High water, high anxiety
Last summer made it clear that flooding is one of the greatest risks the Northeast faces from climate change. Warm air and oceans, along with sea level rise, mean more intense storms and floods — this summer, the summer of 2021 and likely summers in the future.
The Fifth National Climate Assessment, released earlier this month, specifically noted extreme precipitation and flooding as a key climate change issue for the Northeast.
This is the last of a four-part CT Mirror series examining the impact of flooding on communities. In the first story, we looked at how regulations are changing to deal with more water. In the second, we looked at how flooding affects the shoreline. In the third, we examined how inland areas are coping with floodwaters. Today, how towns with little or no expertise in dealing with the extremes of climate change can get help.
On a blue-sky, not-a-raindrop-in-sight October afternoon, Stephen White surveyed the rain garden his team had just about completed in Town Center Park in Hamden.
“Garden” may be understating it.
It’s big — 2.5 acres. It was conceived to handle drainage of more than 96 million gallons of stormwater a year from more than 73 acres of watershed up the hill near Hamden’s downtown. Its purpose is to keep the rest of the park from flooding, especially in summer, when the huge adjacent events area can get too muddy to use. It also filters out contamination that the water picks up from streets and other surfaces.
A large pipe at one end empties into a ditch that drains into a retention pond, surrounded by newly planted water-absorbing trees and native plants — with more to come — and fitted with rock drainage areas.
Even though it was only half-finished when the July floods hit, the pond area did exactly what it was supposed to.
“It’s never overflowed. It’s all stayed within the footprint,” said White, who is Hamden’s town engineer. “Ever since then, this whole pool has just had water constantly because it’s been raining.”
The project is actually one of more than two dozen recommended to Hamden by an entity called the Stormwater Corps. The corps is actually a two-semester set of undergraduate or graduate classes at the University of Connecticut that includes sending students right into local communities to figure out what nature-based solutions — also known as green infrastructure, like rain gardens — they can use to deal with stormwater impacts from climate change. Municipalities receive a report detailing what they can do, where they can do it and the potential results.
Best of all, the program is free.
For towns with little or no expertise in dealing with the extremes of climate change — or small staffs, or little money, or all of the above — a resource like Stormwater Corps can be invaluable. It can also help municipalities substitute green infrastructure for some of the big, traditional, so-called gray stormwater infrastructure, like drains, sewers, pump stations and bridge replacements, which is often prohibitively expensive.
Flooding and stormwater are cited as the top concerns in a recent needs assessment conducted in the coastal zone around the whole of Long Island Sound. That has been underscored by relentless extreme rains that started this summer and are now predicted into the winter.
But Stormwater Corps is not the only resource for these towns. In addition to a number of nonprofits whose missions include facilitating flooding remediation projects and funding sources from government and others, communities now have access to grant writing support, resilience training and planning assistance. Perhaps most controversially, there’s now a vehicle for municipalities to essentially help themselves: stormwater authorities, also referred to as stormwater utilities.
Stormwater authorities: New London
Stormwater authorities generally work this way: Residences, commercial entities, tax-exempt properties — basically anything with a physical footprint — are assessed fees that go into a fund, which is then used solely for infrastructure that addresses all manner of stormwater issues. Yes, it costs residents money. Will it work? Just ask New London.
“We generate about $1.4 million a year in revenue that strictly supports and is dedicated to the stormwater utility costs associated with maintenance, permit compliance, any kind of capital work that we need to bond — anything like that,” said Joseph Lanzafame, who’s been the city’s director of public utilities for 14 years. “It’s been very successful for us.”
New London is five years in, which predates the 2021 authorizing legislation to let all municipalities in the state establish such stormwater authorities. Despite a years-long campaign to get the legislature to do that, only one other municipality — New Britain — has followed, though another one or two and a couple of Councils of Government are looking into it.
Lanzafame said being able to count on general fund money to deal with the many flooding issues the city faced just wasn’t working. So New London asked for and was granted permission to run a pilot project. Essentially, it’s still going.
To be clear, it’s a fee, not a tax; it’s not tied to property value. What it is tied to is the impervious cover on a property. That’s the hard surfaces like roofs, paved driveways, patios — the areas where water cannot be absorbed.
New London charges $7.50 per 1,000 square feet of impervious cover, which is billed quarterly. “I would say the average resident in New London for the average house in New London pays between $30 to $60 a year,” Lanzafame said.
Five years later, with that dedicated funding stream, the city has just about worked through its 30-year backlog of problems and projects. While it’s helped alleviate persistent flooding in areas of the city, it has also been used to fix stormwater runoff problems that had persistently kept the city out of compliance with state regulations. Most of those regulations deal with stormwater quality. But when that’s addressed, the stormwater quantity that often causes flooding also improves.
The next push in New London will include green infrastructure projects, some of which were recommended by a Stormwater Corps team.
“We’re still in recovering-from-the-years-of-neglect mode,” Lanzafame said. “But I do believe that it raised a lot of awareness in things that we can do or ask others to do to try to help lessen the impact of development on the flooding issues that we’re having.”
To that end, Lanzafame said, the city has added green infrastructure and stormwater mitigation requirements to development projects. He’s finding many developers now are going even beyond what they have to do.
New Britain
After five storms with significant flooding this summer alone, New Britain is not second-guessing its decision to implement a stormwater utility, which went live less than a year and a half ago. Mark Moriarty said he hadn’t seen anything like this summer in his 18 years as public works director.
“Not even close,” he said. “It doesn’t have to be a long-duration storm. It could be a short duration, high-intensity storm.”
New Britain’s utility runs a little differently than New London’s. Residential assessments are based on the square footage of homes; commercial properties are based on their impervious cover. It’s designed to bring in about $1.8 million.
Already the utility has allowed the city to address two of its most persistent flooding problems. It closed the funding gap for a project around Overlook Avenue and McKinley Drive. And it will allow them to do a $7 million project on Allen Street that’s been waiting for years.
Asked whether any of the infrastructure work now in the pipeline would have happened without a stormwater utility in place: “No way,” he said. “There’s no way I would be able to get $1.8 million a year out of the tax base effectively and guaranteed every year. It just wouldn’t happen.”
But few additional municipalities are interested right now, though the Department of Energy and Environmental Protection notes that a number of the 17 communities that received its 21 Climate Resilience Fund grants in June would be using the cash to address flooding.
Only two, however, planned to specifically assess the feasibility of a stormwater authority. One was the city of West Haven. The other was the Capital Region COG, one of two COGs looking into authorities.
CRCOG Executive Director Matt Hart said he’ll use his $250,000 to hire a consultant to look at the region’s infrastructure and ask them to specifically address in their recommendations stormwater authority feasibility for the region as a whole and for individual communities. If anything comes of it, even starting an authority would be years away, to say nothing of the stormwater and flooding projects themselves.
DEEP is aware of the enthusiasm gap.
Raising interest
Graham Stevens, bureau chief of water protection and land reuse, said the department’s plan includes more energetic outreach to communities.
“What we want to do in our reaching out to municipalities is find out what are the barriers to adopting a stormwater authority and how can the state reduce those barriers,” he said.
That means learning from Danbury, which tried to do it and failed, as well as from New London’s and New Britain’s successes. DEEP’s intent is to provide the technical assistance based on the needs and barriers communities say they have. That could mean providing model ordinances or contracts they can use with consulting firms.
Barrier No. 1, of course, is convincing a town’s residents that the fee for a stormwater authority is not a tax and that it’s worth paying.
“Some people will call it a tax,” Stevens said. “Maybe they wouldn’t if they understood what the benefits were. And I think that’s something that we need to be thinking about — how do we message that there are benefits to living in a town with a stormwater authority?
“I think there needs to be more outreach to the public to explain what these authorities can potentially do, how it could benefit them.”
For instance, it can be used to maintain infrastructure, freeing up money in a town’s general fund for other purposes.
“It’s not that much money, and your fee is going directly to the department that’s working on the problem,” said Bill Lucey, Long Island soundkeeper at Save the Sound. “It’s like paying your electric bill or your water bill or your sewer bill. It’s paying your pollution bill.”
Save the Sound is among several nonprofits working with communities to help them plan and fund green infrastructure to handle flooding and stormwater. While noting that authorities provide “beautiful matching dollars for federal and state infrastructure grants,” he conceded that an authority might wind up being used more for big-ticket gray infrastructure.
Stevens at DEEP also admitted that could happen, in spite of the state’s and environmental organizations’ push and even incentives for more nature-based solutions to flooding.
“I think it should be both gray and green,” Stevens said.
DEEP is already planning to start a matching-fund program to help communities with the match that’s necessary for most federal grant programs.
But it can take a year or more to get a stormwater authority up and running, and lead and construction times are long for large gray infrastructure projects. So green infrastructure projects can buy communities some smaller-scale flooding relief faster.
A new resource
Municipalities close to the shoreline now have a new resource to help with that: the Sustainable and Resilient Communities Work Group, launched in late 2021.
The group is a joint state and federal operation through the Long Island Sound study. The first work it did was the needs assessment that identified flooding and stormwater as the top concerns. Those concerns were followed by sea level rise, coastal flooding, extreme weather and storms and water quality — lots of water. Shoreline areas face it in two directions — from coastal flooding due to sea level rise and storms and inland flooding from heavy rain.
The focus of the program is to help communities address these issues by providing multiple levels of assistance. Grant writing assistance is underway, with a second round coming up. A resilience planning support program is also underway, and there are training programs, field trips and an annual workshop. Working with the U.S. Geological Survey, it plans to provide a compound flood risk model to help towns understand the interaction of the bi-directional water risks they face, said Deb Abibou. She handles western Connecticut as one of the five extension professionals running the program.
The problem overall is the familiar one — that communities just don’t have the resources, personnel or knowledge to tackle the flooding effects of climate change on their own.
“A lot of times, there’s difficulty with accessing information. People aren’t sure where to go for the best expertise or other resources they might need,” she said. “We’re putting together a resource hub website to deal with that.” The hub is expected to be up in December.
They’re also trying to facilitate better coordination among cities and towns. The mix of private and public properties often hamper that. Small towns are often more isolated, and local governments and nonprofits doing resilience work can find themselves at cross-purposes. “Towns want to know what their neighbors are doing,” Abibou said.
Back in Hamden, town engineer Stephen White reported that the new rain garden handled the two rainy weekends that followed just fine. The town has three similar projects in the pipeline.
Given that his department and public works helped the town save nearly half the $700,000 cost of the park project by doing the design and building in-house, and the town just picked up a cool $567,500 to develop and design a pump station replacement and some green infrastructure, he’s psyched to do it again.
He admits designing a pump station and watershed plan will take quite a while and may require technical knowledge and software that he doesn’t have in house right now. But he’s going to be hiring an assistant town engineer and that may fill in some gaps.
“If I paid engineers to design it and then pay the contractor to build it, I would have never been able to do it,” White said. “We would have blown our entire budget just in one project.”