Make developers responsible for stormwater
Reading - and writing - about stormwater regulations and technical guidelines wouldn’t be most people’s choice for a good time. But when it’s your property flooding because of improperly designed or constructed stormwater management systems on adjoining properties, the subject becomes more engaging.
That scenario became all too obvious in the wet, wet spring of 2010. Low-lying areas became saturated; houses all over Sussex County became waterfront in places where owners didn’t want waterfront.
The sheer size of a 2,000-page technical guidance document, intended to accompany the state’s attempt to develop new stormwater management regulations to address the problem, illustrates the complexity of the issue.
Every single property in Sussex, with its endless number of soil types and subtle shifts in topography, begs a different approach to managing stormwater. Computer programmers could write algorithms for years and still never address every separate scenario.
That’s what makes a statement by veteran Sussex land designer Tom Ford, quoted in a recent Cape Gazette article, resonate so clearly. He said, in essence, make the designers, engineers and property owners accountable for their stormwater runoff and its potential pollution and flooding problems: “Our stance is that if we can meet the pollution-control strategies for nutrient reductions and provide for no adverse impact on downstream sites, then that should constitute a satisfactory handling of the stormwater on a site.”
Rather than writing thousand-page documents trying to envision every scenario, the state should require developers of new and existing properties above a certain size to present a stormwater plan meeting pollution and runoff requirements. Certification of the plan’s adequacy should also require execution of a bond, or other contract, to specify responsibility and ensure performance over a length of time that would demonstrate the plan’s efficacy.
Some properties, because of their characteristics, will require designers to develop more complex plans than others to deal with their stormwater, and there will be added expense as a result.
But it’s better that the extra expense be borne upfront by responsible developers willing to present workable plans than by adjoining property owners who would otherwise suffer the expenses of dealing with pollution and runoff from improperly designed and executed stormwater plans.
