Clean Water Works
CLEVELAND, OHIO: From the Northeast Ohio Regional Sewer District, an in-depth and fun conversation led by Donna Friedman and Mike Uva on any and all topics related to clean water, wastewater treatment, stormwater management, and the people, projects, and programs serving Lake Erie and our local waterways and communities.
Clean Water Works
Stormwater Awareness Week!
Kristin Hall is Executive Director of Cuyahoga Soil and Water Conservation District. She explains the distinctions between natural and urban environments in managing stormwater and the significance of these practices in preventing urban flooding and safeguarding water quality. We also discuss the Sewer District's own Regional Stormwater Management Program, the impact of severe weather events, and the importance of our storage tunnels. Stormwater Awareness Week takes place October 1 - 7 and you can learn more at cuyahogaswcd.org
So we definitely want to talk about Stormwater Awareness Week.
Speaker 2:Absolutely yeah.
Speaker 1:Donna, of course, knows tons about stormwater.
Speaker 3:And awareness and awareness and how weeks work. Seven days still, I think.
Speaker 1:I know a little less about stormwater than Donna, but I know my fair share, Sure. But I'm wondering if you had to give an elevator pitch to someone who didn't know anything about stormwater and why it's a big deal, what would you say?
Speaker 2:The way I usually help people think about it is I get them to visualize that we're out in the woods, actually in an urban environment.
Speaker 2:But many folks have experienced, you know, being out in the woods, being in nature, being in more of kind of a forested setting, which is kind of what our land originally looked like, or at least here in Northeast Ohio. And when you're out there, if it starts raining, the ground below you is naturally going to soak up a lot of that water. It's going to act like a sponge, because that's kind of how it works. You've got really good, rich soil underneath and vegetation that is going to help suck up all of that water between your plants, your trees et cetera, and then anything that kind of can't get soaked up is going to run off into your streams and then eventually rivers, lakes, et cetera. Now let's bring us into our cities, our urban environments. We have covered a lot of that natural land with hard surfaces, sidewalks, houses, buildings et cetera. Honestly, even some of the grass that we have really only can soak up so much because it just has so much capacity or the soil below it isn't quite as spongy as we would like it to be.
Speaker 2:So we have to divert that water because we don't want our homes and roads flooded with water. We have to get around and live our lives. We want to divert that into those waterways in the best way that we can and I will say some of our predecessors before us did the best that they could. But you know, over time our cities and communities and infrastructure has evolved. We have a lot more hard surfaces, so there's a lot more going in there and we are doing our best in an urban setting to find that natural balance of, when it rains or snows basically any water falling from the sky that we're able to get it into those waterways as close to that forest setting as possible.
Speaker 1:Kristen Hall is the executive director of Cuyahoga Soil and Water Conservation District.
Speaker 2:Correct. I like to say to especially any of our Cuyahoga County listeners we are your Soil and Water Conservation District. One of the things I found really interesting when I joined the district is there are 88 districts throughout the state of Ohio. There's one in every district.
Speaker 1:Every county right, Every county, excuse me, yes, which was really surprising.
Speaker 2:I had worked with the district for many years and thought we were kind of an entity of Cuyahoga County, but we're actually a political subdivision of the state and our district has been around since 1949. So we're celebrating our 75th anniversary this year, which is really exciting. As I mentioned, you know 88 districts throughout the county. As you get outside of Cuyahoga they tend to focus a little bit more on the agricultural side. Obviously they're a lot more rural, and that was really our focus as a district when we first started. Cuyahoga County had more than 70,000 acres of farmland in 1949 and more than 2,000 farms operating. We're now down to just a little over 2,000 acres and just over 100 farms in operation, including some of our kind of more urban agriculture representatives, and obviously over that time our focus as a district has really had to shift as well.
Speaker 2:So really over the last two decades we've been focusing a lot more on stormwater management, stormwater awareness, how we can support our communities in those ways and some of the other conservation topics that are kind of adjacent to it. So, as I'm sure you both know, trees do a fantastic job of soaking up stormwater. They also bring tons of other community and health benefits. So you know we work closely with a number of other partners on trees and other vegetation. We do native plant sales et cetera to help support kind of that bigger picture of water quality and soil quality as well. We work very closely with the Rocky River Watershed Council, euclid Creek Watershed Council and Friends of Euclid Creek and the Cuyahoga River Area of Concern, so really trying to cover all of the major watersheds that we have here in the county. So between working with those groups and all of the constituents that those watersheds represent, there's no shortage of work there and the sewer district has its own regional stormwater management program.
Speaker 1:Donna, could you give an elevator pitch of what that does?
Speaker 3:Sure. So the regional stormwater management program was started around 2016, with even previous studies going into it, but, similar to what Kristen was saying, it was to address these stormwater issues related to water quality impairments, erosion and flooding. Our program collects the stormwater fee across 57 communities and then takes those funds and puts them towards projects to mitigate water quality impairments, reduce erosion and reduce flooding, and we work with Soil and Water all the time in order to help provide support to our member communities.
Speaker 2:We at Cuyahoga Soil and Water really appreciate having an entity like the Sewer District here in our communities and it's through them that we are able to, I think, be as impactful as we have been. Donna mentioned the stormwater fees. Some of our communities are utilizing those fees to support some of their own stormwater operations, that is, maintaining their infrastructure within their communities, addressing their minimum control measures under the MS4 permit, the Municipal Separate Storm Sewer Permit. I believe I got all my S's right there.
Speaker 1:What is that MS4?
Speaker 2:So the MS4 permit, and I'll give a little very brief background. In 1972, the US EPA passed the Clean Water Act. Yes, and some of it. I think we locally can take a little bit of credit for that. We might have had a burning river, but it brought a lot of national attention to some of the industrial pollution that many large US cities were experiencing. So we weren't the only ones. But following the Clean Water Act was the NPDES permit, the National Pollution Discharge Elimination System. It's a permitting program very focused on point source pollution and really I think helped address a lot of that industrial pollution that we were seeing along the Cuyahoga River and other major riverways, you know all waters of the US. Those measures were addressing a lot of the pollution but we were still seeing water quality impairments due to what we call non-point source pollution, and many of the listeners I'm sure are aware of what non-point source pollution is. But it's things that you really can't kind of point to the same way you could point to a pipe, that is you know putting out pollution, yes.
Speaker 2:So things like runoff from the roads that might contain salt or oil from vehicles or heavy metals, animal wastes, you know, if you're not remembering to pick up your poop, you're going to, you know, potentially invite some of that E coli bacteria into our storm system. Early 2000s, I think phase two, came out of the permit program that really focused on minimum control measures that communities could put in place to reduce their non-point source pollution. So really getting our residents and businesses and other community leaders to understand what the issues are and why we need to care about them, but also giving them a chance to get involved and really hands-on. So we'll do things like rain barrel workshops. As an example, there's one minimum control measure focused on illicit discharge.
Speaker 2:We really work closely with a lot of communities and a lot of that is focused on construction activities and then the control measures that are in place after construction. So there is a lot to break down just in that one MS4 permit. But we're here to help with it and, as I mentioned earlier, the sewer district has been just an incredible partner in supporting that work and I think we have been really a local model for how to engage, educate and empower our folks to actually do some stuff.
Speaker 3:And we take on some of those minimum control measures through the sewer district. So we fund all the sampling of the outfalls that helps to identify those illicit discharges and then the communities can use some of the money back from the program and that's the community cost share program. So 25% of the stormwater fees that we collect in a given community goes back to the community for use on local stormwater-related projects or activities and so any of those minimum control measures can be applied for and they can use that money that they get back.
Speaker 2:Yeah, in my previous role when I worked at the city of Cleveland, we actually utilized some of those community cost share dollars as a match for a federal grant to do some work over at Wildwood Park. So it was nice to know that some of that was available and it really did make a difference. I think we were able to do, you know, a $300,000 plus project with some of that support, so it's been fantastic.
Speaker 3:Can you give us some examples of when residents might call you and need help? What does that look like? Sure.
Speaker 2:Some of it may be asking about different types of plants to plant. So perhaps they're thinking about putting in a rain garden and just want to know what would be the right types of plants that I should put here. We offer a master rain gardener program for anyone that's interested in really knowing all of the ins and outs of what can go into there. Some residents who may have a stream on or near their property may see erosion or undercutting or other types of stream impairments that they want us to come out and take a look at. Our watershed team does a great job of kind of evaluating that. We do what we can and try to connect to the many resources that we have throughout the county, even outside of our organization.
Speaker 1:What are some of the things you're trying to promote through Stormwater Awareness Week?
Speaker 2:One of the big messages that we're hoping to get out throughout that entire week is slow it down, spread it out, soak it in. Water is going to naturally run in whatever is the easiest path for it to go.
Speaker 2:So, if we can kind of break that up a little bit, not give it just a straight shoot to move down, for example, roads, sidewalks, channels, culverts it's going to help break up that velocity and make it a little less intense. Whenever it does hit, whatever, the next thing is that it's flowing towards. You also want to make sure that you aren't trying to force the water through something that's perhaps too narrow for it. You want to give it as much room as possible to soak in. If you had a piece of paper size of soil and you're trying to pour water on it, eventually you're going to fill that in pretty quickly. If you instead took a tarp that's 10 feet by 10 feet of soil, you have so much more area to soak in that water and you know it's going to just create more opportunity to reduce the runoff that you're going to see going to those other areas. Soak it in. If you have some really good spongy soil, that water is hitting as soon as it lands. It's really going to minimize how much of it actually is going to run off into those stormwater systems right away. It gives it a little bit more time to infiltrate into our ground and support those plants that will hopefully be in those areas as well.
Speaker 2:I think a lot of us are expecting that our storm frequency is going to increase both the frequency and intensity. You know we're not too far away from it. Many of us remember just a month ago we had tornadoes. I'll get to some of the damage that we saw and just what that means for stormwater, but the volume of water that we are expecting our systems to accept is a lot greater than it used to be. You know, I really appreciate that we have some of the tunnel systems that are coming online to hold some of that, because otherwise we know where it goes. I'm sure you've talked about combined sewer overflows and other flooding, erosion, infrastructure damage.
Speaker 2:You know, I think there's many communities that are still recovering from the damage that we saw in those storms and you know, one of my biggest thoughts as I was driving around was, of course, looking at some of the trees.
Speaker 2:You know, obviously we've talked trees are a great stormwater capture mechanism, especially the bigger they get, the more they can soak up. And some of our really large canopy trees came down during those storms and it's going to take us some time to be able to replace that infrastructure with newly planted trees. We have a lot going on through our Healthy Urban Tree tree canopy program at the county, so we're getting a lot of new trees planted but it's going to take you 50 trees, 50 new trees, to achieve some of the stormwater benefits that you would see from a 50-inch caliper tree. So knowing that we have some of that larger scale kind of gray infrastructure also gives me, as a resident here, a little bit of peace of mind as well that we're not going to shut down as a community if you know, if and probably when some of these storms return.
Speaker 1:You don't really think of trees as infrastructure that often.
Speaker 2:We're trying to change that.
Speaker 3:We had a podcast with George Ramius, who's the manager of Stormwater Strategic Support, and he talked a lot about how we're expecting to see storms change and become more frequent and more intense with these cloud bursts that we've been seeing microbursts so it is something that we're thinking of. And then the tunnels that you mentioned the Project Clean Lake that we have to catch some of that combined sewer overflow before it goes out to the environment. They're currently working on the Southerly Tunnel, which is the second to last tunnel that we're digging. I was just in a meeting for our Big Creek Tunnel, which is going to be the final tunnel.
Speaker 3:And then we pack up and go home.
Speaker 2:Yes, that's it Close up shot. I feel like by now you guys have this down to a science. You can probably just crank those tunnels out, oh sure, yeah, you need one, give us a call, just as Donna was sharing. That it made me sort of appreciate and I think especially in the last couple years since I've joined Cuyahoga Soil and Water and just how closely we work with the 59 communities in Cuyahoga County, how blessed we are to have a regional sewer and stormwater entity.
Speaker 2:You know I think many other cities have to deal with some of this on their own and or have private it's, you know, managed by private entities. And you know, having a public service like that, a public utility that really works so hard to keep our water clean, you know I'm again thankful to have you here. I know many of our communities are as well, and I think our residents are really. You know, we're starting to grow that awareness of just what that water cycle is and you know where it goes.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I think it's been really nice having the stormwater program, because wastewater and stormwater really go hand in hand, especially in combined sewer areas. So being able to really address problems in a more holistic fashion with our partners has been really helpful. And I think that the residents are starting to see the benefits, especially when we're doing projects in their neighborhoods and they see the newly planted trees and they see the stream being remeandered instead of coming through a pipe and all of those things. So I think those benefits are definitely being realized the further along we get in the stormwater program.
Speaker 2:I know we've recently partnered with the sewer district on the drain keeper program.
Speaker 1:Oh we, should talk about that drain keepers.
Speaker 2:Especially if you haven't yet on the podcast. We have partnered with the sewer district. They received funding through a local chapter of a sorority. The sorority was looking for a project that would have impact on our local communities.
Speaker 2:We're working with the cities of Maple Heights and Brook Park to engage residents as drainkeepers so they will essentially adopt a storm drain that's near their home. They can go to their local service department in those respective cities, get a drainkeeper kit that includes some tools like brooms and dust pans, rakes, some gloves and some trash bags and, you know, gets them out there and just helps kind of monitor their local drain and kind of keep it free of any debris or litter and hopefully, if there are any issues with it, report it to their local service department so that we can kind of keep on top of that. While it may not have an enormous impact in terms of the amount of material that we're keeping out, I think it's really helping to create more awareness among residents that might not otherwise kind of think about that catch basin that's sitting on their street.
Speaker 2:So if any Brook Park or Maple Heights residents are interested in participating, please check out either the sewer district or Cuyahoga Soil and Water's websites and we can get you signed up. Do you find that your?
Speaker 3:work at Cleveland, when you were in sustainability, crosses over into your work now.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think what I have appreciated working at the city of Cleveland is it really did give me a good sense of local government kind of how it's structured, how it operates and how you can get some things done. And now that I'm at Cuyahoga Soil and Water, we have a much bigger footprint covering all of the county. It's been helpful to just have some of that experience of local government systems so that when we want to perhaps help communities put a policy in place or ordinances or code language that better supports conservation right at the start, well before any new activities or construction may happen, we better understand how to best execute that and get it done, because there's a lot of players and rules and regulations when it comes to doing things in and for our communities. We want to do it the right way and we want to do it in a way that has a lasting impact. So I think it's helped me kind of see what levers we can pull that will hopefully have a ripple effect in the long run.
Speaker 1:How do people find out more about Cuyahoga Soil and Water Conservation District?
Speaker 2:I would invite you to visit our website, wwwcuyahogaswcdorg. You can follow us on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn and Twitter. You can also sign up for our e-newsletter and get any updates for upcoming events, workshops, etc. Nice yeah, the only other thing I would love to plug, if you don't mind, is our Stormwater Runoff.
Speaker 1:Yes, coming up. What's the date of that?
Speaker 2:So our Stormwater Runoff is coming up October 6th. It is at the tail end of Stormwater Awareness Week. Many of us, like I said, we work with other districts throughout the state are going to be celebrating and I believe there is a house bill out right now to try to make it a statewide week. So it will be Ohio Stormwater Awareness Week, kind of permanently always the first week of October. So we're hoping to raise a little bit of awareness in that week leading up to it, get some folks to sign up for our stormwater runoff. It's going to be a 5K and one mile family fun run. Again, our purpose is to just educate on some different ways that again, you can slow it down, spread it out and soak it in. So even during the race we're hoping to have some examples of that. Along the race course, For example, you may have to do a rain barrel slalom to run in and out of some rain barrels.
Speaker 2:So there are obstacles Some obstacles might be a part of it as well. For those of you that are perhaps more dedicated runners, those will be optional, so you don't have to worry about your race time. Where is the course? It's actually going to start at Clark Field in the Tremont neighborhood. We picked that one because it is really right in a very heavily urbanized area. It is really right in a very heavily urbanized area. The Clark Fields did a healthy urban tree canopy project there as well and the course, I think, is just going to be relatively flat and accessible so you can walk, you can run, you can roll, so if you say have a stroller or wheelchair, it will be all paved. So that's another reason that we kind of picked that spot. Any proceeds from the event are going to help support our Conservation Action Grants. So we're very excited to just continue to do more and give our residents, nonprofits, CDCs, et cetera, a chance to take conservation into their own hands and make it all happen.
Speaker 1:All right.
Speaker 2:So the runoff is Sunday, october 6th at Clark Fields down in Tremont. I'm going to say 8 am is registration and I believe the race starts at 9.
Speaker 1:All right.
Speaker 2:More information can be found on our website, CuyahogaSWCDorg slash runoff, or if you just go to our main homepage, you'll find it there as well.
Speaker 1:Great Kristen Hall. Thank you so much for joining us today.
Speaker 2:Thank you both for having me. This has been fantastic. I love talking all things stormwater and I have the two best people I can talk to about it.
Speaker 3:Aw shucks.
