a number of people that paying him to help you most of you had a chance to register their registration desk and start to get some information that's available on our many information tables here this year we're welcoming our main goal tonight is to educate people and to get conversations going about about stormwater and so i would like to ask best our panel to that you want to hear and we're hoping that will work work well and i'd also like to recognize a few special guests that many of you might want to have a dialogue with  here and if if i'm missing anyone please introduce yourself or that wants to be introduced because we all know that a lot of the solution to this problem is getting our elected officials to prioritize and demonstrating to our presence here that this is an important issue both the pollution is affecting the flooding aspect of storm water so we have we hope to have a total of six panelists three or four who are from the three towns and three of whom have three expertise of relevance to store water i green infrastructure water quality and i think that no one would disagree that the reason we are polluting so much of the water receding waters outside of belmont is because our sanitary system is broke and it probably should be it's old it's very most of the century sewers in town put it before the twenty's whole lot more before nine hundred thirty five which means that the senator the sewers in this town are already hat the end of their useful life or soon will be that means that seventy seven miles of senator a sewer pipe needs to be reconstructed we need to do what we've done in drinking water the reason it's a problem for  to simplify this and bear with me if you already know this but in belmont the way we have of sewers slayed out is that we have drainage pipe laid clay pipe very large diameter laid end  integrity of the can actually hold this century sewage in them but now they're old they break and they leak as do also the laterals coming out from the households into these and when they break they link in the same trend the drain is and so they go straight into or receding waters and we pollute i think it's time to the town of gum up and citizens about not to say this is enough we have to develop a plan and we have to go ahead and make this a priority seventy seven miles to go you can do the math you can see this is going to be a project that is going to cost tens of millions of dollars but i think it's time we do it the pipes are old they are no longer serving the function they were supposed to serve they need to be replaced and the easiest way to replace is what we're doing now really lining up going man hold man you know trench work at all you simply rely by sending a liquid up and then school coming down the road but talking to our down further it's a date as far as he's concerned debt assumed by the sewer and water enterprise funds is very different from the way the regular d from taxpayers and they separate that off and are not as concerned with debt that is that borrowing done for that purpose also unlike a lot of other projects that are the proposition two and a half limit on borrowing here this is not tax this is rates so what has to be done is the right article these to be placed on warrant by the selectmen to authorize that sound borrow and then this work i think needs to go concerned about the waste is going into our catch basins from that some other animals we need to worry about illicit connections to the extent we haven't found them yet we there are a whole host of things that need to be done plus we need to clean and maintain our sewers all of these things cost money but i think it's time to think about getting some capital projects going that will be given to reestablish a an early interest in the mechanical integrity but first everybody's been thanked here i'd like to thank everybody that came to see us because i think the first step is to let you all be aware of the issues because you have to speak for the town to direct us as a single person at the d p i can learn to forge but the communities have to be able to say this is the direction we want the town to go we're focusing on infrastructure so i think the important thing is to create storm water awareness to our community twenty nine hundred thirty so critical but i've seen some older sections so it's all and needs needs to be updated it's just like an issue throughout the whole country's infrastructure people seem to focus on on roads and bridges and the safety of it to the public and in such a sewer water storm water has a big impact when it comes to water quality and the regulations and the potential for fines for not being able to meet that water quality so by not implement water quality out there and not only do they do they have the town's a den of five issues but they have they've had in the past all of them away and purchase program where they not only improving the water quality they're creating you know i think the scene issue this what we're talking about here is dry weather floats you know when it's when it's dry out you don't expect flow to be coming out of your pipe out of your dream plate and we're seeing dry weather flows and they're polluted they have high bacteria counts and they can have high nutrients and a lot of issues and lots of water i'm going to the charleston yeah actually i so i have a bunch of statistics to say and you may appreciate this especially since most of the communities here in mystic on watertown is about two charles i believe so i definitely feel like the dry weather flows and our leaky sewers is a big issue it's a big issue for watertown that we've been working on for a number of years it's something that is really never going to end unfortunately you know we have as they point out a system that's very old just like our old houses and our old roads they need constant upkeep so this is something that we're going to be doing for a long time so that being said are two other issues i just wanted to mention and we started to talk about the stormwater awareness issue and i think that's a big issue in watertown and the other community as well i'm sure that the watershed associations can discuss that further but you know talking to some some people about this presentation you know when you think of watertown you know it's called watertown you're supposed to think of water but the first thing that comes to mind is the charles river and you know when you think of watertown in the charles river you think of the charles river something that flows through watertown you don't think of water town as something that drains into the charles river and trying to just create that awareness when all your brock's are gone they've all been piped you know how do people see those connections that they me see in other more natural areas on so i think something that we're constantly struggling with especially when you're on a town staff in town bob here is how you get that word out and the other issue that i want to point out and you know we've focused a lot on the drive of flows but we really need to talk about the weather flow so you know tonight it's raining out what's the water quality in our falls now if we solve our dry weather issues our leaky sewers we're still going to have exceeded sister in our weather events and  weather events are the sources not just of our bacteria but a lot of our phosphorous and phosphorous is a big pollution in the rivers that leads to cation and again i'm sure the water should association could talk a lot more about that than i can but particularly being in charles river community and having what's known as a t n d l or a total maximum daily load allocation which is sort of you know the amount of pollution you can carry in a river with the river still being healthy  you know i think we have to have our sixty two percent reduction in on phosphorous we bring into the river how are we going to do that so now the phosphorus comes from a little bit of come from roofs it comes from the air naturally forest as a source of phosphorous how do you how do you solve that problem so i think that's something i think a lot of the focus is on the dry weather flows but my pipe but yet there is and it smells like sewage that's sort of water a drive with the flow as it's usually it could can be groundwater but a lot of times it's indicative of leaky pipes issue which obviously is important to me and my work and it's great to see that you know it's a palette these here to help so some of you may be familiar with charles everywhere should association but for those of you who are i'll just give a brief  introduction to who we are we're environmental advocacy organization and we work very much off of a science base so we have a strong field science program for go out collect data run data crunch numbers run  models to try and figure out what are the problems what are the sources and what can we do about that charles for watershed associations been around since about one nine hundred sixty five which may actually makes us one of the old watershed associations in the country the charles does start in hopkinton to boston but unlike the marathon it takes an eighty mile route so it's pretty soon us  our area is about three hundred eight square miles and we have either all or part of thirty five municipalities within our watershed so working with municipalities is a big part of what we do and a lot of strong want to management in massachusetts as you've heard does take place on the municipal level so it's a great place to engage on this topic so i told her what i should association one of our sort of main approaches or montra is to look at a natural system try and understand that natural system understand how that natural system would want to function before the development came and then can we use the technologies of today to essentially recreate that natural function in some way so one of the big things that happens when we develop a landscape is we cut off the connection between the rain that's coming down and groundwater and plants so the rain that's falling outside in a natural forest or grassland system  about fifty percent of that would go down into the ground is ground water when we build buildings on it and pave over a parking lots very little of it can go down into the ground again we develop we tend to reduce vegetative cover so about thirty percent of in our natural system of that rainfall was coming might be taken out by plants used by plants transpire back into the atmosphere or evaporated back into the atmosphere but again we build we cut off that connection and instead what the most of that rainfall volume becomes is runoff which is creating this in these issues that we're talking about whether it's the water quality issues like the phosphorous the bacteria or the water quantity issues like flooding which tends to get people's attention but a big issue been facing this summer in the charles and a lot of the a lot of reason around the state are low flows because it has been so dry during the dry weather periods of the river would rely on that groundwater to serve as its base flow so that water has been going down into the ground all year that's what makes up your river when you don't get that groundwater recharge you can have a dry river or dry lake system so sometimes are viewed as two separate issues but they're really all connected to the storm water the quality and the quantity issues so basically looking at returning that natural water cycle or that natural function to our developed areas and we've done that relatively simple things to more and more advanced sort of engineered technical approaches like bio filtration systems which are basically garden type systems that are designed to take in cold water treat it get those pollutants filtered out by plants and soil if the underlying soils are good ideally you can infiltrate it to kind of again return then actual balance but even if you can't infiltrate at least you can filter it somewhat before it gets down into the charles you can also slow it down and cool it down which is important  so that you're not getting a huge spike of runoff into your rivers or your streams right when it rains and then returning to that low base level low base low level right after rains you can kind of round runoff and the great thing about a lot of these techniques is a lot of them have a lot of ancillary benefits as well so if you're planting you know if you're planting more vegetation you get air quality benefits you get habitat benefits you get a benefits so they can be very as opposed to sort of underground forgotten out of sight out of my infrastructure these can be nice on the surface reminders  refer to the fact that in the lower charles we basically have one visible tributary and that's not because there's only one tributary it's because all the other tributaries were either fill mostly think of the back bay as landfill or some a south boston is landfill well a lot of the tributaries to the charles like in austin in brighton in watertown through cambridge were either just filled in with land or put into these huge culvert s which still do discharge to the charles in fact basically the large tributary to the charles to the lower charles is the stony broke which is completely color it so some of them are still there some of them are gone you usually see the effects of them when it rains because that natural system wants to act like it wants to act but the project that and reason referring to is the muddy river  daylight project which folks maybe you have experienced right now just as traffic it's the stretch of the mighty river right in front of the landmark building kind of the stretch that people call the old sears parking lot because it was basically berry when sears needed a parking lot and they put a parking lot over it so for decades that that stretch of the mighty river has been in a culvert and that's really one of the worse absolutely worst things you can do to a river i mean it just it just kills a river to put it in underground pipe like that so this money were daylight in project which daylight ing is the term for bringing out a very pipe this body we're dealing project is going now supposed to be completed this fall and it's that buried stretch in front of the sears building but a little further upstream as well  where they have created some nice natural banks totally taken the pike river out of the cape recreated you know some natural vegetated being some natural flood  plain and i think it's going to look really really nice from you know from what i've seen and what they're doing and that will not only help the water quality but the reason this whole project came about was as of the first phase of a flood relief project  so again when a river or stream is in a pipe that's an absolute fixed value it cannot take up more space than is available in the pipe whereas in a natural system a river has a natural overflow it has a natural floodplain floodplains where it can go because there are times where you'd naturally get flooding so there recreating some of that and then this project which is an army corps of engineers project basically got funded through federal funds after some severe funding and severe flooding in the mid ninety's phase two is to do some restoration on the entire money including dredging and removal of invasive but the funding for that is actually now a little bit less secure or then than than we thought it was during the project things are interesting  we are a science based advocacy organization that works very hard to gather data and share that data with partners like municipalities but also other friends groups and public groups and regulators to make sure that the best decisions are made to restore the river to what was once a very vital recreational resource our organization involves fifteen hundred people a year in the activities and we work very hard to translate these results for people to show them where conditions are great for recreation but also where we can find opportunity to implement some solutions and improve these resources we have been working with a number of business of how these over the past five years to try to find solutions to a number of these problems and like the charles river activities we've been undertaking is trying to work with communities to identify the best opportunities in their community to reduce sources of pollution whether it's identifying the stormwater of all that carries the greatest concentration and load bacteria or whether it's performing analysis on the landscape level to determine where we can restore natural hydrology in the community arson opportunities in the community when the queen is ready to implement these solutions what are the most cost effective solutions available to us now and in the back to the right you'll see a few posters developed by our consulting group it dexter or chester engineers formerly bio engineering group right here at the high school in belmont as well as in arlington on a number of the streets one shared by communities across our watershed and the charles river so it's going to take some time to shift from the way the system has been maintained for the last fifty years to the way that we expect these resources to be taken care of in the next fifty years so that that will take some time to and i guess this is most easy to understand the relevance of the water the environmental deals with a lot of environmental science problems and of late we've concentrated our efforts in assisting the owners property owners to go pers and landscape architects in the technical aspects of landscape development landscape design and one of those very important here is storm water management and i think the key word that i want to attach to that effort is infiltration and consumption we were with developers and landscape architects in consuming and infiltrating storm water on the property of the site so that we minimize the amount of water that ever leaves the site development of course creates  research projects in development projects since really used to building frames and designing the built environment to build landscape we have a wonderful opportunity  to test various systems and to advance the science and technology of ground water management the kinds of things that you would recognise that we could name that we actually  actually are also somewhat forgotten as a design element for storm water management and very infiltrating soils and planted areas to lessen weight the amount of runoff that occurs in those planted areas we've developed techniques and expertise in what is called manufactured soils we're rather than using soils that are native to an area were stripped loans that sometimes are on market less and less of the stores that are on the market are in fact handouts just find on one of the tables here are some photographs and some text that underline the design criteria the rewards of this approach and also the risks involved a deficit is that the science of stormwater infiltration has evolved in recent time like in the last five years it's a it's a very hot item  reasons one is really wants in the robust soil environment to support the vegetation that serially is planted there but also we want to maximize the treatment and the storage we and for us the opportunity to do some measurements and some interesting checking of how that is performed and what we found and others have found the same thing is that ninety percent of all rain events do not create a discharge from the wringer ninety percent of all redye that ends are consumed remember that the word i mention  treatments or the other thing we found was that there was some reduction of phosphorus although not as wonderful and the initial releases of leachate from that system actually hurt that you cannot get water down to the ground water for a number of different reasons you can still have a rain garden and you can gain this ninety percent factor simply  if the runway if the subgrade is contaminated which frequently occurs in the in areas you don't want to infiltrate water through contaminated soil because then you're into in the wrong water you can still create a impervious layer through various means catch that leach a through the three fluid or cultural soils and then it can be discharged in a responsible way so the loss of tools in the agree that's necessary also in times in the past it's been more of a reaction or something breaks you fix it we're now starting to drive to evolve into a more proactive approach to it similar to we pavements have been taken care of and that can only happen through investigation so in order to get into during these these programs through to locate illicit detections investigating the pipes permeable pavement is a development again about in the last five years you didn't see much of it before that it's a tricky business it's a wonderful idea it does require concrete again it can be made very permeable to the point where you can make a five gallon bucket and pour it and it disappears and i've done it it's very dramatic in the third type where the joints between the pavers are permeable they're filled with coarse same and who are very very fine gravel there is maintenance associated with all of these systems remembering talked about suspended solids well suspended solids ruined all of these things eventually the permeability will decrease to zero over time but the good news is i mean it's a new very particular kind of maintenance will save the day and maintain the functionality of the systems vacuum vacuum vacuum do not use a hose do not use a high pressure cleaner  to i think a topic that we haven't really looked at which is what does the law have to say about what people and developers need to do when it comes to runa and is it enough so maybe that's an easier question a slate we haven't talked about this is i know when it comes to these developments you can't get a building permit until you have met certain requirements the clean water act regulations the massachusetts weapons protection act regulations and and they are as disputed as they were at the  sounds like they're getting discredited with it with the mubarak they're pretty concrete what you need to do if you have to have store a certain amount of water but one of the challenges is that the state was not keeping up with climate change something amount of water that you are required by the law to store is different and you know it's based on a fifty year old data about how much rain comes for instance in one hundred years storm so so  if you know if they meet the legal requirements it's tricky business to predict whether that's enough and whether thing you know they'll be downstream impact it requires a pretty complex hydrological model and maybe that's something ralph you could also talk about the importance of having a good and how hard it is to get a good hydrology might know well the one thing we did do a few years ago when we were working on flooding was a build hydraulic model that we could integrate with cambridge and we calibrate of that and before we did our mapping was just a little hole and then put basically to cambridge that basically was assumed to be the same all the time whether it was dry or wet and what we did was actually develop a hydraulic model measuring the flows in boma and good that tell cambridge what to expect based on conditions in belmont that was very important when we did flooding were because we wanted a solution that would help people in the one brought neighborhood here and not hurt people in cambridge and we had twenty three different options and tried to choose the best and some of those would have done nothing for us and water done nothing for suppose some of them would have done great things for lynbrook and her cambridge and so forth and so we had had to choose an option i would hope eventually get all of our communities including our own into the water down into the same sort of modeling  that we can begin to see what the impact of flow really is when they go into the ability or it's just i guess another another thing worth mentioning with those projects is we do have material from the arlington and no man's land trusts here which emphasizes the importance of purchasing properties for the for conservation because private property owners by right have to meet certain stormwater requirements that  brook system itself you know we've had two properties come up for development recently both connected with the flood plain and with the type of geology that we have done on particular clay soils and how we've made so much of this and pervious the value of these remaining open species becomes magnified and i think it just adds to the point that you're making so you know what is the incremental cost of one more development to meet the very difficult to measure that but they do add up and as we see two very large developing go in at this time it is exacerbating existing think the sort of the questions were goes to the heart of the role of a watershed association because our natural boundaries are often at odds are they certainly do not line up with their political boundaries can certainly be a frustration if you are you know downstream of an upstream so it's great to see everybody here have a conversation together tonight the other point i wanted to mate is on the sort of the question of what do we need to do to get there so there are regulations first our water when it comes to new development and redevelopment what we found when we did the total maximum daily load study that i referred to in the charles for to scribed when you get a lot of phosphorus to the river it's because you're getting a lot of storm water to the river and where there's a lot of star water come from it comes from a large impervious parcels so what we found was that even though it was only about twenty percent of the land cover land use is the three land uses high density residential commercial and industrial were causing about fifty percent of the problem so small area  big problem so we have targeted that those areas obviously it sort of makes sense as a management approach to go after if you can get twenty percent of that treated and take care of half of your problem then that's a good way to go  but of course you know those communities or those particular properties are not regulated they're within a community that is regulated or already built there are ready built they don't know that they're not making any changes and are required to do anything and they're completely allowed to just let all their storm water runoff into matzos and into you know into all these guys systems and then it becomes mats problem basically without any  without any without any help from that and i think kind of a question about the pervious driveways is also connected there because basically the question is you know how do we get everyone everyone contributes to start on a problem how do we get everyone to development is going in the bylaws and the requirements and the regulations are in place for many of these like you said it is to determine precipitation are fifty years old it was an issue back to our days the ordinances are  not that difficult where if you only have a little bit impervious area you don't have to do anything if you already have a house that you don't have to do anything but it's all these little pieces that can tear down to dust for hours and put up the twenty things like that are something that as a few people we can just put it for that way the businesses will have an issue the developers will have issued residents who are trying for to upgrade will have some one thing citizens can do is to advocate for different table has some sort of ten things that a citizen can do sort of or a homeowner can do there and and several of the other tables have i mean i can see we've got a whole discussion of pavers over with ideal painters and on one side immediately at least lay out a plan of what we're going to be doing to correct this problem it is our problem we own it we should be doing something about it i think it will show that to both the enforcement agencies in massachusetts  they're willing to see some good faith effort on our part the trouble they have with creative financing is it is usually a legislative term that goes along with we're not going to give you any money but we'll tell you how to creatively finance something and that's the problem they are not providing any money they're just talking about creative finance but there are some potential opportunities on a larger scale there is for example the potential for private investment we've already seen some of that in major infrastructure projects around the country we've also seen the flaws in the contracts are written badly as they were in chicago or indiana but you know if you think briefly about getting an investor in to  stormwater by project and say that that investor is going to be able to try to feed over a period of fifty or seventy five years and that begins to stretch out and reduce the engle debt service payment for the citizens of the town and it also pushes it out over several generations one of the things that i find most disturbing about infrastructure finance for one hundred year projects is that we this generation is being asked to fix all the problems that we've created in a twenty year per one hundred years ago and that is going to last for another hundred years the financing really should be stretched out over several generations who are all going to benefit from that and hopefully with some a specific situation the selectmen have committed to requesting a presentation on our director of community development going clancy this fall about storm water and mining projects that are about to complete in various parts of town and we'll see the next phase will be driven by water quality measurements did they make enough of a difference or do we need to take a that people are where there is a reference to the new permit that will be issued at the end of two thousand and fifteen that mr powers will have to do to undertake work to meet these new requirements are go really ask the municipalities to step up to a different level in terms of measuring what is flowing out of their communities and putting a schedule usually about five years on resolving almost all of the storm water problems going into the river so in some ways the communities are really going to be in hot seat for the next five or ten years to really start resolving these issues so the need to identify funding and a strategy within that community made me pressing  communities but i'll highlight i think what is a an opportunity for municipalities which i think i'm starting to see in arlington with the work that wayne is doing with his storm or we're in a series but it's very difficult for a citizen in even a watershed group to understand the scale of the challenges that other communities have it's very hard to understand where is the problem under the city streets what were has been undertaken how can you measure the impact of that work in explain it to whether it's the selectmen or whether it is a town meeting can you create metrics to show that you are making progress and if you can't let's take a step back and evaluate whether the plan was an appropriate one to begin with and i think it's a critical juncture because you're asking these community members to support putting money roads sewer pipe water pipes are like dams and bridges they are usually designed to have a one hundred year life and so you build them and forget about them if they just go out of sight out of mind and the crisis that we've seen with the nation's bridges for example is one that is very difficult to grapple with roads you can see see the potholes but our bridges you never know when that is not going to be structurally sound so these are i think this gets to the heart of this is hard to communicate to the average citizen it's hard to explain what a rate increase will really do and we have to develop a better message try think to get th years and two against of my thought is the community needs to be aware of what's underground what needs to be replaced and understand that everybody is getting a benefit from it but nobody's paying for it per say by the gal awareness community input on how to provide these these options are something that we could be considering and just do it we need to get the outreach to the community explain it and that the majority of them agree with  a pamphlet that was put together i don't recall the person's name but it has a great history of water resources in watertown includes a lot of information about the oil drugs so we've been advertising our information tables and do we have any more questions