little i'm going to talk a little bit about the friends and then talk more specifically about the presidential stormwater and some ways to deal with that this is a sign up for email sorry e mail list to everybody so i would like to tell people that before i ask them you know purely voluntary if you want to sign up or not have just because i know everybody gets a lot of e mail map you see up here is that when you ski watershed and the sub watershed in the various colors one of the things i always like to ask people is does anybody know where the when the river starts somewhere in vermont or the largest river basin in the state of vermont so largest river basin that drains into lake champlain covers about eleven hundred square miles which is all of washington county about half of chickening county know all the way along i eighty nine and and it enters the lake between burlington and colchester so we're a small organization i work out of my home in waterbury and i'm part time full time depending on the time here we have a part time project manager and we have an all volunteer board so the way we get things done is we work in partnerships sorry it was just so slow it's going to go back for me all right there we go so we always try to work in partnership and we try to work at sort of a smaller  scale sort of a smaller scale than the one to ski because well i've found is that people don't necessarily always relate to that when you ski river they may relate to the north branch or the stevens branch of the kingsbury branch or the huntington you know small or smaller tributaries we work with all types of organizations we work with mean us a palate we work with other non profits we work with state local or state local and federal agencies have had a bit of a history i guess really through their conservation commissions of working together and i was actually asked to speak probably a couple years ago an event and i thought well this is a great way to work with you know four relationships with some schools we will go to community community events and festival we put on workshops public meetings and forums we do have some printed publications which i do have a couple with me here today we also do some on water programs first for five years we did a six day paddling trip on the river from marshfield to the lake we haven't done that for several and what i tell people is don't be put off by the word race we changed the name this year to race and ramble i mean last year we had people who stopped and went swimming so you don't need to take the racing part of this seriously if you just want to come out and get on the water people can interrupt and with any questions you and we do a lot of monitoring assessment we have several water quality monitoring programs one is down in the  greater burlington area a lot of little urban streams down there the other one is around berry montpelier and then we actually have a long standing one in what we call the headwaters which for us basically means plainfield marshfield and cabot if you think about it in terms of municipalities we do a lot of storm water outfall monitoring and what that is we go we work with me yes a pallet is and we worked in richmond several years ago  and we will go around a lot of pollutants can enter our streams are storm water systems which are only supposed to collect precipitation but there can be  cross connections from sanitary lives or cracks and breaks from sanitary lines or intentional dumping where we go around and we sample the outfalls we go around while it's dry because any water that's coming out of a storm water system during a dry period is automatically suspect a lot of times it can just be ground water infiltration but we sample that and then if we find problems we work backwards up the line and we're working with the public works department to see if we can identify the source and most importantly then actually correct problems and we have done that in a in a number of cases the other thing that we've done a lot of is what we call third area of health is really looking at the physical characteristics and this is also understanding the geomorphic status of our streams is also really critical to protecting ourselves from flood damage most flood damage in vermont is not inundation flooding it's not simply where the water rises up and spreads out and goes into buildings and structures that's certainly what happened in waterbury where i live up on a hill so i was not impacted by it but most of the damage from irene and all the other storms we have is a row janelle when you saw the roads ripped out the culverts ripped out people's houses washed away it's because our streams are unstable at this point i have several copies here i don't know if i have enough for everybody and this is available online but a couple years ago we produced living in harmony with streams and this explain that so it's accessible to everybody we work on a lot of restoration and protection projects we do a lot of riparian improvements we do a lot of str bank planting so if your kids are interested in planting a longer stream bank i'd love to talk to them about it we do long term protections we've helped you know work with farmers and other landowners to  long term or permanent easements along the river to protect them we do river cleanups fish passage improvements a lot of our calls are significant barriers to fish passage they break up habitat isolate populations so we've done both retrofits and actually this summer we're going to be doing an actual replacement there hopefully this summer on cross it broke  and we do a lot of storm water related projects that to help reduce flood runoff so that's all i was going to talk about the friends and then i was going to shift and talk a little bit about yes yeah you know it's like any board i think you know some are more active than others and yeah they're all involved sort of in in different ways in their in their different the one board member who people are maybe most well there's actually two i should say who are people are most likely to know one is ginny lyons is on our board she's been on for about a year and given jenny's schedule we don't see a lot of her at board meetings but she's very helpful in many other ways the other person that people might know is column mccaffrey he's a musician he's actually the president of our board and he's the only board member who actually predates bear with me i guess are you all from jericho or you some from you from surrounding towns jericho  county down around burlington we focus on really what we call the urban pollutants phosphorus sediment i don't think we're doing any sampling because where other ones so they're not really expected to be contact streams and then around bury montpellier and in the headwaters we do more bacteria testing headwaters we'll do we sort of rotating you know there's a lot of really nice high quality streams up there and we want to keep them that way and we've sort of have our program where we rotate like this year we'll do this at a streams in the next year we'll do another set of streams so it sort of varies based on what we're what we're sampling for very varies based on where we are well in the streams that are in the more urban areas not surprisingly we're finding high sediment high phosphorus we are finding a number of bacteria problems along the main stem of the when you ski and the thing with sampling in stream is trying to actually get back to a specific source is really difficult because it can be so cumulative but for example we've got a spot in plainfield where i feel like every year we're getting it narrowed down a little bit more but there's some kind of hot spot with with bacteria coming in because right above the village it's good and then just a short downstream we've got a hit so we're trying to look at some of the tributaries that are that are coming in so it really it really varies the other thing that we want to do more of is  is more and it gets a little difficult to do more precipitation events so rather than just going out on a scheduled basis which means you know we could go out five times during the summer and they could all be dry  trying to go out after what we call the first flush of the storm because that's when the majority of the pollutants come into the stream and if we can get out there you know within a certain window then we have a better chance of perhaps especially on the smaller streams of finding out where we have specific problems in the case of out falls we literally look at the infrastructure maps and we will follow it up catch basin by catch basin and and try to intervene and see if we can pick up where in the case of the outs also you know when you go well typically we don't do anything typically it's the town that does something and i'll give you sort of the most sort of agree just example i remember personally seeing but there is a case in one town where the storm water line was directly under the sanitary line and both of them were cracked so the repair was to fix the crack in both of the lines but particularly you know to stop the sanitary line from from leaking there are other cases where  inadvertently or intentionally people's sanitary lines from their homes will get hooked into the storm water line so then those have to be disconnected and connected  properly we had a case in montpelier where we were picking up fluoride so there was a drinking water leak that was getting into the storm water system so that was a way to save them money on their drinking water system so it's sort of a variety of  things so talking a little bit about storm water you know the first thing people think about is that storm water is an urban problem and without a doubt when you get into urban areas where you have a really high percentage of impervious surfaces and a hard surface a roof or driveway it's certainly more extreme but there are  lot of issues in more urban or excuse me more rural village village settings and i'm going to talk about that a little bit more later as a lot of it is related to our road in our ditch systems the way it accumulates water so first has to talk about what is storm water and it's really simply water from rain or snow that doesn't soak into the ground in a natural environment you get a lot of uptake by vegetation  also serves to slow the water down so that as more of an opportunity to soak in and reach the stream slowly via groundwater or not reach them at all because it's used by other vegetation even if it does run over runoff over land it's slowed down by the roughness of the surface and it prevents erosion and sediment from going  in our built environment our goal was pretty much to concentrate water and move it as quickly as we could away from our infrastructure and into our into our streams so you see in a more urban or suburban setting this depicts the roof you've got it on the driveway the lawn it gets into a storm drain system it puts it in a pipe and we move it as fast as we can into the river and what we've learned is that's a problem for two reasons one is it picks up a lot of pollutants and carries them directly to the so the pollutants that go into the stream are a problem the other problem so quality is a problem quantity is the other problem and it's this type of system that can really contribute a great deal to localized flooding to where you've got intersections that are flooded you've got culverts that are getting torn out because we're taking this high volume of water and putting it  in very quickly i was trying to put this presentation together a while ago and i was trying to member some of my statistics i have citations for and some of my i don't know i was trying to find where i got these two probably through the lake champlain basin program  but storm water is responsible for seventy percent actually i take that back i think i got these from e p a stormwater is risk boncelles for seventy percent of surface water pollution and fifty percent of that comes from residential sources yet and that's why i was trying to find the sod taishan because i figure somebody is going to ask me that when i looked at it myself i was like where did i get that citation from so yeah that would be collectively across the us it would be somewhat it would be different in vermont and it's different with different you know even when you break down the lake champlain basin it's different you get into a very heavily agricultural base and like the mrs swaray that's going to be different than the wind that has a much higher concentration urban yeah so it is always going to vary but it's sort of gives you an idea of the magnitude of the problem and i think you know a lot of it's the shift and some of you guys may know this you've self selected to come here so i always figure there's some background in people's minds but you know there was always a tendency to think that water pollution brought our industrial their waste water treatment plants you know they're all these big things that you can point at and that's not the case it's everything that we've done to our landscape on a cumulative with a cumulative effect and that's why we can all play a contributing factor to the blooms stormwater is very effective at carrying pollutants directly to the water and the other thing that we often don't think about is water that's coming off of hard surfaces is much warmer and warmer water has its own impacts on water bodies and i don't know if anybody here is a trout fish or person but trout like cold clean so what this shows and again this is for the entire entire lake not just but also the new york side is what are the sources of phosphorous  and agricultural is clearly a big piece of the problem just based on the sheer volume of land that is in and in agriculture  one thing i always do like to point out is you know forest is a big contributor of phosphorous phosphorous is a naturally occurring element in the environment so any land is going to contribute phosphorous to it and that's why forest is there and we do have a lot of forest so that's why the percentage seems kind of high but kind of the key thing i want to come back to this one in a second is that i'd like to talk about is the relative contribution of an acre of land and this is from the lake champlain basin program one acre of urban and suburban land contributes about four times as much as one acre of farmland so when people think oh it's all those farmers from the missis couloir down to addison county or wherever yeah  ag land and there's some really issues there but the urban and suburban and rural issues are a big thing yes i think is kind of a fun fact that if lawn were classified as a crop that would be the fifth largest and one of the things to remember about lawns is that as far as their infiltration capacity you know some of it's going to vary by soils and so forth but long as a share is shallowly rooted so it doesn't break the soils up really well so the runoff from law on is really pretty high certainly compared with if you had  slow it down spread it out and to let it soak in because that's what it would do in the natural environment i do want to go back sorry well i don't know i don't i don't know if they fertilize as much but remember there's two issues with storm water one is the quality which would certainly be if it was picking up fertilizer and bringing it into the river the other is quantity and that lawn it's not as bad as a parking lot but lawn is going to shed water much more quickly than again a maddow or for land lies if it's causing a row well first of all it can a number of ways it can be eroding in and of itself you know like for example i used to live in coal chester and i didn't put phosphorus on my lawn but the person who lived there before me sure did because i did a soil test and even after two years of living there it was through the roof so anything that was eroding off of my lawn was going to be taking phosphorous with it the other thing and i do want to get back to this slide here use of of phosphorous and fertilizers whether it's act you know the government basically used to give farmers as much fertilizer as they wanted and it was loaded with phosphorus so there is a lot so even though a lot of farmers have cut back on the use of phosphorus and fertilizers there is a lot bound up in that soil and the other issue about storm water is is not just the quality of the storm water itself as it enters the stream but the quantity so when you see these raging rivers which are more and more common are more common in areas that are developed and i'm going to include agriculture you know anything that isn't pristine forest or meadow you're going to get a lot higher flows which are going to erode your banks a great deal more and it is going to take the phosphorus no i think there are people who think it's everybody else's problem and they're not going to change their behaviors unless they're regulated to change their behaviors and there are there is a bill i mean if you really want into the details there's a bill in the legislature this year aged thirty five which is probably the best chance i mean i've been here for in this job for like nine years this is by far the best chance that we have to actually fix this problem and it is a combination of regulatory enforcement eg agricultural producers there's probably going to be very very little on just individual landowners because you know who's going to come out and police people putting fertilizer on their lawn there's educational aspects  just putting fertilizer on the lawn it's a lot more complicated than that so there's a there needs to be more and more funds put towards education so that people do know how they can change their personal practices and there's also going to be more funding towards fixing the problems that we already have on the ground a lot of the development in the wind in the lake champlain basin was done before we had a really good understanding of the impacts of storm water if we could go back and like new development the new development that's coming worries me less because it's more regulated they're going to use better tools to manage the stormwater things that we have on the ground and our dirt road system is is a big problem because think about where a lot of our dirt roads are i don't know if jericho's an aberration or not but where did we put a lot of our not just our dirt roads but our paper roads where did we put them along the rivers so we have created  a major pathway for a rose in and storm water to get into into our rivers just by where we put our roads know we're not going to go back and relocate all our roads some segments of some roads probably will be relocated and probably should be relocated but we've got to deal with the situation on the ground so there's no easy answer do i believe things are getting better i kind of have to or i couldn't do this job am i going to see pristine lake champlain in my life time not a chance so i don't know whether that's good news or bad news but i think it's a realistic view the other night we had our annual dinner and we had the deputy secretary of the agency of natural resources speak and you know he said this what we're doing this for our kids and our myriad of levels and lived to several places before moving here in two thousand and four and when i moved here in two thousand and four pretty much what i heard and saw was that lake champlain was in severe difficulty it's decades and it's it's more than decades it's really in some ways it's a century and a half or more in the making while since i read the history of it was a lot of it was really in the thirty's and forty's when we put so much phosphorus on the land and then there were also techniques in agricultural practices that you know to bring more land into production you know land that was probably too wet to be farmed in its natural state it was drained and ditched in certain ways and that you know sent more water into the streams and then our own patterns of automobile eighty nine with through in sixty you know people began to move out further so a lot of it is i mean it's been it's certainly been decades figured i would do some stuff on the board and with handouts i see a couple people did pick up handouts since we have a small group  is something that i work with i work a lot with there's a group up in callus called the calloused lakes and streams committee it's an offshoot of their conservation  of small areas of the development so what we wanted to do was put something together to help people sort of assess their own impacts and that's what this document does and i'm not going to read it you know word for word but it's basically sort of the  first message is just go outside when it's raining you don't need to be an engineer just go outside when it's raining and look at how water moves onto your property across your property and off your property across your property and off to off your property and what's in here is really a series of questions to think about  one is you know just looking at your structure do you have gutters and downspouts do you have them directed onto your driveway onto your driveway so it hits your driveway and and goes out  rapidly as possible or does it go onto a vegetated area where it would just have a chance to groups sink in and if you do have water coming off your roof whether it's in a down spot or it's coming off you know say the value of your roof or it's getting concentrated do you have any type of erosional issues occurring there and can you to have an opportunity to spread the water out  little bit more in a more rural environment really thinking about where water leaves your property and joins the town road or the private road  or ditches is something that's really important because what you start to get is as these networks work together is you get a real concentration of flows and sooner or later that road crosses a stream or comes near a stream and a lot of times everything that's accumulated into that water is going to go into the stream so that's something that's really important and another one of the handouts i have  is talking about how you can do better maintenance on your driveway or private road we've done along with some partners  a lot of dirt road assessments on behalf of towns and what we do is using g i s geographic information systems we'll try to find the h spots just using g i s and the way we do that as we look at what's you know first of all what's the proximity of the road to a stream what's the steepness of the road because that'll tell us a lot about how quickly the water travels what are the soils like there are they highly a road of soils those are really the three main criteria and then we have a set of priorities where we actually go out with a checklist and a camera and we document erosional spots and then we go back to the town with a list of priorities and then the towns can work through those and this is one of fix them it can save money for the town in the long run and i can also be protection to the stream and one of the things that struck me the very first time i did this and i can still visualize it we were standing at the bottom of this really long private driveway that was coming into the town road and i said to the person i was working with i said well the road would be fine if that guy would fix his driveway because you could see the coming down and you could see where at the bottom he or she had really directed the water on to the road so there's a real interplay you know in rural communities between those two and this is something that sort of going back to your questions about the history of this i think it's really been the last three four years where the real it's really the realization has really come that our dirt roads are a big issue in our communities in terms of the way they convey water so i think that that's a really big thing that i think people can can look at  so i'm going to i'm not going to walk through all of this but one of the things in this is a different schematic than the one that's in here and there's some resources at the end of this to go into a lot more detail but if you really want to think about what's happening on your property you can go online you can get you get pretty good aerials of your own house right now and you can blow him up and you can go out there like i said go out there in a storm and start drawing arrows of where you see things happening or go out there you know particularly like this time of year when we're going to have so much runoff and really look for you know where you might have a row tional channels even small ones coming off of your property because they can they continue to contribute down you know downstream if you will  but this shows a couple of different ways with the references you know that you could sketch out what's going on on your property and then i didn't put these in the slot on the board over there people want to just come up and take a look at some of them but then it talks about techniques that people can use and some are pretty simple and metal grasses are good too if you don't want what are you vegetation but the more you can put deep roots into the soil that are going to break the soil and have it have more infiltrated capacity and i actually i see what they did there one of the techniques i don't know that i've got it up there but it's previous pavers you know most would have places to infiltrate into that yeah or if there is some way for them to divert water into a vegetative area i don't know what it looks like out there  have a parking lot that just looks like regular asphalt but what they've done and i'm not a materials engineer but basically the fine that would normally make an asphalt impervious are left out so that the water can actually drain in and through and then what's important about these though is the way they're constructed underneath because if the water drains through you want to go somewhere so it's usually on like some kind of sand bag or they might have some perforated pipes in there and those have actually been in use and i know there's concerns about them in some cold weather situations but they do actually they resist they were because they don't hit the frost heaves unless they get clogged up if the water is draining through they won't get the frost heaves as much and they're going to actually be a little bit safer because you yeah ok yeah yeah yeah i've seen applications and i've seen the pervious concrete too and maybe it's i haven't seen in a lot of years to be honest and maybe it's gotten better but the problem somehow it was it looked a lot and felt a lot rougher like i actually before i came to vermont i was in philadelphia and one comment was where you couldn't walk in high heels because your heel would stick there probably would not be such an issue courage to take a closer a closer look at these and just go home and take a look at your property and if you look on the last i guess it's the second to last page five there's a number of resources here  you haven't taken a copy please do and i have plenty of the and i actually have a goal to give these away because this is a state publication and i want them to redo this because i think it's a good little publication but i think there's some things that could be done better with it like the title low impact development guide for residential and small sites now if you're a homeowner does that scream out to you that this is a useful  tool and a lot of it is geared towards people just using around their home and i probably get in trouble for saying this but the new hampshire homeowners guide to storm water management which the link is in here that's excellent that's like real down to earth i mean if you want to get into going out and calculating square footage and doing all this stuff it'll help you do that but it also has just some really practical great photos i think a photos i have here i got out of out of that same thing with the vermont rain garden manual if you want to you know learn how to put in a rain gar how to size it properly what kind of plants to pick where to site it it's a terrific god and then the other thing i have here is a one page this was from  i think that's pretty much what i had and wanted to cover i don't know if there's any questions i can answer people want to come up and take a look at the board and look at some of the ideas we can just turn the lights on and and you can do that c barn in richmond and there definitely will be announcements via our newsletter and also i'll probably ask folks in the surrounding towns to put that on front porch for  when we have a suite of native species that we we recommend it varies a little bit by site both on the specific conditions of the site and whether or not you're in the lower when you're in the upper ski but you know there are certain plants that you can sort of never go wrong with from our perspective willows dogwoods all those are great in a lot of cases you know basically you want floodplain species in the lower when you ski silver maples are great red maples are really versatile believe it or riparian buffer guide and that will give you i think it's the bot top reference this one right here that will give you a list of a lot of species better suited going to go out go and check check that out and i don't want to paint the picture that you know grasses are a good option either they most certainly are anything that has you know a more established root system and i guess i could see that maybe what that would do is filter out a lot of the sediments you know before it got into the buffer and then you can just continue where they probably yeah yeah yeah and it's always a question i get a lot as well how big does a buffer have to be and there's no single answer to that you know it depends on the size of the stream it depends on what is adjacent to the bar for it depends on how steep it is it depends on the soils typically when we approach a landowner we tell them we want a minimum of thirty five feet  and part of that's practical we work with u s fish and wildlife and they'll pay for half the plant material but i have to get the land owner to sign an agreement that says we're going to have thirty five feet if i can get thirty five feet they won't pay for you know so part of it's yeah we always try to plant a mix the one thing that that i feel like we have learned in the last few years is  going more and more towards when we do the planting of planting shrubs willows and using will as and with because they grow fast they can get cut off by ice and they come back they can get chewed down by beavers and they can come back but in general we've moved a little bit more towards early six plants because that's what would have gone in there on its  so begun to use in certain cases a lot more birches alders but a lot of time when we're working with a landowner we're working with volunteers too they want what i call the big charismatic trees they want sugar maples and red maples and you know so we put enough in there for people to come and look and say while there's a diverse buffer we've moved a little bit away from what i always call the forest forest in a box kind of thing you know a few a few more species and i've worked with landowners who sometimes a land owner sensibility matters you know i had a guy say well i