- Okay, good morning, everyone. It is still morning, barely, but it is morning. Welcome to our stormwater panel.
- We're also presentation and panel, I suppose. This is kind of your welcome from us. I'm Liz Carter. I'm the MS4 program coordinator for the city of Bloomington. If you don't know what those words mean, we will define them here in a little bit. So I have a couple items to go over before we get started into our presentations. So the purpose of this event is to empower realtors to better inform potential homeowners, enabling them to make sound decisions regarding property purchases and
- subsequent stormwater management responsibilities. Overall, we're talking about stormwater and how it affects our residents and our neighborhoods and the role that you all as realtors can have connecting those folks with either government or other resources to manage stormwater as best they can. One other item we did want to address, we are aware that there has been legislation in the state house that affects stormwater and we do have a statement on that.
- So the city of Bloomington, Monroe County government, and the town of Ellesville are aware that there's been recent legislation coming out of the state house regarding stormwater regulation. At the direction of IDEM, the Indiana Department of Environmental Management, each municipality is working with their respective legal teams to ensure local ordinances are revised to be in compliance with this legislation. And while we're making every effort to be in compliance with state law, changing local law does take time.
- When our ordinances have been revised, we will reach out to local stakeholders to hold outreach events so that these changes can be discussed. So the State House did make some changes to stormwater regulation. It was signed into law in May, so only a couple months ago. And since then, each municipality has had to work with their legal teams on their own to figure out what that means for their ordinances and how to revise them.
- From the city of Bloomington's perspective, our ordinance isn't the same as Monroe County's. Therefore, our changes are not going to be the same as Monroe County's. But we had an event last summer where we talked about ordinance updates. We intend to hold something similar once we have something to tell you all. So with that, anything else from you guys before we get started? OK. With that, we will jump into our presentations. And first up is Kaden Swanson, who will be giving a stormwater 101.
- Hi, good morning, everybody. Thanks for coming out today. So my name is Kaden Swanson. I'm a utilities engineer with CBU. These are just some pictures of myself. This is my family's, my girlfriend, and our dog, Squints. He's a happy little fella, and we love splashing around in the water. So to begin with, what is stormwater? Seems like a pretty simple question, and it kind of is. So stormwater is precipitation and snowmelt, but we're going to go a little bit deeper into it.
- So the way storm water is projected is through these rainfall data projections, which NOAA provides Atlas 14. This table on the left here shows the amount of rain within a set amount of time. And you might have heard people say a certain year storm, a one-year storm, a 100-year storm.
- And essentially what that means is it's the given percentage chance for anything to happen or for that storm to happen within a year. So a hundred year storm is a one in 100 chance to happen. That doesn't necessarily mean it's only once every 100 years. It means it has the chance to happen one out of 100. Moving on from that, why is stormwater management important? Vehicle and pedestrian safety. This is an image from Kirkwood from 2021 where
- the entire road flooded and there was a lot of damage. Flooding damage to property and homes, I'm sure you all have seen this, especially after the rainfall a couple of weeks ago, we had a 50 year storm. So I'm sure you've seen some damages from that. Erosion issues, this is another image from here in town where the embankment was starting to cave in and just because it was eroding away from the water flying through it. And you can see it's starting to eat away at that sidewalk there.
- Protection of waterways. This is important for water quality. You can see that this stream here is completely browned, full of sediment, super dirty. Nothing's going to be able to live in there, and that all kind of ties into the idea of one water, the water cycle. This is an awesome image that shows where everything eventually drains to. You can see that we're in the Ohio basin, and that it all eventually drains to the Gulf of Mexico. So what we do here is going to impact waterways
- all the way down to the Gulf of Mexico. It's also important, especially now because storms are getting more severe and more frequent. Warmer and wetter is what this figure says, but you can see there's an upward trend in the amount of rainfall that's been happening. So the common consensus is that the five-year storm, the old five-year storm, is now the one-year storm. We're seeing them a lot more frequently and a lot larger.
- kind of moving along from what is stormwater to how do we manage stormwater. A lot of these things you likely have seen out and about, but I'm just gonna take some time to explain some of it. We'll start with the main components of stormwater management. We got conveyance, water quality, water quantity are the three big ones, and then of these, they have green and gray infrastructure options. So I'll explain what green and gray is here in just one second.
- Look at that, green and gray. Green infrastructure, this is a picture from here in town. This is on Allen Street. This is one of our rain gardens that CBU maintains. And green infrastructure essentially integrates natural elements, so a lot of live plantings to aid in stormwater management, encourages biodiversity, and improves neighborhood aesthetics. A nice planted area is gonna look a lot nicer than a concrete ditch.
- Again, speaking of concrete ditches. Gray infrastructure is what you'll see a lot of. This is utilizing impervious or other man-made surfaces to manage stormwater. This here is an asphalt ditch that conveys water very well, but it doesn't do much else. It simply gets it from A to B. Conveyance. You'll see ditches, either vegetated or paved, kind of like we just talked about. Swales.
- culverts, so the pipes that are going underneath driveways, roads, so on. And curb and gutter are all very frequent examples that we see of conveyances. This image here is a vegetated swale in the Atlas on 17th development. So it conveys water and also does a little bit to treat it. Again, goal is to convey it. As far as water quality goes,
- We have rain gardens are a good example. That's what's shown here. Wet ponds, which I'll explain the difference between a wet pond and a dry pond in just a second. That's kind of an unusual one. Bioswales, so kind of what we just saw in the last image. And the goal here is to help remove those typical pollutants, trash, and other debris from the storm water. Water quantity, they're very similar words. It's easy to get them mixed up. But water quantity is essentially
- things like ponds. Wet and dry ponds are retention and detention ponds. A wet pond is what people typically think of when they hear the word pond, something that's wet all the time. There's plantings around it, fish in the water sometimes, though not typically what we would want to see.
- a stormwater feature. But dry ponds are what we frequently see here in Bloomington. These are, they essentially look like craters in the ground and that just gives water an opportunity to stage up and then discharge at a set rate coming out. So instead of just pushing all the water through at once, excuse me, it allows it to hold it and then maintain that flow coming out. And we also see hydrodynamic separators which are
- less common in residential areas, but these are a best management practice or a BMP that sit within a manhole that help kind of separate out the heavier, the sinkers sink and the floaters float. So the trash and debris is gonna float to the top and the sediment's gonna kind of settle to the bottom. Again, these are less frequent to see in residential areas, but I just wanted to mention them. Of course, the goal here is to release stormwater at a set rate.
- And that is Stormwater 101. Here's my contact information. Feel free to reach out to me. We can provide these slides to you and we can feel free to reach out with any questions, comments, concerns. From there, I am going to hand it off to Brian to talk easements.
- Hello thank you all for coming and thank you for having us. I am Brian Blake I'm the project coordinator for land acquisitions which is a way of saying I do easements. I was asked to speak about easements because they perform a they're an important part of the overall stormwater system because it gives us the opportunity to get in inspect make sure those that infrastructure is performing as it was designed and if necessary make
- changes or maintenance to it. So, easements are defined as, it grants someone the right to use another party's property without owning it. It is a legal right that can benefit or burden a property, allowing or restricting certain use of the land. The important takeaway here is to know that the owner retains possession of the property. There may be some conditions about how they can use it, but the utility has a right to be there and to install infrastructure.
- How are easements created? Well, there's numerous ways, but I'm only gonna touch on the most common. The two most common is that they're dedicated through the platting process when people go to subdivide property. Sometimes they're asked to place easements in locations that make it necessary to deliver the utility. Outside of the platting process, we rely on written agreements.
- just the written easement between the property owner and the utility. And then there's also eminent domain, but that's probably not worth exploring in this context. How can you find those easements? Well, those easements are always recorded, well, should be recorded with the county recorder. You can find them through looking through the deeds. You can sometimes find them in surveys.
- Good title search should find them, and also by reviewing the plat. The UDO defines 10 types of easements. We're going to concentrate on the drainage easements for our conversation today. Easements always create a dominant and serving interstate.
- The dominant estate is the entity that gains an advantage from the easement, generally referred to as the grantee. The servient estate is the property that is subject to the easement. The servient estate must allow the dominant state to use their land consistent with the intent of the easement. Servient estate is generally referred to as the grantor. Public right of way.
- We want to talk about public right of way to not, to differentiate that between the right of way and easements. Public right of way is made up of, as you would know, streets, sidewalks, utilities, curbs and gutters, and it's the responsibility of the adjacent property owner to maintain the portion of the right of way in front of their property.
- Here's an example of a public right of way, even though it's unimproved, it still is controlled by the city. I include this one because you can see an unimproved alleyway, but yet the homeowners are using that unimproved alleyway for things like sheds and whatnot. That would be considered encroachment, should not be there, but they do exist.
- Drainage easements, there's a lot of information here on this slide I know and I don't want to dwell on it too long. But our drainage easements are designed to, as I said, provides the utility, the chance to get in there and inspect the features to make sure that they're performing as designed and to make any changes if necessary. Encroachments.
- Oh, encroachments. Structures that can sometimes be legally there within the easement and they can include generally fences, decks, swimming pools. Yes, swimming pools sit over our easements and sheds. Oh, sorry, I thought I had another slide.
- We sometimes allow encroachments. They're taken on a case-by-case situation, reviewed by our engineers to make sure that they won't interfere with the function of the infrastructure or our ability to get in there and maintain it. I know I was given 20 minutes, so I apologize for speeding through that. If you have any easement questions, you can feel free to reach out to me, and here's my contact information. I'm gonna hand this over to Erica or Liz or both.
- Thank you. Okay, I apologize for moving so quickly. We are very efficient government workers. So I hope you all appreciate that. So Erica and I are kind of tag teaming this topic of public and private stormwater maintenance responsibilities. What we're trying to get at with this section of our presentation is, you know, we get questions all the time about,
- Whose responsibility is this ditch near my house? Whose responsibility is this little stream running behind my house? And that answer can vary greatly depending on a bunch of things. So we're going to kind of cover how you find out whose responsibility that ditch or stream or pond or driveway culvert is. And then kind of like if that responsibility falls not to a governmental entity, who it might fall to and what those responsibilities entail. This is a question we just get so frequently.
- So there's two different kinds of responsibilities. There's public and private. Public responsibilities, meaning you call your local government and say, hey, we've got a problem. We're responsible for stormwater infrastructure that exists in the right of way. So the curbs and gutters, the storm drains you see in the street, but we're also responsible for
- infrastructure on municipal property. So a good example of that, if you've been to Switchyard Park, they have a bunch of stormwater infrastructure through there. The Parks Department is responsible for that.
- So when we talk about the public right-of-way, that can include ditches on the side of the roads. A curb is technically a part of stormwater infrastructure because it conveys water. So if you or a client or anyone you know, you see an inlet that isn't draining because it's covered with likely leaves or grass clippings, you can call your local stormwater office, either myself or Erica, and we will send someone out to uncover that inlet. If you would like to do it yourself, we do always appreciate
- but it is our responsibility. When we get into private infrastructure, we're just looking at stormwater features, be it a ditch. It's not always obvious that something is a ditch too, because sometimes it's been sitting for 40 years and not been maintained. So we're looking at ditches and pipes and ponds and all of that kind of stuff that is on private property. It's not on public property.
- But it likely, hopefully, in Brian's case, does have an easement over it so that your local stormwater governmental entity can enter and inspect it to make sure that these things are working properly.
- So if you have, let's say you found a ditch and you're trying to figure out whose ditch is this? So there's quite a few places that you could look. You could, I'll just walk you through my process. When I get a call that says this isn't working, can you come look? First, we will probably go to Beacon, which used to be Elevate, or our own internal GIS to look at properties. Is this on private property? Is it on public property?
- Apparently also the Monroe County government is ahead of the city of Bloomington. They have a public facing map that covers all the storm infrastructure in their jurisdiction and will tell you if you click on a ditch upon an inlet, is this a governmental owned piece of infrastructure or is it private? We have an internal one that has not yet been made public, maybe one day for the city. You can also look at recorded documents.
- at the courthouse, deeds, plat, surveys, kind of everything Brian has talked about. And then there's also operation and maintenance manuals that could be recorded with your deed or plat. I will talk about those in a moment. And then finally, if you have done all this research on your own and you can't figure out whose ditch this is, you can call either county government, city government, or town of Ellitsville government, who is represented today as well, and you can just ask us. And hopefully we can find out.
- So I was going to define a couple of words that we toss around a lot in stormwater that not everybody knows what they mean. And if you're the person sitting there that doesn't, sometimes folks don't feel comfortable saying, I don't know what that means. So we say MS4 a lot. My job title is I'm the MS4 program coordinator. And I get asked all the time what that means. The MS4 stands for municipal separate storm sewer system, which is a mouthful. And I trip over it a lot. So an MS4, it details systems for stormwater that are not
- combined. So a lot of older municipalities, you think some of the East Coast cities that have existed for a very long time, their sanitary sewer, so what flows out of their toilet, combines with their storm sewer, so what flows off the roads. Which does then mean that when there's flooding, like we saw that picture of Kirkwood, it's not just storm water flooding, it's all the sewage too. So we are very fortunate in the city of Bloomington, we do not have any combined sewer. There are older cities in Indiana that certainly do, but we are very fortunate that we do not. So when
- When we talk about the MS4, we're just talking about the pipes that carry storm water. There are other people that deal with the sanitary sewer, and I'm fortunate it's not me. MS4s are entities that are dictated by the state of Indiana as you are an MS4.
- a territory, a jurisdiction that is responsible for stormwater. So the city of Bloomington is an MS4. Outside of us, basically all around us, the county is an MS4. The town of Ellisville is its own MS4. Indiana University is its own MS4. So like Erica and I have no jurisdiction there. They regulate themselves.
- Ivy Tech is actually also an MS4. Their location over on Daniels Way is its own MS4. So sometimes MS4s are huge. The city of Indianapolis is one. It's gigantic. And then sometimes they're very small. Sometimes just a subdivision is its own MS4. So they all try to regulate their area as best they can.
- But we do work very well together. As you can see, we're all here today. And we try to coordinate amongst ourselves so we don't have disjointed jurisdictions. So that's an MS4. An operation and maintenance manual, which I just mentioned, we commonly call this an O&M manual. This is a document that details the
- the infrastructure that's installed on a project so that future owners, current owners and then future owners, know how it works. So if you have installed a pond, a development is built, a pond is built as part of it, and it's going to be the HOA's responsibility in perpetuity.
- We expect to see an O&M manual so that future owners, because you're going to have an HOA, you're going to have different board members throughout the years, they know how to maintain this piece of infrastructure. It's going to detail what the plantings are supposed to be, what kind of inspections you should be doing and how regularly, what kind of maintenance activities you need, and then the larger, more capital projects
- How often do you need to dredge this pond? So we require, at least in the city, that these are recorded with the deed or the plat when a subdivision or a commercial property is built so that any future owner is able to find this and understand what are their responsibilities going forward for the infrastructure on their property.
- Lastly, this is my third defined word, post-construction best management practices. We call these post-construction BMPs, and Kayden touched on that briefly. We define this as any permanent piece of infrastructure that is intended to achieve water quality or detention. So this is an example of one of our city-owned ones. This is a rain garden up on 19th Street. As you can see, it is full of muddy water. After some storms that we had a couple weeks ago, there were some
- discharge from a construction site, but the fact that it's holding that muddy water means that it's working. That muddy water didn't go into our streams and into our creeks. It does mean that my green infrastructure team has some work ahead of them, but that's okay because we don't want that dirt in our streams. So a BMP could be a rain garden like this. It could be a pond. It could be a swale. It could be a hydrodynamic separator as Kayden briefly touched on, but if we gave you a presentation on hydrodynamic separators, that would be its own afternoon.
- be a green roof like the one we just toured earlier today out at the trades district, which is lovely. You should all go check it out. So anything that accomplishes that goal of either improving water quality or holding back water to maintain water quantity, that's what we consider a post-construction BMP. So HOA responsibilities. So we're kind of
- putting together HOA responsibilities and private citizen responsibilities. In my time with the MS4, there are situations where we go out to someone's property, let's say they have a stream running behind their house, and they assume it's the responsibility of the HOA. And we have to tell them, you need to go look at your CCR, covenants, conditions, and restrictions.
- Okay, I never get that right. Go look at your CCR. That's your agreement between your HOA and yourself to find out whose responsibility it is. Sometimes it is the responsibility of the HOA to maintain a linear stream that runs through 45 properties. Sometimes it's not. Sometimes it's on each individual homeowner, which means if somebody builds a retaining wall in the way and affects the flow for everyone upstream and potentially everyone downstream, that can be a problem. So we are kind of lumping those together right now. We're just saying,
- responsibilities, but I do think it is important to note that it could be on an individual or in a larger body. So the common items that we see that are private responsibilities are culverts and pipes, swales and ditches. This is a very nice swale out at our fire department training building.
- Structures. So this is a structure when you see a pond that is built at the top, you see a beehive, but this is everything that goes under the ground that you don't see, including an orifice and a big deep dug in structure riser item. And post construction BMP is just generally. So this is a little pond out at Atlas on 17th, but it could be again, ponds, swales, spring gardens, anything like that.
- So a note about culverts and ditches. So driveway culverts are an item that folks don't understand responsibility very well, so I figured I'd talk about it. A culvert that goes under the driveway is the maintenance responsibility of the owner of the driveway. That is confusing because it is almost certainly in public right of way, but it's not an item that the utility would have installed for drainage. It's only existing because somebody wanted to build a driveway. So that culvert, if it gets clogged with leaves,
- it starts collapsing, that is the responsibility of the private property owner. However, if, for example, the utility is doing a ditching project through an entire neighborhood, I think we've been in Park Ridge recently. Yeah, Park Ridge recently. If we're doing a whole connective project, we may be adding culverts for people's driveways. If we said you didn't have one before, we're doing a ditch on either side of your driveway, obviously there needs to be a connection. That's when the culvert may fall to us. But in terms of just a culvert and a driveway, that is a private responsibility.
- It's also worth noting ditches in right of way. So you have the road, maybe a tree plot, a sidewalk, you have some other amount of land, and then you have a property line because right of way, as we all know, can vary wildly throughout the city. If there is a ditch in right of way that is adjacent,
- to a property, it is the property owner's responsibility to keep the ditch clear, to keep the ditch mowed, just like it's their responsibility to mow the grass that's in right of way, right up to the road. Now, if that ditch starts collapsing, if that ditch starts filling in with sediment to the point that it's not operational, absolutely give us a call and we will come out and assess what we need to do to make the system work well. But in terms of
- some leaves fell off a tree and landed in the ditch, that is the homeowners responsibility to take care of that. Okay, I'm going to hand it over to Ms. Erica, who is the stormwater manager, stormwater program manager for Monroe County. Hello, everyone. I'm a little taller.
- So as Liz said, I'm Erica Pena. I'm the stormwater program manager for Monroe County. I was previously the stormwater inspector. So you may have seen me out more on some of the construction sites on some of these newer home builds out in the county. So Liz touched on some of the responsibilities. I'm gonna take a step back to some of the larger infrastructure that is gonna be the maintenance responsibility of those HOAs. So anything that's outside of that right of way, so those
- detention basins, swales that maybe go between homes. The swales between the homes may be on those private property owners, but anything that it drains down into and is detaining, that's gonna be the HOA's responsibility. Typically, they're gonna be designated within a common area. Some of our older subdivisions have them just within a drainage easement.
- in the rear yards of properties, but now moving forward past a certain date, they've all been designated into a separate common area that is, the ownership is the HOA.
- Liz touched on the driveway culverts, so I won't touch on that any further except to say the county feels the same way. Driveway culverts are the maintenance responsibility of those private property owners. Ditching, we'll do the ditching in between. If we are coming through and doing a major drainage revision where it makes sense for the culverts to change their elevation, we might go through and just do that
- for that section to make sure that the drainage is gonna go where it needs to go consistently. But then once it's in, it becomes the maintenance responsibility of that private property owner. And then any ditches and swales that are on the private property that go into the drainage area or just convey away from the home, those are the private property maintenance.
- So Liz mentioned the O&M's. Oftentimes when we get a complaint, we'll ask them, well, are you aware of an O&M manual? The county didn't require them to be recorded until more recently, maybe 2021, 2019, 18, somewhere around then. So some of the older subdivisions, we might have to do a little bit of digging. They weren't always recorded. Hopefully now they are, so they're much easier to find.
- But we try and look through our records. Planning department, we work with them quite a bit. They often have some of those records or local design firms may have them as well. We're looking for the O&M to tell us exactly where those structures are, where those common areas, easements are, because that really helps us know who's responsible for what. It also gives us a description. Sometimes the maintenance has fallen off
- the track and we don't know exactly what it was supposed to look like. Sometimes if there's an underdrain, the vegetation has just grown in so much, we don't even know that underdrain is there anymore and maybe it's not functioning anymore because some of that vegetation has just grown in and collapsed it. It outlines the maintenance activities, the frequency, and gives us the ownership information. So that O&M manual typically will tell you it belongs to the HOA.
- Here's an example. A lot of it, once you get in the swing of it, it's just seasonal. Your typical mowing, like when you'd mow your lawn, have someone come out and mow outside of the pond areas just to keep the grass manageable. And then in the bioswale areas where you've got your native vegetation and want that really good native growth to have the good root system, uptake that water, that's once in the spring.
- Any trees that are part of that as well, kind of annual pruning or just general maintenance. And then areas where it's just grass, like I said, kind of general mowing and trimming.
- So in 2021 you may have heard some of this information before, and we did have an update to our MS for general permit that required us to keep an inventory. So we're just having a record of where all of these post construction BMPs are located. So I know that the county has.
- been hard at work at that. We're right around 400 in our inventory right now. We know that there's a lot more out there that just hasn't been accounted for. I know that the city's been working on theirs as well in town of Ellsville. So if you find something, and especially with the county we've got our public facing and it's not showing up there and you know it's there, please let us know so that we can make sure we add it to the inventory. So we were required by the state to inventory all of these post-construction facilities. We are required to make rolling inspections once every
- five year permit cycle, so our MS4 general permit is on a five year term. Once within that permit cycle, we have to go and lay eyes on
- every single one of these. And so our next step is to start performing outreach and education to these responsible parties. So part of this is reaching out to you all. You guys are eyes and ears on the ground. You're probably very familiar with some of these subdivisions and these residential areas that we just don't get out to quite as often. So getting some of that contact information for the HOAs is our next goal.
- Hopefully you guys can help us on that. So that's kind of our next step is once we've got our assessment of what we have or what's out there, starting to reach out to the ones that are in the roughest shape, need a little bit more love and attention and helping those HOAs get that ball rolling so that it functions better for their neighborhood as well. It helps improve the drainage within their own neighborhood and the people downstream.
- So our post construction program a lot of what we do is education and outreach, letting people know what's what is there in their property or in their in their neighborhood. Planning to send out some letters to those property owners management companies for those common areas.
- summer. Last August we held an HOA workshop which was really well attended. We got some really good feedback, started to make some of those connections with some of those HOAs. I think we're going to look towards doing that again this year. Continue to make those connections and opportunities for people to learn more about what's in their neighborhood. We're also updating our website. The county is doing a major
- renovation to their website. So when we make that transition, hopefully at the end of the month, that we haven't had a set date yet, but within the next month, our website will be a little bit more streamlined and easier pointing you in the right direction to the resources that are gonna be what you're looking for. And we're always trying to keep that information updated and relevant.
- So one major note that I wanted while I have the attention of our realtor friends here is there are some detention facilities that are on common area lots. Those common area lots should never be sold to an individual property owner. We have had a couple instances where that has happened and it kind of puts the onus for maintenance and liability on an individual property owner which is not
- probably in their best interest. So if you come across a listing or someone inquires to you about wanting to purchase or wanting to sell a property that is listed as a common area, holds a detention area, and doesn't have any other residential dwelling on it, please let us know because that should not ever be listed for sale. It should be maintained in perpetuity with the HOA. And with that, I think I am done.
- So I think we'll move on to the panel. Mason, do you wanna come up and oversee us? You can field the questions. Hey everyone, I'm Mason Greenberg. I'm the stormwater technician. I wanted to create this kind of space just like I heard there was last year for the contractors.
- and that community for the Bloomington and Monroe population, so I'm really grateful that you're all here today, and I hope we can continue to do things like this. We did make it an opportunity online for people to submit questions. No one did, so we're just gonna open the floor. If you have any questions at all, we've got a full table of experts here, so we warmly welcome any questions that you may have.
- Okay. So invasives, that's something that while we're doing inspections, we would certainly note and say,
- hey, this isn't really what was intended to be here. But dealing with invasive species, at least for the city of Bloomington, I assume the county as well, that's an issue for the planning department.
- They theoretically have a policy that whatever landscape plan, if there is a landscape plan, it's supposed to be maintained in perpetuity. But to my knowledge, they've never followed up. I used to work in planning, so it is direct knowledge. They've never followed up with a development, a commercial property to do an inspection 10 years later to see if the landscaping matches the original plan. So it's something that from the stormwater perspective, we might mention, hey, this isn't what's best for your stormwater feature.
- and native plants are going to be far better, but it's not something that we're going to pursue enforcement-wise. It's just something we would mention as, hey, this isn't great. I will say, I think that there are some opportunities. MC Iris loves a weed wrangle, so they love opportunities to remove some of these invasives, especially if you can make it a neighborhood event.
- It just, many hands make light work, so looping in the neighborhood to help beautify their own space and then replant it with some native vegetation, which I think MCIRS is also really great about recommending or connecting to resources for some of that more native vegetation to replace what you didn't want growing there.
- Let me see if I can remember the acronym. It's Monroe County Identify Reduce Invasive Species. Thank you. Good quiz.
- Yeah, they will. And it's something, too, that if we're looking at stormwater infrastructure, at least my team, I think Erica's team as well, we're pretty good at identifying invasives. So if there are questions about, hey, is this invasive or not? This started growing on the bank of our pond. We're worried it shouldn't be here. We'll certainly answer those questions and let you know the best of our ability. If we don't know, we might loop in our counterparts in planning if you're concerned about what is this. But we are pretty good about identifying them.
- It's not something that we're going to ding someone on. We'll give recommendations, of course, but we're not the invasive police. So while we will try to provide help and guidance, we're not coming to write people tickets for not weed.
- Can you, oh, there we go.
- So I am assuming you mean some sort of drainage report study like that, or? It was labeled in a stormwater survey. It was county. It was county. So there's a stormwater pollution prevention plan that is required for
- development is basically how are you gonna prevent sediment from leaving your site? How are you gonna limit the impacts of stormwater from your site? I know that several years ago there was kind of a shift in leadership. Kelsey was the previous stormwater program manager. And so she was a little more consistent about asking for it for every single project. So that might've been the change. Going forward from that, it's local engineers,
- anticipate it so it's included now. So that just might have been in the learning curve where they didn't realize that they needed it and yeah.
- That might be around the time that the county planning department started requiring individual plot plans for residential developments as well and so now everyone's
- aware of that and it's being factored in. So that might have been outside of what we were requiring and it's a planning department. It's always nice to blame things on another department. So I did want to ask something real quick. So when somebody is anticipating doing development, large or small, we very much encourage people to come talk to us first. So Kaden and I probably have like
- Two three meetings every single week with someone who is planning to do development or redevelopment or expansion or what have you because we want to talk over those stormwater concerns up front. We don't want it to be a surprise. You know, it's not it's it's not a gotcha quiz. You know, we want to be
- Give guidance. We want to be resources. So when folks have something planned, we very strongly encourage them to come. They're welcome to come to our office sit down a conference room talk us through what they're planning so that we can step them through all this. So it isn't a surprise later and we realize, you know, stormwater, you know, Ken was talking earlier about how like a
- 5-year storm is now a 1-year storm. Storm water has changed drastically in the last 5-10 years and regulation of it has moved along quickly as well. So we realize folks don't always know what they need to do and we do want them to come talk to us. It's not a secret, you know, we're not trying to play gotcha. So if you do have anything come up that you're not sure if you need anything from us,
- I think most of the time, if it's single lot stuff, the answer will be, you don't need anything from us, thanks for calling, we appreciate it. But in case it is kind of a unique situation, we are happy to see folks and talk them through it. And just some more general information about the SWIP, that is a requirement through the construction stormwater general permit, the CSGP. So that's triggered off of a set amount of disturbance. So if it's over an acre, then the SWIP is required as part of that.
- From IDEM, thank you. From IDEM? Yeah, from IDEM. It's a state requirement. Oh, sorry. Liz explained IDEM earlier. It's required by the state to follow those standards, and that's what we do. Yeah. Every fee is changed.
- To be honest, I was on student counseling. It came through 27 years ago. But I felt it would rain tax. Mayors and managers just sold it. Anyhow, there was quite a bit of discussion back then as to what we needed, what we were going to do, but more how we could. And it ended up being a flat rate. It was due at the time.
- difficult to figure out a way to make it more site-specific, which obviously it is. I've got a couple follow-up questions. Has there been any change, or is there anything in the works to change it from a flatter acre to a mile one acre lot pays the same as Brian's five acre lot?
- Fantastic question. I'll answer from the city and then I'll let Erica answer for the county, if that's okay. And then our friend Dylan, who we did not introduce, and I think he was fine with that, is here representing the town of Ellitsville. And be kind to Dylan, he's been in the MS4 world for a year now? Just about two. Oh, just about two. Okay, I was going to give you even. So, yeah.
- He is our representative from the town of Elitsville, and we didn't even make him do a presentation, but he does have to answer questions. Okay, so the city of Bloomington's stormwater rate for residential properties is a set fee, regardless of size of residential properties. When we get into commercial properties, multifamily properties, et cetera, it is calculated based on the impervious surface, so the surfaces that do not absorb water, buildings, asphalt,
- all that kind of stuff. It's calculated based on those impervious surfaces. And that's set when anytime something new is built, we calculate that out based off the plans and that's what their rate is. So for commercial, multifamily, industrial, any use that isn't single family, it is based on impervious surface. I will also say the city's stormwater rates have not changed in a very long time. Kelsey, when did you come in, 2019?
- So last time our rates changed were 2019. There's a strong possibility we'll have a new rate case in the next couple of years to change how we assess those rates because obviously it's not perfect. One quick follow-up I wanted to add to that. Prior to about a year ago, we also didn't charge any fees for plan review, for development, for issuing permits, any of that. So in our fees for permits,
- not much at all, but every other department, building department, planning department, everyone charges a fee. We didn't, and we were finding that in some cases we were doing many, many, many rounds of review for development, and that meant that, you know, Kayden and my reviewing plans for 10 rounds of review was being subsidized by rate payers, so we've changed that so that developers are paying that fee.
- especially if we go past a certain amount of review time. So we have added fee structure so that when our time is taken up by activities that are not directly impacting rate payers, that someone else is paying for it and not being subsidized by rate payers.
- attention, okay, in some way, instead of having each individual law or person take care of their problem some way. We have a lot of dry holes, and we go by them, and they look like crap. They really are everything. I know we can change it going through whatever. We'll get the stormwater police out there and take care of it. But they're dry holes. They fill up.
- extremely rare, and that's another batch of things. But there's got to be a better way of doing that, where they just take a piece of ground that was nice and turn it into a nicer one. Now, back to them, what about, let that go, what about regional detention? Is there any discussion, is there any kind of ongoing thought of
- We need to do this more reasonably. Certain areas are much more of a problem with runoff than others, which is the way the world works. If you get out west of town and it's full of sinkholes, disappearing creeks, and this, that, and the other, it's totally different than most of the rest of town. So is there anything that we can take care of instead of having all these, you know, I look at it like in a commercial area,
- That's okay. We have plenty of time for the panel. That's okay. Regional detention. So first question, regional detention.
- Yes, that is something that we're working on. We have a couple smaller projects that should be coming forward here soon. We have a little bit of regional detention being built in the Waterman neighborhood. It's not going to be very large because what we're constrained with within the city, like within city limits is property. Like we don't have a whole lot of opportunities to build regional detention because obviously if we're trying to capture water on a regional level, we're talking a large volume.
- Caden is working with the Parks Department right now to build something in the Winslow Sports Complex, because those neighborhoods over there have some drainage issues. We are looking, yeah, we're always looking at opportunities for regional detention. The big barriers for us is cost of land is extremely expensive, which is why where we can, we try to partner with the Parks Department and say, hey, you've already got all this land. In a lot of cases, it's in floodplain, Switchyard Park, Goat Farm, now Rogers Family Park. So they tend to get park properties because they're in
- areas with drainage issues because no one can build there, right? So we are trying to partner with parks where we can. We are looking at opportunities throughout the city as we can, but it really just comes down to availability of land, expensive land. But it is something that is an ongoing mission for our stormwater program. And let me let Erica answer as well because I want to make sure she gets to as well.
- I'll first touch on the county stormwater fee is also a flat rate for residential and then similar for commercial. Regional detention, the county does have some regional detention areas. We have the pleasure of having a lot more land available to us, but again, it is expensive. We do try to work with our parks department. There are some areas where we've got these grand ideas and hope
- to put things in motion, but it takes time, it takes planning, it takes a lot of coordination, and we're getting there. More efficient and much less expensive instead of, it can be every time I come and build a property, I don't know how big it is, you know, I gotta go through all this engineering and this, that, you know, but it's extremely expensive to add another cost of power to it. Yeah. To be able to do that. One more quick question, I'll shut up.
- Cindy's on it, Cindy's got it back. Who are we protecting? Okay, and I talked about this a long time ago also. We're spending a lot of money, putting a lot of energy, a lot of time, a lot of resources, okay, into retaining water, right? Do we have areas, I don't know what we do, that we need to form? Lake Monroe or Monroe Lake, whatever you want to call it, was built for this specific purpose.
- It's because of the flooding of the Wabash River. And that's one of the reasons that the lake was put in there, where they've taken up detention for a lot of people. Most of Monroe County does not drain to Lake Monroe. No, it does not. But it flows into the same stream. Downstream, yeah, down, down. Yeah, but it's, yeah, so are there areas that we're trying to protect more than others? I mean, we're spending a lot of money on this. Are we spending money that's
- I think it's A, it's alleviating existing problems, and B, it's preventing future problems. You buy a home, and then your neighbor builds a massive home next to you, or does a commercial property next to you, and suddenly you're dealing with all the drainage from that. That's true, because older neighborhoods, they don't have to pay for all their infrastructure. They still pay a storm water fee. They still pay rates.
- We are looking at some of our older neighborhoods and assessing because they do contribute and cause issues for people downstream. So we are looking at them and trying to figure out, we don't have regulated drains. If we had regulated drains in the county, that would be easy for us to say, anyone who drains into this area, we're assessing you a certain fee to help pay for that. But we don't have that.
- So we are looking at ways to retrofit or modify existing neighborhoods that A, either don't have detention or B, have inadequate detention or just drainage in general. And so we are looking at, we know where those problem areas are. We get those drainage complaints, the roads flood. We are looking at those and trying to figure out how to do that in a way that doesn't pass on too much cost to individual property owners. Yeah, go ahead.
- So I'll also add to that a little bit. So we are doing the same, right? So when we talk about the neighborhoods, the older neighborhoods in Bloomington, I'm hesitant to call them core neighborhoods, but that's what people call them. They don't have space to add detention, but I will also say we get complaints from those folks all the time about why do I pay the same rate as someone else when in a lot of cases, these neighborhoods are so old that they don't even have stormwater infrastructure. So there's like a good section of East 1st Street that just goes downhill and
- no inlets so those folks call us up and they say well every time you guys pave the road it's like getting higher and higher and higher so every time it rains the water sheets off the road into my onto my property into my basement and there's no inlets there's no pipes in the street there's nothing there what am i paying you for
- And so they have kind of the opposite complaint of like, I have no infrastructure. My basement floods all the time. What are you doing to help me? So figuring out who pays for what and how to place infrastructure so that hopefully, ideally, nobody has flooding. That is a huge challenge. But when you say like, who does this help?
- We finished our Hidden River culvert project just last summer. Kayden showed Kirkwood flooding. We built a culvert under Kirkwood that you could truly drive a city bus through. And so Kirkwood would no longer flood. However, it was very expensive. However, that water's just been moved downstream. So while Kirkwood will no longer flood, now my team and Kelsey as well, we're trying to figure out what to do with all that water that's discharging at First Street.
- It's like first between college and Walnut because every time it rains, that water is just moving to a new location. And then eventually, if we don't detain it, it leaves my boundaries and it becomes Erica's problem.
- In flooding, yeah, Clear Creek floods, we had someone lose their life on the Dodds Bridge just a couple years ago. So we are constantly looking at what we can do in terms of regional detention, in terms of projects that the city pursues to help this. And I realize the new neighborhoods have to do all this stuff. It's not fair that the old neighborhoods don't have to, but there's no land. We have not tried, maybe we can, but it would not be popular, go eminent domain people's houses and say we're gonna build a pond here.
- That's kind of what we're faced with. We look at the near west side neighborhood where properties are very small. There's no big swaths of land for us to build in. There isn't the possibility for detention. But when we look at that near west side, we then follow the watershed down and we see building and trades park. And we say, hi parks, would you like a pond here? Which is actually what we're working with them on right now. So we're looking for opportunities
- where we have property, where we have the possibility and it's economically feasible to build regional detention. But there are situations where a neighborhood is 150 years old and it wasn't built for, they didn't even think about stormwater at all then. There's just not going to be regional detention there. So is it a possibility in the future that those people pay a higher rate because they're not managing their stormwater? Certainly possible. We will take public input when we have a rate case. So we expect to see there.
- So no, I totally recognize that, and that's something we struggle with all the time. But like I said, those folks who don't have regional detention in their neighborhoods, or they don't have a pond as part of their subdivision, because the neighborhood's just too old, they have the exact opposite complaint of what am I paying you for? You know? Well, they do now, right? They pay a stormwater fee every single month as part of their utility bill. Right. Yep. Yep, absolutely. Yes.
- Yes. I mean, we don't have a map that's like, don't buy a house here. So actually, actually, great question. The first place I would look is the floodplain map, because we get people all the time they call and say we have a
- a person right now that we're back and forth with. They're like, my property floods every time it rains. And we're like, your entire property is literally in the floodplain. Like, it's going to flood. Yeah, yeah. We do not have an official map for that. Kayden, I'm going to defer to the engineer to see if you can give guidance.
- You're also always welcome to call us and be like, hey, do you guys have any complaints of a history of flooding in this location, in this neighborhood? And we'll be honest with you. Certainly that. That's huge. Yeah, a lot of it is just institutional knowledge that's been passed down from people who've been in the positions for a long time and know certain neighborhoods and certain colors. To be quite honest, that's mostly what it is. Yeah, I have had a few people reach out to us before purchasing a home, just
- perspective homeowners and say, we're interested in this property. Have there been any drainage complaints about it? Has there been any issues with flooding on this road? Or they're saying we want to be able to build a barn or do these things with our property. Can you see any kind of restrictions that would be in place with that? So I highly encourage you to reach out to us if you have someone that's looking to use the property in a certain way or has very specific concerns. Yeah, definitely.
- And we've started using at the city, this program called city works, which was allowing us to kind of maintain some of these calls when we get them in. So like Erica's mentioning, if, if you were to call us and say, I'm looking at this property, is there any complaints that have been received? We can look up that address and see anything that we have loaded in as a work order or a service request for our crews. Correct. Yeah. That you would just need to reach out to us.
- So if I'm understanding the question, you're asking how we're moving forward with that
- just until we make our updates. So we're kind of moving forward operating it as normal because we've been given zero guidance from the state and our legal team has kind of advised us to just move forward as normal and then once we change our ordinance then that's when the change will go into effect. And we're hoping, I'm hopeful that we can have something,
- within the next month. The wheels of motion at the legal team are not as quick as we want them to be, but they are moving. So hopefully by the end of next month, we will have much more information to share, yeah. From the city, same, we are, you know, we hope to have updates in the next month or so.
- legal is really driving that because they're checking everything to make sure they think that everything's legal. I'm not a lawyer. The way we're kind of operating right now, we have been lucky where we haven't had many
- projects come forward that are in this questionable zone. So projects that are under an acre, we haven't had many. And again, when we encourage people to come in and talk to us, that's what we're talking through with them. If this project is over an acre, it will be regulated as it was. The state has all these requirements that we have to follow anyway. It's pretty clear cut. When they're in that question zone, that's when we want folks to come in and talk to us about what they're doing.
- kind of like layout like here are the ways this may go and the idea is we want people to come see us early because by the time they actually submit plans drainage reports that kind of stuff we hopefully will have revisions that you know in place so yeah we're kind of taking it on a case-by-case right now and then if we're not sure honestly we defer to our lawyer and say what should we do in this case you know we don't want to
- be overly aggressive. So I will say we are leading to the far more conservative side right now, where we're like, if we're not sure, if our ordinance hasn't been updated or we're worried a section of it is no longer valid, we're going to err on the side of not enforcing it until we have a new ordinance that has made it through all the channels. Kelsey, do you want to say something? Kelsey, would you like a microphone? I know you don't want to, but you sat so close to it.
- say that the law that was passed from our perspective as the local regulating entity is just very difficult for us to interpret and enforce and that is the reason why it's not an easy
- Yes, here's how we're moving forward because we not only have to have a local ordinance that mirrors the CSGP, we're also regulated by our MS4 general permit that tells us to have a local ordinance at least as stringent than the CSGP. So we're talking in circles all the time and we're trying to figure out the best way forward to change our local regulations to be in spirit of this new regulation while still being in compliance with our MS4 regulations and everything else. So it's really tricky legally to for us to locally figure out how
- what this is going to look like. So that's the reason it's not an easy straightforward answer. And the other thing I want to add is that, you know, those of you that do work regionally, you're going to run into this. I'm on a statewide board of MS4s that we meet once a month. Every single municipality in
- the state of Indiana is going through the exact same thing. And I will say that Eric and I are incredibly lucky that we have a legal team that works for the city or the county. A lot of the folks I talk to are having to go hire outside legal, because they have one lawyer for their municipality, and that lawyer basically handles, like, they cover their city or town council or something like that. So we're really fortunate, but every single municipality in the state of Indiana, of which there are hundreds, if not over 1,000, they're having to go figure this out on their own.
- They're looking at their ordinance and saying, what can we keep? What can we not keep? And the item has not given us much guidance, I think is the most diplomatic way to say that. They've been asked. They've been asked at events. They have told us to go consult with our lawyers. So we're doing our best.
- The people at IDEM have always been fantastic and wonderful, and we appreciate them very much. But they have had no guidance for us. They've just told every municipality in the state of Indiana, go call your lawyer. You guys figure it out on your own. So unfortunately, we're going to have a lot of people with different answers throughout the state. So yeah, we've been left in an awkward position. We're trying to do our best with it. And for the town of Elksville, we're basically doing the same thing. We hired a legal team to work on it, and our lawyer as well.
- As of right now, we're just kind of running how we normally have. And just like them, just erring on cautious on some of the smaller lots and just trying to get through until everything's figured out in the next few months. Just a question for Alton. Mm-hmm. You know, there's just a lot of money in the downtown area. You know, it does happen more and more. Is there, like, some kind of, you know, like, strategic plan
- Well we just did the Vine Street project which helped a whole lot and we're looking into buying more land. We had an engineer come out and showed a couple different pieces of property on what to buy, where would help. Just like it's hard to get land to try and get that amount of water to stop.
- Any question back there? First of all, I want to say we miss you as the planning department. We appreciate your leadership today. Water management might be the most important thing that the city does. So my question, I think, is a quality-wide issue. Kate mentioned working with the Winslow residents there. Is there any collaboration with the Parks Department on specifically Winslow Sports Park where we saw 9 of 16 rack games canceled because of flooding that was on
- And we saw one out-of-town tournament move to Columbus because of flooding, which is an economic development issue. Certainly, yeah. A lot of the issues specifically at Winslow are more catered towards issues that are at the neighborhoods that are along Wexley, so the adjacent neighborhoods. The regional detention
- would still impact Winslow Sports Complex to a certain degree. I can't guarantee that it would fix it. This project has also kind of been on and off. So I just want to make sure it's clear this isn't something that's directly coming down the pipeline. This is still something that's in design. But that is the intent. So for this question, we're going to pretend that I live in Monroe County.
- If I lived in the county, I've got what would be like an easement in my backyard. And I think I was calling it the wrong thing, but now that I've heard the presentation, I think I have like a swale in the backyard. And it holds water probably three to four months out of the year. So I know we talked about private versus public responsibility. It's probably my responsibility as a homeowner to try to figure out how to fix that standing water in my backyard.
- Fantastic question. I'll start. I'm sure Erica and Kayden might have something to add. So at the city and at the county, if you have, if
- If you personally have a drainage concern on your property, if you have a client who has a drainage concern on their property, our job is to come help you. So if you give us a call, we're not going to come out with a backhoe and fix it for you, but we absolutely are here to come in and give advice about
- drainage issues. And if the answer is, this is larger than your one property, this is a swale that expands through a bunch of properties and then goes to a pond, this is an infrastructure that's 40 years old and needs some attention, we'll certainly tell you that. But if there are, we also just go to single properties that are saying, water's getting into my basement,
- what can I do on my property? I've got a contractor that told me a French drain, and then somebody else told me to build a rain garden, and I don't know what to do. I'm not a drainage engineer. Well, the good news is I have a drainage engineer, and he'll come with me, and I'll hold his clipboard while he gives you advice. So we're very happy. When I talk about rate payers, when I was talking about how we are collecting fees from developers so that our rate payers aren't subsidizing that,
- rate payers it that is like our our public service to you you pay a rate we are there to help you so if you have questions you have concerns or even just like my neighbors gutters are all discharging under my property can how can I manage that we're happy to come out and talk through it I will say we have a bit of a backlog right now because of the extreme storm event we saw 10 days ago
- Yeah, so it may not be we'll come out tomorrow, but that's a lot of what Kayden's team and my team do is we go out into the public and we look at people's properties and we give advice to the extent that we feel comfortable. And I think Erica probably very similar. I'll pass the mic to her. Yeah, so especially in the county, we don't have a drainage engineer on staff. We're not lucky like the city. But one of my staff will come out and if it's identified as something that's
- something coming off of the roadway that's causing the drainage issue, we'll look at what we can do within our right of way and within our own infrastructure. Before coming out there, we'll typically look up your address and see if there is a platted subdivision plat for there and see where there might be easements. That gives us a good idea of what we might be finding when we come out there if you haven't sent pictures or anything.
- And it tells us where that water is meant to go. So it sounds like if you've got a swale in your backyard, coming from one neighbor through your backyard through to the next, that's intending for that water to move on to somewhere else. So it's gonna end in a pond. So that'll kind of prep us for what we might encounter when we're out there. At the county, we do partner with the Soil and Water Conservation District for a mini grant, they're called, which help alleviate some of these private property
- drainage issues. So they can help, especially if you're gonna work with your neighbors and have a cohesive effort to improve this, and that's gonna be your best bet for a success. You and your neighbors can apply for these grants to help install the native vegetation, fix some of that infrastructure that may be not maintained. But yeah, just like Liz said, the stormwater rates help
- pay for us to come out to help you. We are here, we are public servants, we are here to help the property owners. And I don't know if Ellisville would like to, Dylan would like to add anything. We do the same thing. If you call, how you get ahold of us is you call the Ellisville Planning Department and then they will relay the message to me or our street commissioner. And then we go out, we have a,
- If most of the time it's me, but we have one other guy that goes out and if he cannot, if he can't look at the situation and be like, okay, well, this is pretty simple. I could handle it. Then he'll call me out and then we have an engineer on staff 24 seven. So if I can't figure it out, then I'll, I'll involve him as well in it, but always call us. We're willing to help on anything like that. Is there a website or email address
- So the Soil and Water Conservation District website will have a little tab at the top about, I don't know, they just redid their website as well, so I don't remember exactly where it is now. But if you go to their website, they'll have a little dropdown for the grants. And there's, you know, it's an application, you meet with their technician and walk through some of their recommended fixes and go from there.
- Yeah, O&M manuals, if they exist, which is a big asterisk, because at least in the city, we go see things that were built in the 60s. And is there a manual in that case? Probably not. But O&Ms are totally public knowledge. If a neighborhood is trying to find out if they have one, we'll look through our files. If that's something we can find, we're happy to provide it if it didn't get lost amongst the years. But yeah, O&Ms are totally public knowledge.
- Now we have people record them like we mentioned with the deed or with the plat. So you could just go to the county courthouse recorder's office and search a plat or a deed and the O&M would be attached to it. So totally public knowledge now. The only ones that aren't is just because they were so old, they were not made public knowledge when they were created. Yeah.
- Okay, I think we are at time. If you guys do have any further questions, we're gonna make the slide deck available to our event host so that they can send it out. It has all of our contact information on it, except for Dylan's, which we'll add. Very popular. But thank you guys for coming so much. And once you have our contact information, if you have follow-up questions, you ever need a meeting to talk about a new development, you want us to come look at some stuff out in the county or city, we're happy to do it.
- All right, thank you.