thank you very much for coming this is another in a series of educational events that a group called living along the lake shore sustainable living along the lake shore i was putting on we've had some on general sustainability some on energy some on food this one on water we're planning one for may twelfth on air quality and you saw a flyer on the table on the way in that will be holland christian high school high school and we're going to have some students participating in that they've been working on a project for monitoring air quality and they'll be presenting some of their information to us we're doing this as an effort to try to reach out to the community to educate people on sustainable issues the city of holland through their sustainability committee  has that as part of their charter and as such what we're trying to do is reach out to the community and provide topics that are important in the sustainability arena but also should be important to us as individual citizens tonight we're going to talk about four elements first we're going to talk about the watershed the water said project what's going on with that what defines it what our objectives are then we'll be talking about project clarity project clarity is an effort to improve the water quality within the watershed and involves a significant fund raising local fund raising effort to accomplish this the third element we'll be talking about is our drinking water that comes through the b p w system and basically that supports a lot of people in this community with clean fresh water but there's another component to that because some people are still on wells so we'll also be talking a little bit about getting our whole water supply from well systems and that's the program tonight we'll do the first two project a watershed project in clarity we'll take a little break and then we will come back together to talk about the water supply sold kelly gauhar it is a project manager for the bachata watershed project and kelly has been working on this for quite some time now i work with her on an educational committee for the watershed activity as well as an advisory group so there's a lot of opportunities for people to participate in a watershed program and kelly is going to talk a little bit about what the program's about they thank you paul and thank you everyone for coming out tonight on such a lovely evening for giving up your evening to be inside and i know i'd rather be outside ok all right technology will get this figured all right so here's a quick outline before i get started there's try to see where everybody can see me i know there's  post in the way so many give a quick introduction about the organization that i work for and then i want to talk specifically about some practices that we can all be doing at our home so we're going to die right into some specific practices for protecting water quality at your house in your yard and then we'll kind of take a step back and look at why do we care about these things and tie em back into the watershed project and learn about what the watershed project is and then finally i've got some resources to share at the end that are also back on the table there so the organization that i work for is the max how area coordinating council so how many of you have heard of the coordinating council excellent how many of you have heard of the coronating council because of the watershed project ok all right so some of you know the other purpose of a coordinating council that hopefully so little bit of history here the council was established in one thousand nine hundred three as a metropolitan planning organization so that is a local body that is designated under state law for every urbanized area of the state it's the local body that's required for carrying out the transportation planning process so that really is the core function of the council is to work with the local units of government in the holland urbanized area to carry out transportation planning so that entails road construction projects also non motorized planning bypass council coordinates the green commute week every year that's coming up in may and works with the local units of government on other issues of area wide concern so helped with the census clean air action crime prevention prevention and some other issues in so the secondary program of the watershed council beyond the transportation program then is the watershed project which i manage and i will just mention we do have five full time staff members that work in our office two and a half under transportation and two and a half under water shed and carolyn is here with me tonight major hand carolyn carolyn's r r half that shared so she gets to work with both the transportation and watershed programs so we will come back to what the watershed project is in a few minutes but i really wanted to kind of get right into the meat of what are some things that we can all do you around our house to protect water quality and help ensure a cleaner like macca tower for future generations so i want to just talk briefly about these four areas how we use fertilizer around the house are around the yard outdoor water use lawn maintenance and then a little bit about impervious surfaces fertilizers kind of the basic messages here number one is too much fertilizer is unnecessary first of all so making sure that you're testing your soul and only putting on what the plants need too much fertilizer it's has to go somewhere the plants don't use it up it's going to be lost to the environment in one form or another either it's going to be carried away by storm water it could lead to into the ground water and contaminate ground water sources or could be volatilized and lost to the atmosphere so being careful about your fertilizer use is a really important so you don't have unintended negative consequences to the environment so again the really the easiest way to do that is just to have a soil test em a few extension which in ottawa county is located at the fillmore street complex and west olive in allegheny county they are at the dumont lake complex in allegan they offer a home soil test kit you can purchase for twenty five dollars you bring it home and has instructions for how to collect your sample it has a posted page below that you send it into the lab at michigan state and they will send you back the test results the fairly simple process fairly inexpensive it is of i think it takes a couple weeks to get the results back but it's a great service that's available in kind of a good first step and a fairly simple thing that we can all be doing to make sure we're not using too much fertilizer that can then be lost to the environment a couple other things to kind of help reduce fertilizer use is especially in the lawns to mulch mow so make sure that those clippings are going back on to the lawn they are full of nutrients and as they decompose will release that needed fertilizer back into the soil that's also really important to make sure that clippings go back into the yard and not on paved surfaces so that when it rains they can be washed away down into a storm drain that goes right into lake macca tell us which is where we want to keep our fertilizers out of another great way to get fertilizer nutrients into the soil naturally is to use compost whether you compost yourself or you purchase commercially available compost a great source of nutrients also a great way to recycle your yard  waste and then finally one way you can minimize your fertilizer use is to utilize native plants in your landscape native plants or those that are adapted to our natural conditions here so typically they can get what they need out of the soil you don't need at additional fertilizers water conservation we believe pictures of here you'll see that the theme of native plants throughout this so water conservation really just being smart about how you water because again any excess water that's not going to be used by the plants in your landscape is going to run off your lawn runoff the driveway carrie whatever pollutants might be there waiting for it and end up in a storm drain and go into lake mecca tower the pictures are little dark but the first picture there on the top shows kind of an example of a drip irrigation or a soaker hose which is really kind of the message there is getting the water where the plants need it that's going to be much more effective than an overhead sprinkling to the stem in most cases because the water is going to go right into the soil and sometimes certain plants are susceptible to fungus or bacteria if the leaves get wet from overhead sprinkling so you can avoid some of those kinds of pest issues if you can do a stoker hose or a drip irrigation especially in your landscape beds lawn is more adapted to the overhead sprinkling the soil longer you can water less like that bottom picture because it shows that if you are going to mulch around a tree you don't want the mulch to touch the bark of the tree and one of my biggest pet peeves driving around the landscape in seeing improper mulch and having the mulch in contact with a tree trunk or a shrub especially can he encouraged moisture to stay there which could make it favorable for fungus to grow and then it also is a great place for rodents to hide and get right up close to that trunk and eat the bark away so keep the bark away for the multi way from the trunk a little bit to protect it up from to capture water that what otherwise run off of your property and then you have it available to use for watering your landscape it's is also i guess it's the dual purpose of capturing that water so it's not going into the storm drain and carrying pollution potentially carrying pollution with it and then you've got it to utilize for your landscaping needs to question you know you can ask questions throughout that's why i guess there's different options there does everybody hear the question about an official way to use water from rain barrel i mean one thing that you could do is connect the soaker hose to that spigot and if you have that soaker hose going through director of the conservation district and she is my local go to expert for rain barrel among other things she sells native plants too so she has information on her table back there she'll be working with us later this summer  host some rainbow workshops as part of the mecca tell water festival so there will be some options locally if you're interested and want to sign up and build your own rain barrel we will have those available later this summer courtesy of becky and her team  so then the other last point on here again using native species really is about picking plants that are suitable for the conditions so you don't want to put one plants in a high dry sandy backyard you want to pick plants that are right for the conditions so that you can minimise your water use typically if you're picking native plants that are adapted to the area you should not have to give them supplemental water once they're well established perhaps during a period of drought but so that's that's one way to minimize your water use is pick the plants that are going to be suited to the climate the rainfall amounts that we would normally get lawn maintenance  so these are just kind of some basic recommendations for maintaining your lawn so it's healthier for the lawn and it helps protect water quality moline high is important for helping the lawn itself to grow stronger and become more drought tolerant three inches is what the general recommendation is to mow your high three inches and this comes out of michigan state they have  a research facility and they have done all kinds of research and they have lots of great resources available on their website all about home and commercial lawn care but three inches is what they recommend was that does not help right structure to grow stronger so it will grow deeper stronger it will gather more water naturally it will tend to grow thicker there is less room for weeds so if you let it grow higher  you should have to water last and not worry about weeds as much love the photographic you're they cut it high and let it lie i don't remember where that came from that's not something locals but  that's those are kind of the big the big points there for a healthy lawn you mohai to get that good a structure you let your clippings lie so that they can be recycled back into the soil fertilizing in the fall again is what the recommendations are for for best utilization of that fertilizer again coming out of the research that's been done at michigan state in then one of the big things for water quality is the cleaning  up so it's kind of hard to see so this shows a picture and again these are not local pictures these were just google pictures of you know these grass clippings left on a a street they could go in that storm drain that storm drains going to take the clippings right directly to the nearest river stream and in our area we're most concerned about them getting to lake mack a towel where then they are source of nutrients that can be utilized by plants and we get access to plant growth and i forget the statistics but grass clippings have a lot of phosphorus in them which is the nutrient we're concerned about we'll talk about that in a minute length of time seems to change as new research comes out so the latest from michigan state is to water frequently during the middle of the day so so that's the that's the latest recommendation that they're putting out there so i'm sure there's there's plenty of reasons why that's just they have this little tip card that they produce and i wish i would have had them to pass out today but that's their latest recommendation is moeen frequently middle of the day which is against everything we've been taught last far so i think some of that has to do with trying to get water to the plant one it's at the highest stress point and then also i think there's been issues with watering in the morning or at night when it's cool making it more favorable for fungus and other problems  lawns when i talk about lawns i like to talk about alternatives to lawns because there are other things that we haven't talked about ways that lawns are very polluting there's air quality there's no equality issues involved with lawns so one way to kind of improve your maintenance for water quality is to reduce your lawn and you don't have to worry about money you don't have to worry about the watering the fertilizing that intense maintenance that lawns require and there's lots of simple things that you can do if you like to garden just increase your amount of flower beds can alter the size and shape of the lawn instead of having corners if you round those corners off you can kind of have some spots in the corners where you can put them some flower bed then it's easier to mow that way to alternative ground covers so this picture up on the top there kind of looks like a lawn but it's actually pennsylvania savage that's been planted which is a native plant grows about six inches tall it will grow in just about any conditions sunlight shade it does kind of like drier sites but it's very versatile very hardy  it's a perennial so you need to treat it like you would any other perennial usually once a year you can mow it down but other than that that's all you have to do once it's established it's definitely maybe not as friendly turfgrass would be but if that's not important to you then you can reduce your maintenance by putting in an alternative i don't know your neighbors so that's a good question whether the city will complain or not i don't know what the city ordinance is for height i know they typically have  ordinance which is something that's kind of near and dear to my heart to get changed so that these kinds of alternative low maintenance native landscapes can be maintained in in city areas but i'm not familiar with the cities we'd ordinance to know but a lot of with your neighbors it's just kind of spreading the message telling them why you're doing it helping them to understand the benefits and should go a long way to helping them to understand what you're doing  s could be could be although there are a lot of yard services that specialize in landscaping as well and want to put in those landscape bad too  native species all right so the last thing i want to have benton here is just kind of an awareness of impervious surfaces i've mentioned several times already like with grass clippings on the driveway that's the name pervious surface it's a direct conduit to is to the nearest storm drain you may live on a street that doesn't have a storm drain so that's not as as crucial but if you live on an especially in the city on a street with a storm drain anything that's being carried off and impervious surface your driveway your rough the sidewalk the street goes into that storm drain it's going to go directly into lake mecca tell or get there eventually through a river or a stream system so one of the really just the most important things is being aware of that and being ready to handle anything that might spill if you change your oil in the driveway making sure you have that you put something down in the driveway first to catch any drips or leaks and have a ready even just for anything that might be spilling as you're using it if you're mixing up pesticides or fertilizers to use in your garden you should always have a spill kit ready to clean up any sort of mess and that can be as simple as having some kind of an absorbent material or using a liquid kitty litter that's probably the most common for that having gloves so that you're protecting yourself and some kind of a broom and dustpan and garbage bags that's going to be your basic spill kit for taking care of any these are i think becoming more accepted and more used there's certainly concerns about using them in colder climates how do they handle free sauce cycle home and public schools has been putting imperm asphalt at some sites and i think they've been seeing fairly good results with that grand valley state university has used them on their campus so it's been applied in kind of small scale but i think it's certainly something to consider if you're going to be redoing your driveway or even just a path up to the house because then you're going to reduce what runs off and it will encourage water to get into the ground where it really wants to be anyway ok any questions about any of those things and i'm trying to speed through here quickly and i think i'm already taken too much time to try to get through the rest of this quicker so i was kind of step back now and talk about why do we care well we care i care as a watershed project manager because what we do on the land has an impact on the water and that's because we all live in a watershed so many of you have heard the term watershed before how here so so this is this is not what we mean when we say we live in a watershed but if you ask people off the street a lot of people may think it's some kind of a shed full of water but it is indeed the land so this is the m tower watershed so we define a watershed based on the single point where one body of water answers another so we define our watershed by where a lake m channel so that's the point and we can kind of draw an american airline on the landscape kind of connect the dots if you will for all of the high points between the mecca tower river and any adjacent rivers so we've got the river to the south pigeon river to the north we can look at those high points in between and connect the dots on the landscape to determine our watershed area so this is  watershed and you can see here i mean there's lots of streams that end up in like mecca tallow but everything is going to that single point where the channel enters lake michigan so this is my domain the mecca tell watershed you can see here that watershed don't care about our political boundaries that we put on the landscape so that makes it a little challenging to to work because we need to work across those political boundaries but that is one reason why the watershed project was placed with a coordinating council the watershed project started in one thousand nine hundred ninety the council had already been established for six years and was already working with most of the units of government collaborative collaboratively on transportation planning and other issues so it was kind of a natural fit because the mac was already working with most of these unit government the only two major townships that are but don't work with american transportation planning our blendon and over ice fall so we have to work a little bit harder to to reach out to them because we don't see them on a regular basis like we do the so a little bit of the history said the watershed project started in one thousand nine hundred nine and this was really in response to the state department of environmental quality they had been monitoring the lake  a couple decades and they monitor lakes and streams all over the state and so by the mid ninety's there monitoring had kind of determined what most people knew about lake mecca tower the water quality was for the low oxygen too many nutrients lots of algae blooms and so they're monitoring what they did was really determine the cause so the cause was there's too much fat and phosphorous coming into the lake so the state  towel to reduce the amount of phosphorus by seventy percent to get us back to a place where the water quality is no longer degraded and it's able to support healthy fish and wildlife population really is the state's major concern is that the lake in at the state that it was in then in the state that it continues to be and now it's not suitable for supporting healthy fish and wildlife populations so the the states look to the mac that and to figure out how to reduce phosphorus by seventy percent so when are it to reduce the phosphorus we have to know where it comes from first of all so the state helped us a little bit there and they're monitoring they did some models and determined that there's there's two main categories of pollution we've got point sources and nonpoint sources and i'll show a graphic on the next slide that illustrates what that means but essentially point sources are we think of them as pipes they're very defined easy to point at sources of pollution so a pipe coming from a factory that's discharging waste water versus non point sources non point source pollution that just comes from everywhere on the landscape so anything that storm water washes off of the land off of driveways off of construction sites off of farm fields every time it rains that's non point source pollution so the majority of our phosphorous and sediment comes from what's washed off the land every time that it rains here is this kind of a visual representation of you know point sources are very discreet there factories wastewater treatment plants and nonpoint sources everything else on the landscape that we know when the makah taua watershed we have the recent sources of phosphorus that we're most concerned about there are  several other factories that discharge small amounts but the three that we're most concerned about and pay attention to are the waste water treatment plants in holland and zealand and then meet johnson and what is again different her one thing that's different with point sources is because they're known and they're discreet they can be measured they can be regulated so the state does have a program by where point sources of pollution have to have a permit and already discharge that pollution into waters of the state so the wastewater treatment plants me johnson they have a permit that tells them exactly how much phosphorus they're allowed to discharge into lake macca taua they have to monitor it on a regular basis they submit annual reports and so we can see exactly what they are doing and we know based on since this project started in one thousand nine hundred ninety that the waste water treatment plant me johnson they are operating well below what they are allowed to so they can't really do anything else to reduce the phosphorous going into lake macca tell us they're doing everything that they can and even putting out less than what the state allows them to so our job at the waterside project is to work with everybody else to try to reduce a non point sources so what's been done so the project started in one thousand nine hundred nine and a lot of work has been done since then  community awareness is probably the biggest thing just like we're doing tonight kind of explaining what the problems are making sure that people understand what a watershed is the connection to storm water where these non point sources of pollution come from that's really our biggest job so we do have some ongoing things we do a newsletter we have a web site we're trying to get more into social media which with carolyn and i being fairly young you think we'd be into that more and we're just really not so we're we're working on that we do have a storm drain stenciling program that we work with community groups and they will spray storm drains that usually have just a brief message drains to lake what i get a picture of a fish so it just kind of puts some awareness in the community and neighborhoods that oh hey this goes right to the lake  lots of public education programs we do with both adults and children while there it's kind of inside like this or outside actually in the field get and getting our hands muddy lot of water quality research and monitoring has occurred  only from the state but whole college to grand valley and particularly as water resources institute has done a lot of research and monitoring not only to help us kind of figure out where the problems are but also to monitor is it getting better how are we doing at reducing the pollution the m p s are best management practices and demonstration projects so what those typically are kind of physical structures or vegetation that we can put on the land to either filter storm water runoff flow down runoff capture pollutants things like that and we do that both in urban areas with things like rain gardens bird park there's a series of rain gardens there that treats all of the storm water that comes off the parking lots that's one of our demonstration projects we do have a seal of approval program for long care and landscaping companies so they sign a certificate every year that they're going to use water quality friendly lawn care practices and we did we discover this is the eighth year that we've been doing one theatre tonight so it's been going on for quite a while and we have what sixteen companies that are are signed on this year we have i didn't bring any with me tonight but we have a list that's published on our website of all those companies that participate and then finally the there are storm water regulations that municipalities are subject to the cities of holland and that is a really good question so he asked what what fraction of the non point source come from residential versus other that is really difficult to determine because it's non point source hope  college working with the outer discovery center did some satam and monitoring the looking particularly at where sediment is coming from and so we know that the majority of the sediment that makes our rivers brown and cloudy every time it rains is coming from the agricultural areas of the watershed which makes sense because those soils are lighter textured they are rowed away more easily compared to the western side of the watershed where we are here where the are standing and heavier there's less agriculture so we do know that that the soil that we see carried is the majority of that is coming from from the agricultural areas but once everything's in like  lose i definitely think it's possible it's just the logistics of it capturing and measuring equipment is expensive it takes time so i you know i don't know that that's something that we're really prioritizing and dan will be up next and he's going to talk more about project clarity on the work that they're doing with some of the monitoring efforts there but at this point we're not in the watershed there i guess there are some it takes time to get through those their process so i think from what we hear from local farmers it's very frustrating to go through that process and there's a lot of paperwork and they have to wait and it's highly competitive to get the funding so fortunately we have a lot of farmers in our watershed that are willing to do things on their own or with minimal financial assistance so their project clarity which again dan will talk about next we have started to really form a network with the farmers and have these conversations about what what can t so i just will leave you with this some ways that you can kind of get involved using the best practices that we talked about and there are lots of handouts back on the tables there that have more information  about some of the things i talked about at the beginning we do have several volunteer opportunities throughout the the spring and into the fall we do a fall and spring river cleanup in partnership with the outer discovery center  that's coming up and i forgot to bring the postcards that have more information about that on may twenty seven i'd mentioned the rain gardens that small and bird park our staff is kind of adopted those rain gardens and we like to get out a couple times a year and pull the weeds but we like to have friends come and help us and then we do with the otters cover center again we partner with them to monitor the insects that live in the streams we've got seven locations that we monitor the insect populations they give us kind of a good general sense of water quality because they are have they have varying sensitivities to water pollution so we started this project a couple years ago and we hope to do it long term and see how the insects change as a way to gauge our water quality improvement or or not so that's a fun thing great way to kind of literally get your hands wet and and your feet m y to really see and understand what's in the watershed also we have a lot of educational opportunities we'll have a mega tile water festival on july twenty five we're still working on planning all of that so that and then probably one of the biggest simplest things that you can do is just help us spread the word if you learned anything new tonight have already heard something about so start with a little bit of a history bit here i might not be able to read the writing up at the top of the screen but everyone know like max how what that used to be called black river yep the black lake and the black river here this postcard is from around the turn twentieth century we've got a couple folks out in a boat having a nice day a nice little postcard to send back to their friends this used to be a very nice little tourist community folks would come up from chicago for the weekend there would be great fishing on the lake in the river and it was on the place called the black river which i think some people kind of have a little bit of a negative connotation makkah towel is actually from the the native word for black water so people might think that that's kind of a little bit of a problem so i'll go through some of the other names that we could go we could call it brown lake  this is water from my point i will show up here and they are not the brown water coming out of lake maggots out into lake michigan very sediment rich a of the sediment coming from upstream making a very warm cloudy inter bed going out into the clean clear waters of lake michigan law days could go out there in a boat and cut the difference between the two in the knife  times we could potentially call this green lake in the past few years we've had some significant algae blooms happening in the late summer for many years we've had so much sediment in the water that there was not enough sunlight for the  be able to use and grow so it's the water's actually cleaned up a little bit in the past few years in the algae has been able to use that sunlight kind of take off so it had some large algae blooms out in the lake and this next picture we could call it kind of awkward marine lake maybe you see this nice flat right in the middle that is blue green algae and for those of you who remember the news from last summer some types of blue green algae have been known to produce toxins and that was what caused the water shutdown in toledo along lake erie so we've seen a couple small spots of this here thing hasn't shown any problems for us yet but the conditions of our lake are kind of similar to those of lake erie and that could be a concern down the road for us so we used to have this nice relatively clean lake and things that kind of degraded over time it was known as black lake because it has a dark murky bottom with very clear water running through it we had a lot of decaying organic matter on the bottom so it was actually very clear water supported a lot of fish and ice a quiet community and over the past hundred years or so conditions  slowly degraded to where it is today so on the left all the areas in green are forest light blue or white ones and water that was what it was like in pre settlement times compared to present day where the red is built up urban areas with kind of a ring of agricultural land around the bottom still a few trees out near the dunes in the sand here soils along the edge of the lake but part  problem with like mega towers is the story of the change in land use that we've built up this community very vibrant community produces a lot of agricultural manufacturing it's a great place to live but in a lot of ways this is been at the detriment to the east side is the island merged with the outdoor discovery center back in two thousand and nine and we've been working on launching project larry with the partners at the mac and grande valley and a few other partners for the past couple of years to give you an idea of what the the greenway looks like are roughly following the river corridor from the lake past when mile island you can see the number of parks that are along there we are working to have  or purchased land along the greenway for conservation purposes to date we're at about roughly eighty percent of our goal can see the areas in a little brighter green are those parks that we are partners own  we're just missing a few spaces yet we'll eventually hope to connect all of this with a pedestrian trail which you could connect from the site is elan and take that all the way out to the state  the present mca to our river valley it's got about six hundred acres full of floodplain a really nice place to go take a walk through they've just connected or are connecting a bike trail that you could potentially ride on the can what you are from grand rapids hop on this bike trail and ride down adams street all the way into holland you can see the pictures on the right showing some of the flood plain area areas where the river when it gets hyper like we've had this past week floods out into the flood plain could slow the water down and store some of the pollutants that are coming downstream with it another example of this is the mcintyre greenspace this is the old one country club  when it closed down of about six years ago out of county parks and the outdoors every center purchased the portion of land here part of the problem with it being a golf course is that it was underwater for about a month out of the  year the law hard for it to be used so when that shut down we were able to buy this up as a park space there's still a disc golf course so there is still some golfing there but show you in this next image here this is what it looked like this is from january two thousand and thirteen right after a big snow melt event if you have been out there this past weekend it looks just like a lake it has about six to ten feet of water in places will stay there for a few days slow probably touch on a couple of questions that were mentioned earlier we've worked on some of these recreational and conservation efforts as part of the greenway project we were approached a few years ago by some community business leaders who were kind of settlement sampling and monitoring to try and figure out where exactly these pollutants are coming from we know that we're seeing them in very high numbers the state has told us that this is an issue that we need to address and before we could really start to have any significant investment or impact we really needed to know where the problem was coming from significantly so for about a three year study period we went out and actually monitored in streams for sediments nutrients and bacterial pollution  we were able to kind of come up with this kind of prioritized map for where things are coming from generally what we saw was during large rain events a lot of the pollution would come down from the outer edges of the watershed enter the streams the streams are been significantly strengthened and altered since since pre settlement times a lot of what winds have been removed so that water has a lot more energy can just move through the system faster and faster scour out banks bring in more pollution with that and all of that eventually winds up down the lake in the span of a couple days later and deposits a lot of the sediment there so by going back up to these streams are able to kind of prioritize out if we have a dollar to invest in this project where we'd like to ideally start so out of this i'm missing a few lines i'll try and summarize here  project clarity is kind of the result that came out of this we're seeking about twelve million dollars worth of investments to raise that in about a five year period we're targeting that to have a significant areas the first is land acquisition we want to secure some key areas along the river along the greenway where we can create more wetlands we've lost since we've lost about eighty six percent of the wet ones we know we're probably not going to be able or store all of them but if we can do them in key areas where key tributaries come together create significant storage in good locations we can hopefully have a good impact there this map shows a couple of them  this is one of our first restoration projects we did last year this is the view from the papar bridge park in zealand in washington on the way into town there a few years ago i think the story goes there was a troop of enterprising boy scouts who were tasked with clearing some of the vegetation out so folks could see the the water a little easier unfortunately when they took the vegetation out that kind of left the soil exposed the energy coming out of the river culvert there scoured out the bank and the park was losing about six to twelve inches of their bank on an annual basis so think about that with about three hundred stretch that's a lot of dirt that's being a road isn't this one spot so we work with the city and a couple of our consultants to put in this restoration work here this is wrong about the temper we put some rep rap to kind of stabilize the lower bank took the grade of the slope down a little bit replanted that with some native plants so that should hopefully prevent future scouring to becoming off the site from here this is in the ellen township you can hopefully see the one ninety six adams street exit right here so we have purchased about one hundred eighty five acres along the floodplain here this was once pasture land maybe twenty five to thirty years ago and it's gone fallow so we were able to purchase this room of a few of the neighbors  what we are going to be doing this summer is installing a berm which will store about forty five acres worth of water during high storm events water will be piped into this low area there's a little bit of a natural lev along the river so this will reconnect it to the flood plain the water will be able to sit in this what land area for a couple of weeks slow down the vegetation will be able to take up some of the nutrients and water will slowly be able to filter back out into the river much cleaner breading sat in this wetland area this is kind of what the area looks like now a lot of reed canary grass an invasive species the river does flood quite frequently and you can see it's a very  dark brown color a lot of sediment in it and hopefully by connecting it back to the floodplain this will have a an impact as water passes by this is the hayworth site so i'm forty and one ninety six right  here with hayworth world headquarters right there mr hayworth had approached us and said i have this piece of property we had one point thought about using for expansion but right now we're just using leasing it out to local farmer can you guys do something with this so the north branch of the river runs right across the path and what we will be doing here is creating a four selves one restoration site these lower two cells can store water coming out of the river the bottom two cells here can collect water coming off of the adjacent farm field and from nearby properties similar to last site these will hold water slow down through some native plants and eventually go back out into the river  this was going to be my slide on best management practices kelly mentioned them briefly those are basically ways of doing business or around your home for the best   a couple of projects that we're working on in the agricultural community one of them is to stage ditching instead of a traditional very narrow alessi there's a lot of times  driving on the run of these very straight up and down ditches and they get a lot of water in them very quickly with a two stage ditches designed to do is provide a little bit more storage space some people call them when you're wet ones so normal flow is down in the base here and then when we get a rain event this is one we have down in fillmore township it fills up to the top there and doesn't quite get out of farmer's field so the farmer like to keep the water off this field a little bit and it provides a little more storage for us and help slow water down on its way down to the lake other things we've worked on of them selling buffer strips so backing farmers off or even homeowners as well are a parking lot backing them away from the edge of the ditch providing some space with some grasses that can act as a barrier again taking some of the seven nutrients out of the water passes other best management practices we're looking at there include just some application no till farming basically ways to help farmers better have water infiltrate down in the soil which can help some of their returns on their crop yields and helps keep some of the water from going down into the every year get folks down a lot of people haven't seen that side of the river it's a really cool marsh kind of right in the middle of our city and that a lot of people have been there and we work with tons of school groups both at their schools and on our site talking about the importance of water quality it really is important to get the message out to folks of folks like you here tonight because if we put all these practices in and nobody knows the difference somebody still thinks that it's science pickle factory that's causing all the problems eventually that solutions not going to stick we're going to revert back to the problems we've been having the it's important to get our message out and share with folks what exactly is going on and the fifth tent is also important as we've developed a maintenance fund to allow us to go back whether it is dealing with invasive species monitoring sites to make sure that they're doing what they're supposed to be doing we need to go back and hopefully we don't have too much jap that we hear that we have to deal with but just to have a pot of money that we can draw from in the future a lot of big projects they don't have any sort of contingency fund so they put it in and they just kind of sit there and eventually don't work as well in march we're hoping to be able to take care of these projects long term daucus once just some kind of tips for you folks to take home with you kelly mentioned a lot of these already just generally try and keep water on your property where you can be conscious of how you use your water and really help kind of dispel some of the mess that are out there i've lived in this community most of my life and i've heard a lot of stories and theories of what goes on  but really to understand where the problems are coming from how best we can deal with them hopefully we can start to have a significant impact in our lifetimes on the quality of like macca talent i think that's all i have our web site has smacked our clarity dot org we've got more information resources there what i'm going to talk about tonight a little bit of a bit about the treatment process you understand what we do out there at least have an idea of what we do up there i want to talk about the distribution and last year we sent two point four point two billion gallons of water to the distribution negatively charged so they don't come together in come to in the larger particles very easy so that we can set up what we do is we add the elm which will neutralize it in the particles will start to come together to form a larger flock what we call them they s then all of the way around that gets out the big stuff water comes into our low service pumping station and at the station that's right on the lake right next to the lake back give me a right next to a tunnel part the water pump to the plant where we had three chemicals that i talked about and then we have a rapid mixing chamber so it's very important that those chemicals that replicates person to the waters so that the next process can be effective and from there flows out to one of our four settling bases and instead of the selling basis we have these giant paddlewheel that have greater demands we do about fifty thousand water quality tests per year and we have a number of on line monitoring instruments would monitor chlorine residuals to video the water  we have a surrogate to to target to pull organic carbon now that we use our plan is on line twenty four seven three sixty five and sixty five days and it's operated by state certified operators five operators and be certified as they're not only have an educational background but they also have to be have an experience credit before they can sit for these licenses and then we have a state of their status system status meaning supervisor control and data acquisition and that's how we control monitors plan any type of waters or for that matter what we have here even experimented with the use of tablets in with this particular tab and have the surface pro three we're able to monitor and control the system operators that we would support that both financially and in you know otherwise talk a little bit about the water distribution system to this is their service there is a lot of colors here but basically the park township is one of our customers one of our customers here and most in the north side of the south side of lake this is lake county township is one of our customers as well as here the city of holland and then we also service a small portion of holland township and then also of course  residential meter and we have twenty eight thousand three hundred what we serve the city of holland we have up fifteen hundred that we serve in part township like downtown trip about twenty seven hundred and how in touch with about fifteen hundred that's the retail side system and maintain their own system have approximately just over twelve thousand service connections now and to give you an idea where that usage of that water goes of residential use is about thirty eight percent of our water industrial is about twenty percent and then the rest of it is just a couple quick facts here on the distribution system about two hundred forty miles of pipe in the ground now in ranges aside from thirty six inches with twenty three fire twenty three hundred fire fire and we have six storage reservoirs located around the city of hound that we maintain in addition to that we have multiple metering stations and we also have some smaller booster stations would provide water through some of those higher elevations and then we have two major boost the stations one  any violations in the sea we've had nine hundred fifty seven years we have not had a water quality of violation and in the range of a texan and then i guess i want to say a little more about the e m c else you know we have the levels that they've what we had to stay be to implement this program and basically is it's a power attempt to you know maintain the long term viability of the water supply in overcoming some of the barriers that you can have trying to do so the goals  additional program elements are priorities and management tools an option that we can utilize to manage the area that we've identified we have include vulnerability and contingency plans to deal with those on abilities and  there's always new ones but we have very detailed plans of what to do with some stuff like you mentioned how we're going to react to different things we develop chemical field mouse for instance so that when we see these water quality quality changes we can plug these into these models in the model of a giver that gives a better protect protect predictor of what we have to feed and what levels to maintain the water quality at the end so that something as we've been dealt develop in the last several years and with that we've able to been able to reduce our chemicals by thirty percent and we're looking at ways to deal with that and how we need the water from the lake into the plant if that ever happens and there's a number of things we're looking at maybe using some brains and skills kind of things to get the water in but we continue to work on it and then also th it's actually a pariah leave the bottom of the riley street as a zone we would work on and then almost to the channel and then we're out east of the plant almost almost two hundred sixty so we figured that was area that done my home too and you know you put a picture of water in the refrigerator and you know easily dissipate rather quickly some of the things the programs the b p w has it has been part of or initiated words filling that day so we did a first day the first time i did it we had a sixty five gallon drum sitting in the parking lot over there by our county and we took all the pills as they came in took him out of the the the bottles and in the middle bubble packs and put them in  barrel by the end of the day the barrels full fifty five gallons worth of medications now the good thing is that isn't ending up in the water you know and that's so that's what would want to think we're trying to do to minimize that and we've got another one coming up i  taken into monitors and mercury i think at one time i read we had taken seventy pounds of mercury from residents around the city and we at one time we were given them much as thirteen thousand gallons a year on those irrigation controls there's there's new devices out there the water sensitive water sense approved irrigation devices that not only look at but the weather on humanity and all those items and help you better determine watering for your particular lawns those are out there and i don't i don't know how many there's a need you know one of the question i heard recently well that's not good for a number of reasons that we've learned today but so you know put a nozzle on the can shut it up fill a bucket of water in with that with some of these seem like pretty common sense but they're also good reminders pools and spas you know covering you know we have a lot of water to evaporation and we talked about landscaping already and the only thing i would add about landscaping and i'm going to let you know a little secret that it does there's no value in water your sidewalk or driveway you there's nothing there any back and i know these systems can be designed where they don't they're a little more expensive but you may have more shower heads but there's no reason and no value in water your sidewalk in the end we learned why that's bad to my favorites a shower with a friend want to touch a little bit on leaky fossils because you know it doesn't seem like you're losing a lot of water but the average healthful now you know the average household that you can lose up to ten thousand gallons per year you leaks and that's a toilet one we if you can help with some of that stuff and it's possible you know it's possible that you can save up to ten percent of your water bill just by doing those types of things there's a nice light ahead  like this is the water sense it's an e p a website it's really cool and if you receive it but i really like this one it doesn't you know has a lot of good information on it quizzes or stuff for your kids for i would certainly look at that and we also b p w also too if you're interested some time i look my card back there please give me a call i've been doing this now for thirty four years and i love water for water and i love talking about it so please if you want to take me up on it any time  we're talk about drinking water how many people here have a well one two three you get that for drinking water is it for irrigation of use and ok i would venture to guess that a lot of people in this room have wells in the basement that they don't  you've we see a lot of bandon wells in holland park township most of them are so you may not even know what the pipe is in your basement that goes down we see that a lot to about an inch and a quarter pipe runs right through your basement floor probably fifteen feet deep and it pulls from a shell off of her and that's what people use for years and years and years to get the drinking water here but we're going to kind of talk in a roundabout way to get to wells we're going to talk about who first how septic system works because there's a lot of folks anybody in a septic system uses a lot of the same principles the same methods that were back then basically have a big septic tank it could be anywhere from eight hundred fifty hundred gallons you flush your toilet you take a shower wash your dishes into your sink all that runs down in there the heavy stuff sinks to the bottom the light stuff that's oils greases flow to the top and hopefully you're left with a semi clear liquid and it's in the middle of your septic tank is designed to pull from that semi clear liquid goes out your drain field the drain field and should consist of some sort of stones usually about twelve inches deep with pipes distribution pipes that run through have holes the water runs out of the pipes you use fifty gallons in your house fifty gallons goes out your septic tank into your drain field so it operates full so if somebody says my septic tank is full that's good it's posed to be like that we'd be worried if it was cracked and you open it up and there's nothing in it because it's going somewhere it's not getting treated so goes out your drain field trickles over the  of microbial growth on the stones that come out of there it removes nutrients it removes viruses pathogens bacteria before it gets to the soil it gets to the soil the soil acts as another filter trickles through that and eventually it's going to end up in groundwater which is where because a lot of times the problem is typically because we think of them thirty nasty cesspools full of bacteria and they are a lot of good bacteria but the problems they cause in groundwater aren't necessarily related to bacteriological problems of nutrient load the way septic tank works is it comes in it's anaerobic there's no oxygen in it it needs that before it goes to the drain field and becomes aerobically treated as a method of nutrient levels what happens when you don't get proper nutrient community that had probably somewhat poor planning when they put in their septic systems in their wells they put a lot of their sewage disposal treatment systems real deep really really sandy soils very sandy shallow we back in and that's where we talk about sewage disposal been critically important to drinking water problems and clean drinking water now how do we combat that you talk a little bit earlier paul did about states or local governments not having control over a lot of issues this is one issue that we have direct control over there is no state light sanitary code that regulates so it just blows up treatment systems for single family homes so every county has a different rules different regulations and health departments are like that as well so i think there's twenty five twenty eight health departments in the state of michigan all of them are going to have different rules than the county and the health departments at the border are not all county we require a two foot separation distance from the bottom of your drain bed stone to the top of the seasonal high water table some counties require for some kind of require three we  e fifty feet from a septic tank or your disposal drain field to a well some counties require seventy five other ones require fifty so there's no there's no standard but i can tell you that counties are some of the most lenient in the county there sorry in the county in the state as as we look around some of the the things that govern whether a site is buildable and you can have a septic system on it are a lot more lenient than other ways we're conservative county and we prioritize private property rights industry business housing so that's kind of where that comes from in order to keep an eye on that county has a real estate transfer evaluation program for those of you that are on sceptics or we women if you sell your house in the future the county ordinance states it's going to have to be inspected so you'll apply or your realtor will apply one of our staff will come out and if it's a sewage disposal system we do a boring into it  take water samples but really they are there we have one yeah yeah i say we're pretty anti anti government government agency and i mean that in the nicest way possible for government agencies that we really care we really enjoy what we do we love what we do we are professionals despite what some people think and we enjoy it we work a lot of education because we don't like to do unfortunately it's not any fun at that point but somebody come out to do a board in your drain field to take a look at it make sure it's functioning correctly looking good we take water samples from your well when we come back and we have some minimum standards it's not designed to bring a system up to current code that's a lot a lot of people think it's designed to weed out public and environmental health hazards so last year we issued correction as we keep track of and we did about twelve hundred real estate inspections last year so we went out we looked at twelve hundred homes  everybody when you think of ottawa county we have somewhere on the order of probably twenty thousand sewage disposal systems in the county something like that it's a hundred thirty isn't that big when you start thinking about it in terms of of how many gallons that is typically it's about seventy gallons per person per house if you're each s s two people in it one hundred forty gallons a day times three hundred sixty five and one hundred thirty last year there's about six and a half million gallons of untreated waste water that that ordinance caught and issued correction or is on the people had to repair bring it up some of it could be it's a sewage disposal discharge you know right to a creek it's an old farmhouse and other times it is a system it's all right around water the ground water doesn't allow for the proper treatment of that so you get these heavy heavy nutrient loads are going to groundwater and contaminates that it doesn't  guy has a house on the edge of a ravine probably from here to that pole and he went to do some remodeling on interns company came out and said we're not even going to insure it anymore because it's so close to this ravine that is about forty feet high and it was about that's the all of a sudden water just comes rushing in and it was from a septic system was installed in the water table as we walked over we looked on the edge of the ravine probably fifty or sixty feet away from where his drain field was water was leaking out the side of the ravine and one of the things that we look for and look for sewage failures is a nutrient overload and it makes all the vegetation black leaves grass it just leaves a black slime on everything because there's so many nutrients this was just cascading down the side of the hill it was a classic example of probably i could walked up and taken a cup and scooped it up and that water would be safe to drink it's gone through a filtration process it's it's not going to have a hole in it most likely i'm not going to drink it but it's not going to have it it's not going to have it may have some piccola form to have some other indicators in it it's going to be incredibly nutrient rich and that's where all of the stuff ties together when we talk about surface water and lake mack and project clarity all of that ties  together the nutrients and it's for surface water it's for ground water we have some wells that are two hundred feet deep that have nitrate problems that are not suitable to drink that have to go through some sort of treatment for it so it's pretty  but they had really high nitrates the drinking water level for nitrates is ten parts per million a lot of the wells that we see have eight hundred twenty twenty five very high there is some treatment you can do for it typically reverse osmos is the most effective at removing that and making it drinkable at that point then you get in the water conservation for reverse osmosis for every gallon you drink there's two or three gallons of good discarded that's how much it goes for about four gallons of water to get you one gallon of drink  generations yes absolutely easily not necessarily there's when you when you start talking about government coming out in taking a look at your you know and yeah poking around in your stuff that's a pretty touchy kind of what needed to be done and it's pretty valued by our work commissioners we just actually have got to go ahead to hire two more staff to administer the program right yup it does i'm a small  government guy good conservative i'm not that cheap but but we want clean water absolutely it's a program that makes sense when you talk about drinking water that goes through treatment plants that go through treatment if you look on the whole i would venture to guess that you  probably looking at somewhat equal doses of wastewater treatment from so we just will systems on site to commercial at least not accounting that once you start it and it can't county and so the more populated areas but there's millions and  millions of gallons of on site waste water sewage that gets generated model  that's just on the county there are in michigan there's nine counties that have that of those i think five or six of them are from a district health department that are multiple counties together most counties would like to have one if you don't have one if they don't have one now the odds of it getting passed are usually pretty slim there's a lot of opposition to him from kind of private property rights conservative groups lot of realtors don't like it because it makes them fix problems and it can  their deal down in our minds we use it as a fire protection and environmental health protection as well we also do has this waste collection as jim talked about with them we collected over two hundred thousand pounds of hazardous waste disposed of it in two thousand and thirteen we have medication collection was jim was talking about people may not finish their antibiotics they're pain killers but we have yet to have any medical marijuana that's been  and we don't find any brownies nobody drops those off or if they do it never makes it to us but we collect about twelve to fifteen hundred pounds of medications a year when jim was talking about that that one collector until the fifty five gallon drum that was almost seven hundred pounds we had about one and a half drums completely full of pills one of the most colorful drums that you're probably ever see with all the different colors and it and this quite amazing when you think about it that is that's cause that's pretty close to my heart is when i truly believe and i do think it's the next big topic that we're going to face and we're going to have from the standpoint and honestly environmental health is probably third in the in the in the realm of drugs like that accidental overdoses have overtaken car accidents as the leading cause of accidental death in nine states about forty thousand people each year forty two thousand people a year die from that the number one cause of children under five calls to poison control centers are accidental ingestion of prescription or the jenna drug it's wreaking havoc in our communities in our schools as we look at there's some youth assessment surveys that are done and i know i'm probably over time youth assessment surveys that are done in the school tobacco's going down alcohol is going down marijuana is going up with the with the legalization prescription drug abuse is going  certainly at age twelve so it's a it's a cause that's that's pretty close to my heart because it's in the streets it's in our medicine cabinets we all probably have some guilty of it if i have to have a prescription and i don't want to use it all because i want to save it for some time and it becomes you know something that my kids or if you had family your kids could get into as well so and yeah that's about it if it were any questions