Green Infrastructure in Action: Examples, Lessons Learned, and Strategies for the Future
| Date | 01 June 2015 |
6-2015 NEWS & ANALYSIS 45 ELR 10493
D I A L O G U E
Green Infrastructure in Action:
Examples, Lessons Learned,
and Strategies for the Future
Summary
Municipal wastewater and stormwater utilities are
increasingly incorporating green infrastructure (GI)
into their wet-weather management plans. GI can be
a cost-eective alternative for communities in lieu of
traditional gray infrastructure, and also can provide
signicant community benets such as redevelopment
and green space creation. Regulators support its use,
but green concepts are relatively new and questions
remain about how GI will be monitored, assessed,
and credited and whether, ultimately, it will be eec-
tive. On December 16, 2014, the Environmental Law
Institute (ELI) hosted a panel that focused on les-
sons learned with regard to GI implementation, the
evaluation and maintenance of green projects follow-
ing completion, and the growing use of GI following
enforcement actions. e panel discussed the pros
and cons of GI, whether GI is the best solution for
communities, and GI alternatives. Below, we present a
transcript of the event, which has been edited for style,
clarity, and space considerations.
Jessica DeMonte (moderator) is a Principal Attorney at
Squire Patton Boggs.
Carrie Noteboom is a Senior Counsel at the New York
City Law Department.
George Hawkins is CEO and General Manager of the
District of Columbia Water and Sewer Authority.
Louis McMahon is a Partner at McMahon DeGulis LLP.
Gary Belan is Senior Director at American Rivers and Co-
Lead of its Clean Water Supply Program.
ELI’s Jessica Werber Sarnowski: Welcome, everyone, to
our dia logue on green infrastructure, or GI as it’s called.
Our moderator, Jessica DeMonte, with Squire Patton
Boggs’ Chicago oce, has a broad environmental prac-
tice that includes regulatory and compliance counseling,
enforcement events, toxic tort litigation in t he defense of
citizen suits, and third-party permit challenges under both
the Clean Water Act (CWA)1 and Clean Air Act (CAA).2
Jessica represents municipal utilities with respect to com-
bined sewer overow (CSO) and sanitary sewer overow
(SSO) enforcement, integrated planning, GI, and nutri-
ents. She also served for eight years as the executive man-
ager of the Association of Ohio Metropolitan Wastewater
Agencies, conducting regulatory and legislative counseling
in Ohio on behalf of public wastewater a nd water utilities
and representing t hem on Ohio matters that impact the
interests of the association’s members.
Jessica DeMonte: Let me start by introducing Car-
rie Noteboom. Her practice for the New York City Law
Department includes litigation, defense, and regulatory
compliance for the city’s wastewater treatment system,
which consists of 14 plants treating 1.2 billion gallons of
wastewater per day. Carrie ha s been instrumental in the
development of the city’s GI plan and will give us some of
the details related to that.
George Hawkins ha s been CEO and general manager
of the District of Columbia Water and Sewer Authority
since 2009, heading an agency responsible for the drinking
water and wastewater treatment for more than 2 million
people in the D.C. service area extending more than 725
square miles. During his tenure, he’s had signicant initia-
tives that have included the $2.6 billion Clean Rivers Proj-
ect to nearly eliminate overows of sewage and stormwater
to the Anacostia and Potomac Rivers, and Rock Creek; a
$950-million nutrient reduction program; and t he rst-
of-its-kind digester program. Prior to joining DC Water,
George served as the director of the District’s Department
of the Environment; director of New Jersey Future, an
advocacy group for smart growth initiatives; and as senior
assistant regional counsel at the U.S. Environmental Pro-
tection Agency (EPA).
Lou McMahon, a private practitioner in Cleveland,
Ohio, has worked in the environmental realm for over 15
years, focusing on water law issues, and has provided coun-
sel to municipal utilities on clean water issues including
enforcement, CSO negotiations, integrated planning, and
GI initiatives.
1. 33 U.S.C. §§1251-1387, ELR S. FWPCA §§101-607.
2. 42 U.S.C. §§7401-7671q, ELR S. CAA §§101-618.
Copyright © 2015 Environmental Law Institute®, Washington, DC. Reprinted with permission from ELR®, http://www.eli.org, 1-800-433-5120.
45 ELR 10494 ENVIRONMENTAL LAW REPORTER 6-2015
Gary Belan joined the advocacy group American Rivers
in 20 03 and works to promote the use of GI to manage
water resources. He was also involved in American Rivers’
creation of the GI portfolio sta ndard,3 which encourages
cities to set incremental goals for the use of GI to manage
stormwater in their facilities, similar to renewable portfolio
standards (RPS) t hat have been set up in the renewable
energy context, where you have a certain percentage that
has to go toward that on an incremental basis.
GI is a n approach to water management that uses nat-
ural systems, or engineered systems that mimic natural
systems, to manage wastewater and stormwater. It’s one
of the tools that communities have to manage their water
resources, and can include t hings like rain gardens, green
roofs, and green waste. e benets of GI can include
lower cost, reduced ooding, reduced water pollution and
enhanced water quality, as well as general community
improvement and increased green space and redevelop-
ment in blighted areas.
GI is not a new topic. If you talk to wastewater engi-
neers, they will tell you that the approach has always been
around and they’ve utilized its natural ways of dealing with
water runo. But given its benets, including cost savings,
many communities are now looking at using GI on a much
larger scale than in the past.
Additionally, there has been a k ind of shift in culture
from the regulatory agency perspective in that agencies are
much more accepting of GI usage. In late 2014, EPA devel-
oped and launched its GI collaborative of federal agencies,
nonprots, and nongovernment orga nizations (NGOs)
that are committed to building a knowledge base for com-
munities, sharing knowledge and exper tise to enhance
communities’ use of GI. EPA has also issued g uidance for
communities for using enhanced sustainability of GI in
stormwater programs.4
As communities prepare to use EPA’s guidance or imple-
ment GI strategies, they face a number of cha llenges that
our panelists will discuss today. For example, how does a
community maintain a GI strategy where there is private
property involved? W hat about enforcement of GI strate-
gies? What is the performance matrix? How can communi-
ties measure or assess the GI and demonstrate achievement
or compliance? Also, in some cases, communities are nd-
ing that they have to spend in order to save with GI strate-
gies. ere may be times when communities are thinking
that maybe gray infrastructure is the better solution.
Carrie Noteboom: at overview of some of the cha l-
lenges and issues that a lot of communities are facing is
certainly true of New York City. Let me provide some
background on how the city’s GI program came about,
to help contextualiz e what it is that we’re doing and what
our goals are. I’ll explain how our progra m was incorpo-
3. See American Rivers, Green Infrastructure Portfolio Standard, http://www.amer-
icanrivers.org/newsroom/resources/green-infrastructure-portfolio-standard-
gips/.
4. See U.S. EPA, Green Infrastructure Collaborative, http://water.epa.gov/infra-
structure/greeninfrastructure/gi_partners.cfm.
rated into our CSO consent order5; explain the phase one
implementation process where we are right now; and then
identify some lessons we’ve learned and emerging issues for
the future.
New York City is a very dense urban environment.
While this is a very ecient way of living, it has a lot of
implications for stormwater and stormwater pollution. e
city has been looking at stormwater issues and planning
stormwater for quite some time, even before the current
iteration of our GI program.
e prior administration under Mayor Michael Bloom-
berg started what was called the PlaNYC Initiative,6 a
sustainability and resiliency planning initiative that con-
sidered how to make the city a more sustainable place to
live over the next 30 years, including planning for an addi-
tional million residents in that time period. One of the ini-
tiatives that came out of PlaNYC was more comprehensive
stormwater planning. First, t here wa s the 2007 PlaNYC
document, followed up by a 2008 stormwater management
plan t hat looked at the fea sibility of doing GI on a wide
scale in the city. It also looked at GI’s cost-eectiveness as
compared to some of the large CSO projects such a s stor-
age tunnels and large tanks that we were at that time under
consent order obligation to construct.
Prior to these planning eorts, the city looked at natural
systems to manage stormwater pollution, both through the
extensive Staten Island Bluebelt System (mainly in sepa-
rately sewered areas of Staten Island, but using constructed
wetlands to manage storm ows there), as well as in our
upstate drinking water supply, where we are under a l-
tration avoidance determination and do a lot of watershed
protection eorts. So, you can see that t he concrete jungle
has actually done a lot of watershed planning. e city
and its stormwater and drinking water utility agency, the
Department of Environmental Protection (DEP), have a
lot of experience thinking about natural systems strategies.
Our formal GI plan was issued in September 2010 and
built on those earlier planning documents. W hat we pro-
posed to do is to control the rst inch of stormwater runo
over 10% of the impervious surfaces in the combined sewer
areas, focusing on ways to more cost eectively achieve our
CSO control obligation. We looked primarily at t he com-
bined sewer area, though our t hinking may be evolving
as we’re facing other stormwater issues in the city. But the
plan is certainly focused on the combined sewer areas, and
then incorporates both what we viewed as cost-eective
gray infra structure strategies and this additional GI com-
ponent to take a portion of the CSO volume reduction.
Two-thirds of New York City is served by combined
sewers. (We do have areas that are separately sewered, but
the bulk of the a rea is served by combined sewers.) We
have 422 CSO outfalls. Not all of them discharge all of
5. See New York State Department of Environmental Conservation, New York
City CSO, http://www.dec.ny.gov/chemical/77733.html.
6. For more information on PlaNYC, visit the program’s website at http://
www.nyc.gov/html/planyc/html/home/home.shtml. Mayor Bill De Blasio
has since renamed the plan “OneNYC” and launched a new website: http://
www1.nyc.gov/html/onenyc/index.html.
Copyright © 2015 Environmental Law Institute®, Washington, DC. Reprinted with permission from ELR®, http://www.eli.org, 1-800-433-5120.
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