on various aspects of the Long Creek watershed management plan, Bohlen admits, “There have been many places where the effort could have been derailed by a variety of legal or political barriers. It has not. I am more and more convinced of the importance of honest collaborative problem solving in our success so far.”
Asked what advice he would offer to municipal officials and other residents of communities that are under federal order to clean up impaired streams, Bohlen offers three suggestions:
“First, don’t delay getting started. Building consensus on how to address these difficult problems takes time. Solutions won’t be any easier to find if you have to work things out under a regulatory deadline.
“Second, face facts,” he continues. “You have to talk about what restoration will cost and who is going to pay those costs. Discussions about costs are uncomfortable, but they are essential.
“Third, think broadly and long term. If you are only thinking about stormwater, you are not thinking broadly enough. Many urban streams can–and should–be community assets, not eyesores. Imagine what a healthier stream could mean to the community several decades from now. How will stream restoration and stormwater management support other community aspirations? Can you find cost savings or additional benefits by making investment in a stream provide other community benefits?”
Bohlen characterizes the Long Creek watershed management plan, with creation of the LCWMD and the landowners’ agreement, as “a tremendously valuable example of creative collaborative problem solving . . . a testament to years of hard work by many members of the community looking for a better way to address stormwater problems.”
He acknowledges, “It’s still early to be certain how successful the cleanup effort [of Long Creek] will be, but the institutional and collaborative model that is now up and running and being tested in practice is itself noteworthy.”
EPA chose the Long Creek Restoration Committee to receive an environmental merit award. Mayor Tom Blake of South Portland accepted the award in April 2009. Other restoration projects elsewhere may claim similar awards if the nation follows this Maine example.
