Kansas City Sewer System by Lara Isch

Thank you for having me tonight. First I want to get a show of hands in the audience, how many of you are Kansas City, Missouri residents throughout the audience? Okay, good number of you. This will be a little more relevant for you all.

I'm here to talk tonight about Kansas City Sewer System, and I say where we've come from and where we're headed because we've had a long past here in Kansas City from back in the 1800s. Just a little bit of history on Kansas City. We're going to start with water. We're going start back in 1853 when the city of Kansas was incorporated by the state of Missouri. It was a city then of about 2500 people, less than one square mile of land, and an assessed value of a little over $2000. At that time, most of the people got their water from either a local stream or a well, or sometimes even a cistern. But since we were now a city, we decided we probably needed to supply water to the people that lived in that city.

So charter in 1853 allowed the city of Kansas City to provide water to its citizens. However, the first water department was actually a private entity. So back in 1874, the city contracted with the National Waterworks Company out of New York to be our water services provider. And the first water works in Kansas City was constructed on the Kaw River.

The Kaw River at that time seemed like a viable water source, but if you look at the dates on here, by 1886 that was no longer the case. There was an ongoing trend of stream pollution going on throughout the nation as we industrialized and we grew. So by 1886, the water in the Kaw was no longer drinkable.

So they had to find another source of water for Kansas City. Although the city would have liked them to locate the waterworks in Missouri, they built the Quindaro Station to pump water from the Missouri River. But as we all know, Quindaro is on the Kansas side. So this waterworks company had a 20-year franchise with the city. And that franchise was coming to a close, and the city said hey, we want to plant on the Missouri side. And we want reasonable rates for our citizens. And if you can't provide that, we're going to take over and become a municipal waterworks.

Obviously that did not happen. And in 1895, the city took over operation of the waterworks. By 1928, the city was over 300,000 and we needed more water.

This is our first intake structure built on the Missouri River. It's pretty close to the downtown airport. The structure still stands today. This intake supplied 100 million gallons of water a day to the citizens of Kansas City, and we still get our water from this site today. We don't get it from this intake. We have a much nicer, larger intake just about 200 or 300 feet down from it. But this is still the site where we get our water.

About the same time that water was growing, we decided we needed a way to get rid of that water once we'd used it. So that 2500 population in 1853 had grown – doubled, a little bit more by 1854. So we started with about 4500 people. It continued up by the end of 1854. And that was over a 5 square mile area. And that entire area was served by less than one mile of sewer line. So everybody was not using the sewer, we'll just say.

There was a need for sewer infrastructure. So in 1860, Kansas City decided to build the Main Street Public Sewer. It was our first big sewer endeavor. It started before the Civil War. It finished after the Civil War. And by 1885, we had extended that sewer down to the Missouri River. And when I say extended that sewer down to the Missouri River, that's exactly what we did. We took the sewage from Kansas City's residents and businesses, and we put it in a pipe and we sent it down to the Missouri River. No treatments. It just went down a pipe.

So it was better than the alternative, right? Which was keeping it there. So it was safer, it was better. We were diluting it. It was a great thing. But as the city grew south and as the city grew east, we realized there was a need for a comprehensive sewer system plan for Kansas City.

And if you look back here at this map, this is the first comprehensive sewer plan for Kansas City, which was 1910 when this was done. It's probably hard for you all to see out there, but all of these dashed lines that you see are sewer systems. We've got our sewers along Brush Creek, we've got our sewer along the Blue River here, we've got some sewers along OK Creek and Gooseneck Creek.

Some of these streams that we have sewers along in this picture are completely run underground today in our pipes. The stream does not daylight, necessarily, until it hits the river. It's all in pipes. But back then, we saw the need for this. Then by 1926, we began construction of the Blue River Trunk Sewer, which was a big sewer. And this was a sewer that had a plan.

Kansas City, when they built this sewer, on the end of it they constructed it in such a way that at some point in time, that sewer could be connected to a treatment plant when we were actually treating the sewage.

Like I was saying, the Main Street Sewer prior to the 1920s, most of the sewage was gravity fed, drained directly to the river, and treated. But we did have certain areas where we had treatment lagoons throughout the city. And then as we move forward in time, we started to have small treatment plants that grew up in various areas. We would get a large collection of population, and they would either build a sewage lagoon, or a small treatment plant. They would pump their sewage to that area. So by the 1960s, the city had 76 of these sewage and storm water facilities throughout the city.

It wasn't until 1961, though, that the citizens of Kansas City decided that the city really needed to worry about pollution control. We were starting to really pollute our streams with sewage and other industrial waste. So we'd established the Water and Pollution Department in 1961, and that department built the first treatment plant, which was our Blue River Treatment Plant, with an 85 million gallon capacity per day. It was built in 1962. However, that Blue River plant was still a primary treatment plant. And it was built on the Blue River, so it discharged to the Blue River. When I say primary treatment, all we did at that point was remove the solids from the sewage. So everything that wasn't a solid, and some of the smaller solid material, was still going directly into our Blue River and directly to the Missouri River as late as the 1960s.

All right, so a few years later, we decided to build a secondary treatment at Blue River. And just recently we've added disinfection to Blue River, and now we have a pretty good water supply going out of our sewage treatment plant to the Missouri River. So this is where we are today with water services. Kansas City Water Services is our water department which supplies your water, our Wastewater Department, which takes it away from you when you're done with it, and our Storm Water Department, which does a myriad of other things, including maintain our flood levy walls, our flood pump stations, our storm inlets, sweep our streets.

So they do a lot with a little. When I say they do a lot with a little, if you look here, this is our budget for this current year. We're right over $300 million. Most of that goes to treat your water, either so you can drink it or so we can discharge it. A little bit of that goes to storm water as well.

If you look down here at the bottom, you'll see our average residential bill. So if you have an average bill, let me know. I'd love to see it. I've never actually seen these numbers, but this is what the average resident pays over a year each month.

This slide shows Kansas City's sewer system. This is pretty much the outskirts of city limits of Kansas City here. You can see we serve over 650,000 people with our sewer system. If you do the math, that's more people than are in Kansas City. Obviously we serve other customers as well, some of them even on the Kansas side.

So in the center green area here, we have 58 miles of combined sewer. That's in that older area of town where everything kind of grew up in this hodgepodge. That area of town, combined sewer means what it says. The storm water and the wastewater flow in the same pipe in this area of town. So if you have a storm event, all of that water that's rushing down the streets and into those inlets that you see is actually going into the same system as our wastewater. So it's all running to a wastewater treatment plant when it can.

So we have about 90 outfalls, which are listed up there, in that particular combined sewer area. What that is, that's simply a place where if the wastewater treatment plant can't handle the waste, that mixed storm water and sewage – it's dilute sewage, but it is mixed with storm water and sewage – overflows into a creek, stream, or river. We have outfalls on Town Fork Creek, we have outfalls on Brush Creek, the Blue River, and then also some on the Missouri River. And Kansas City has about 6.4 billion gallons of overflow in a typical year today. That's typical year of storms.

Then we also have, around the outskirts here you'll see in the blue, that's our separate sewer system. We have 260 square miles. So it's quite a bit larger than the combined system. And to put this in perspective, the city of San Francisco will fit inside our combined sewer system area. So we've got quite a bit of sewer going on in Kansas City.

So in the separate sewer, that's also what it sounds like. Your wastewater and your storm water flow in separate pipes in a separate system. And if you look here at the miles of pipe that we have, we have well over 2700 miles of pipe in the ground between both of those sewer systems. So the pipe that we maintain every year would stretch to New York City and back, then around the city a few times just for fun, and we still haven't accounted for all of it. And that's just what we maintain.

Then all of us have sewers leaving our own house. All the pipes leaving your house that go to our sewer, if you add up all that pipe, you have just about the same amount of sewer, so over 2700 miles of pipe there as well.

I'm going to give you a bit of history on how these work. Before I can tell you what we're trying to do to fix it, I have to tell you how it works. So what we have here is our combined sewer system. In a combined system, you have your house and you have your wastewater flowing from your house. What it does, it leaves your house and it goes down a pipe, and it goes down here, keeps following gravity, or sometimes it's pumped to a wastewater treatment plant where it's treated, then released to a river, lake or stream.

However, when we have a rain storm in that combined system, remember I said that the storm water flows in that same pipe. So all of the roof runoff, all of the street runoff, all of the trash, all of the ped waste, all of the pesticides and fertilizers you're putting on your yard – all of that is also running off. It's all running down into that same sewer system. And wastewater treatment plants have to treat at a certain rate to make sure we're treating properly to meet our permit requirements. So we can only treat so much water at a time. And during storm events, we will exceed the capacity of that wastewater treatment plant. And what will happen is that water will start to back up in that pipe. And instead of it backing up all the way back onto our streets and back into your basements, which nobody really wants, we have these outfalls.

So we have this little wall here. We call it a diversion structure. It simply diverts that water to the nearest river, lake or stream untreated. That's where you get that dilute sewage and storm water going into our rivers, lakes and streams in the combined area.

Here we have our separate system. It works a little bit differently. You can see your wastewater goes to the wastewater treatment plant. Your storm water still goes untreated with all of that stuff in it I talked about earlier to a river, lake, or stream. So no matter what, your storm water isn't treated. So you need to be really careful with what you put in your storm water.

However, even in that separate system where we have two pipes, we still have issues with sewer overflows. And this is why. In the separate system, we have what they call infiltration and inflow sources. So infiltration sources we're all probably pretty familiar with. We all have houses. And at some point or another, we've had water sewage backing up in our basement. We have to call the plumber, and he comes out and snakes out our pipes. That's because at some point, tree roots got down into your pipes. And everywhere those tree roots get into your pipes, that leaves a hole in your pipe. It leaves a crack in the pipe.

We have the same trouble in our system as well – holes and cracks in our pipes, manholes that have issues. So what will happen is water will infiltrate through the soil down into those pipes. So we get water during storms from those sources. Then we also have our inflow sources. That's where water just flows directly into the system. In some places in Kansas City, people will find that their downspouts from their roof go straight into the ground, or they may have a sump pump on their house, or a floor drain that they can't find an outlet for in their yard. That probably means that that goes directly into our sewer system. Those are illicit connections that are inflow sources. So of course when we have a rain storm, if your roof drain is going into the sewer and your neighbor's roof drain is going into the sewer, we're draining a lot of water into that sewer.

So what will happen is what you see here in this top picture. This is actually an overflow in the separate system where it will actually just start coming up through a manhole, where it's backing up into the sewer and there's just no room for it anymore. So as you can tell, we've got a challenge in Kansas City. It's these sewer overflows during wet weather, it's our aging wastewater infrastructure. That Main Street Sewer that I told you about that was started before the Civil War and finished shortly after, that Main Street Sewer is still in use today. It's still a sewer that we use. It's still in downtown Kansas City, and we think it's in pretty good shape.

We also, of course, have sewer backups. All of this leads to poor water quality in our local rivers, lakes, and streams, which is an issue that we don't take lightly.

So in 2010, we reached an agreement with the federal government in a consent decree that said we will help clean up this issue. We're going to clean it up. We have an unfunded federal mandate to reduce our sewer overflows in the combined system and completely eliminate them in the separate system. It's going to cost us quite a bit of money. It's between $4.5 and $5 billion through the life of the program. It's going to happen over the next 25 years that started in 2010. We're going to 2035. But it will be the largest infrastructure program in Kansas City history when it's done.

We are taking a citywide approach to this, so we are working in both the separate and combined systems, though we do have outfalls in the combined system. The separate system is still an issue because it's still affecting our water quality. And we're pretty proud of the fact that in the end, we were the first federal consent decree in the nation to include green infrastructure solutions as part of our program. I say the first federal consent decree in the nation because there are a lot of combined sewer cities. If you've got an older city, chances are it's got a combined sewer system, and the federal government is slowly going through and cleaning up all these cities. So we are far from the only one. Kansas City, Kansas is in the same situation. St. Louis is in the same situation.

But we did get green infrastructure solutions put into our program. I'll talk a little bit more about them later. But green infrastructure, just for those who don't know, is simply infrastructure that instead of being gray, which is lots of pipes and concrete, which is what we're used to, it's green. It mimics nature. It mimics the natural systems. It doesn't necessarily have to be green. We've all heard of rain gardens. Rain gardens are great green infrastructure systems. But sometimes green infrastructure is as simple as porous pavement, or permeable pavers, something that instead of having a surface that water runs off of, the surface is now something that water can soak into and get back into the ground. So that's what we mean when we talk about green infrastructure.

The goal of this entire overflow control program is to improve the water quality in Kansas City, and that's what we're here to do. But we couldn't do it alone.

So in 2003, which was back before all this started, we formed the Wet Weather Community Panel. It was 50 members, diverse backgrounds, citizen advocates, environmentalists, scientists, engineers. And all of them provided input into the plan and the overflow control program. They communicated with our stakeholders, they picked the way that this plan was going to go. And they presented it to council saying that we needed to push towards having green infrastructure in this program. So the Wet Weather Community Panel had a key role in making green infrastructure happen in this plan.

So the plan we ended up with, the Overflow Control Plan, the Overflow Control Program gave way to the Overflow Control Plan. And this plan is something that is going to reflect the priorities of the community. So we're trying very hard to achieve benefits, triple bottom line benefits when we can. So environmental benefits and socioeconomic benefits as well.

We have a plan that is flexible and adaptive. That was one of the great things we worked on with the EPA. So though we have a plan and we have a set grouping of infrastructure projects that we're supposed to do over the life of this plan to make sure we meet our goals on overflows, we also have the ability to change that plan. We can go back to the EPA at any time and say green infrastructure seems to be doing a great job. We would like to go more green infrastructure, or hey, there's a new technology that's going to be better than what we originally had planned. We want to shift towards that direction. So we got this adaptive plan, which has been a really good thing for Kansas City.

And in the end, we're going to meet the regulations at a minimum cost because we don't want to charge our rate payers more than we have to. We're addressing our water quality on a regional basis. We understand that water doesn't understand political boundaries. We understand that watersheds don't understand political boundaries. So when we are looking at the watersheds, we are looking at them holistically from a regional standpoint. The goal in the end is to reduce our combined overflows by 65 percent and eliminate those separate overflows in a five year, 24 hour storm event, which is about 4.68 inches of rain. Anything over that, we're going to have a huge flood. It's almost possible to completely eliminate things like that.

To maximize the benefit to our customers, first what we're going to do is fix the system we already have. We're going to go into neighborhoods. We're going to fix the sewer we already have, and then we're going to see what's left. So by fixing the sewers we already have, we're going to reduce the problem. Then we're going to measure and we're going to adjust the plan. We're going to move forward from there. We're going to build only what we have to in the end to make this work and to meet our water quality goals. And one of the big ones on here is facilitate green infrastructure development.

We're doing this through sewer separation. Whenever I talk to people, they're like, why don't you just separate all the sewers? The answer is because that is really expensive and very invasive. To separate all the sewers in Kansas City would cost way more than we're paying right now for this program, and it's very invasive. We would have to tear up streets. We would have neighborhoods completely torn up. So sewer separation is only being used strategically where we're going to get the maximum benefit for the cost. We're also adding wet weather treatment capacity, so the ability to treat some of that storm water when it's running through. Like I said earlier, we're rehabbing our neighborhood sewers. In the separate system, we're fixing that inflow and infiltration problem that's causing issues. We're modifying our pump stations, our treatment plants so that they can handle more storm water if possible, and facilitating green infrastructure development. Down here at the bottom you'll see one of our rain gardens we've put in as part of our Middle Blue pilot project.

So when we talk about green infrastructure, the green approach for Water Services, we want to reduce the amount of water runoff, because the ultimate goal is to keep it out of the sewer system. So we're doing that best as possible by keeping it onsite. That's our first goal – keep the water on site. That's what we try to tell every homeowner as well. Keep your storm water on site. Back in the day, everyone said get it away from you as fast as possible. But that's not the best answer. The best answer is to retain it on site, let it soak into the ground, let it recharge the natural systems. So first, we keep it on site. If we can't keep it on site, we want to spread it out as much as possible before we put it in pipes. So putting it in pipes is the absolute last thing that we want to do. Keep it on site. Keep it on the ground.

But we want to create community amenities while we're doing this. So if we can create green infrastructure that is also at a park that people can share, that makes the neighborhood more walkable, we're going to do that. And we want to be a model for other cities. As more and more cities come under consent decree, we want our green infrastructure to be something that they can look to for models and ideas on how to run their own programs. But of course green infrastructure has to be cost effective. If the gray solution is going to be the most effective solution from a cost standpoint and from the standpoint of fixing the sewer system, then we're going to go with that gray solution. But if green is cost effective, we're going to go for green.

Because we are under consent decree and we have to catch a certain amount of water, we're trying to have measured effectiveness. We want to be sure our green is working.

So our first project, this green infrastructure, was our Middle Blue River Green Solutions project. We started with a pilot project. If you look up here, these are the two sub-watersheds in the Middle Blue River basin that we're working in. I don't know if you can read this, but this area is pretty much from 73rd to about 85th between Holmes and Prospect, so older area of Kansas City. This area does get about 3.5 million gallons. That's what we anticipate of overflow in this area. It's a 744 acre area.

The original plan called for us to put tanks near the outfalls, which the outfalls for these areas are right here where these arrows are leading. There's an outfall here, and there's an outfall here. So originally we were going to put some sort of storage down there so it would store the storm water. But instead, we decided this was a good area to look at green infrastructure, because those tanks on capture-per-gallon were going to be some of the most expensive per-gallon cost in our plan. So we thought it would be a great place to try green.

The Middle Blue pilot is this purple area you see up here. That's 100 acres in total. Right below it is the control area. So we were working in the pilot area. The control area is just that – we didn't do anything in the control area at all. We are going to in the future, but we didn't for the pilot. So we needed to capture about 370,000 of storm water in this area. We decided we would go in first and we would repair the sewers, just so we had a clean slate to work with. Then we would move forward with green infrastructure.

First, we went into the neighborhood. Like I said, this is an older neighborhood. It's a neighborhood with a lot of rentals. It's a neighborhood where people don't necessarily drive. A lot of people take the bus. So instead of having our meetings in large churches or community centers that people had to come to, we just went to them. We had meetings in the street. We had pancake breakfasts. We went door to door. We had rain barrel workshops in people's yards. We made a conscious effort to reach out to the neighborhood and show them, hey, we're here and we're going to work with you. We're going to do this great green infrastructure project. It's going to be this amazing thing for Kansas City.

And they were like, great. You're doing a green infrastructure project. We want curbs. We want sidewalks. We have people speeding down the street at 100 miles an hour at night. It's not safe here. They never plow our streets. And we've got all these vacant properties. What are you going to do about that? Because when you come in as the city, you're always the city. So we're listening and they're telling us what they need.

So what we did was we worked with them and we met their needs. They needed sidewalks, and we needed green infrastructure. So we put in 4300 feet of porous sidewalk throughout the pilot area. We put in permeable pavers along Troost to beautify Troost and still get our storm water capture. They talked about speeding traffic. So we put in rain gardens with bump outs that slowed the traffic. They talked about needing curbs, and we needed a place to store water. If you want to have a rain garden and you want to store water, you put it in a curb area. So they got what they needed and we got what we needed out of the deal as well.

This is what we ended up installing for that pilot project. We needed to evaluate the pilot project and make sure that we're getting the capture we need. So Kansas City monitors this at the sewer system. But we also partnered with the EPA and the University of Missouri – Kansas City to monitor the actual rain gardens. So they put in these lovely monitoring boxes, and they monitored for water quality and quantity going through the garden so we can get a good idea of what we're actually capturing and how that's treating the water.

Unfortunately, we put this in right in the middle of one of the worst droughts in Kansas City history. So at first, we had these great boxes and all these students who were super excited to make this happen. And everybody's sitting there staring at the sky waiting for it to rain, and it wasn't raining. And the next thing we knew, we're watering our rain gardens to make sure that they stay alive. So you know, it took a little while and we're still evaluating some of those results.

Then also, since we were in the neighborhood anyway, since we made this neighborhood more walkable, more approachable, we put in these sidewalks, we decided we might as well educate while we're out there. So we took our different rain gardens and we put signage in that you can see from the streets and from the sidewalks when you're walking this new walkable neighborhood.

Then as Kansas City, we decided to celebrate that green infrastructure. So the picture down here at the bottom, this is Mayor and Mayor Pro Tem Cindy Circo and some of the residents. This is actually the ribbon cutting in the Middle Blue project. We did a sidewalk pour on the porous sidewalk. We figured that was a little more fitting than a ribbon cutting. But also, the Mayor designated this area Kansas City's first green neighborhood. Kansas City has a program in place that awards sustainable neighborhood with this designation of green neighborhood, and the Mayor just said this neighborhood has put in so much and we've put in so much. This is the first green neighborhood. So this picture at the top there is actually one of those signs installed. The Mayor actually got to it before we got the signs done. So he had to start with a little sign.

So the Middle Blue, this is what we had. This is what we started with. This is 75th Terrace before the project, and this is the same street after the project.

We repaved the streets, we re-did the sewers. You can see our curb extension rain gardens here that narrow those streets and slow traffic. People ask a lot about these. These are our curb markers or our bollards. They look like an art piece. Really, they're to keep snow plows from running over the rain gardens when we've got high snow levels. It keeps people out of the rain gardens in general, keeps cars out of them.

So this was a corridor along Troost as part of the project. This is what it looked like before, and the next picture is a little bit farther up the street from this, but you can still see the signs to pick out where it is.

This is what it looks like now with our permeable pavers and our rain garden areas in here.

The pilot project, the results of the pilot project. We were going for that 372,000 gallons of storage. We didn't quite get that. When we started working on Troost, we had no idea the utility conflicts we would run into. So we were about three installations short on the project that we were not able to complete due to utility line issues. But we did end up getting 360,000 gallons plus of constructed storage in this project area. And we do have reduction. So we've got a reduced peak flow, and we've got reduced peak volume at the outlet of that pilot area. So yes, they are working. We don't know exactly how well they're working yet because if you're working with green infrastructure versus gray, if you put in a pipe, if you put in a tank, that day you put that in, that is the absolute best day. From day one, it's going to be working at its absolute best. If you put in a green infrastructure project, especially one that contains plants, that's not necessarily true. We all know when we put in plants, they're little, they're tiny, their root structures aren't developed yet. They haven't had time to work down into the soil and work their magic. So early on with green infrastructure, you're not getting the capture that you may get in a few years. So we're still looking. Over the next three years, we've got a maintenance program going on where we're maintaining this. We've got a contract with the installers to maintain this project, and we're hoping to see that we continue to get an increase in capture as the plants mature.

So our community benefits, the very first one we're looking for, we're reducing that storm water and improving our water quality. We've got rehabilitated sewer systems. We replaced aging street trees. That's another great way to capture storm water, is through trees. So we replaced a bunch of the trees. We've got increased green space. These rain gardens are green they're beautiful and they're out there. And we've got traffic calming, like I said before. And we beatified a neighborhood. We made a neighborhood more walkable. And through this process, we actually energized the neighborhood itself. We were out there on the street talking to them, so they came out and talked to each other. The Marlboro Community Coalition has now started the Catalyst Project. So they're redefining themselves as a neighborhood and they're moving forward as a neighborhood because the city has chosen to invest in them.

But we're not done. We're not done with the Middle Blue. That was only our 100 acre pilot. The next two areas we've broken into the east and west. We call this the Middle Blue River Basin Green Solutions Pilot Project. But what the neighborhood know it as is Target Green – something easy to remember and something that we're targeting green infrastructure in their neighborhood. So we have Target Green East and Target Green West. What we did, we actually, because this is all new and we wanted some really innovative designs, we decided to have a design competition where we paid a stipend to engineering firms to design something wonderful for us. Then we selected engineering firms based on those designs to work on the next section. So we've selected one for East and one for West, and design is now underway for that remaining 644 acres.

We've divided it into two because we wanted each outfall, we want it to flow into each outfall. So even though we have these other areas that we've broken them down into, we're going with two main project areas. We're going to capture that 4.7 million gallons of storm water. That's what we're looking for.

This time, the Middle Blue Project, we worked a lot in the right of ways in front of people's houses. All of those rain garden installations are pretty much installed in front of someone's house in the city right of way. And this time, we decided it would be better to work larger – work larger, work more for the community. So we're looking for amenities that are in parks, amenities that may be on vacant lots. So we're trying to really improve that triple line benefit, bottom line benefit.

So here's some of the renderings we have of the next steps for that Middle Blue project. Rachel Morado, if you're a Kansas City resident she was a big neighborhood activist at one time. So there was this areas dedicated to her. But that road has since had to be closed. It became a major dumping ground in Kansas City. It's a lot of trash. So that's one of the areas that we really focused on for green infrastructure. We want to be able to put something in there that will open that back up and make it useful for the community again.

Then we've also, talking about areas that we could make larger improvements, we've got an area off of 81st and Troost that we're looking to put in a large park-like area that will have a lot of community benefits. The area is currently very under-utilized.

So where are we now? We're in year four of our 25 year timeline. So right now, we're reducing the problem. Before we solve it, we're fixing the sewer that we have right now, and we're moving forward with these green infrastructure pilots. Once we get past that, once we've figured out where the green is going and what we've got left, that's when we're going to start with those bigger infrastructure projects, big storage tanks and tunnels down towards the end. And of course like I said, we have an adaptive plan. Who knows what will change before 2035? So we're hoping that there's going to be new things that we can do to make this work for Kansas City.

All right, thank you for your time. Does anyone have any questions?

Q

I would like to know in the first neighborhood, people in the neighborhood, how are they reacting?

Lara Isch

How are the people in your neighborhood reacting when you bring these projects in? Honestly, the first project in Marlboro when we brought the project in to them, they were skeptical at first. Over time the residents that were involved grew. We actually had block captains within that neighborhood that went out and talked to their block and got people involved. But one of the things we did on this project that isn’t something that’s normally done on a lot of city projects is after it was complete, we actually went back to the neighborhood, and we has a lessons-learned meeting with them, because this is new for us, too. Something of this magnitude in green infrastructure isn’t something we’d done before. So we went back and we told them what we learned. This is what we learned. There’s utility line conflicts, there’s you never know what you’re going to get when you’re digging underground, you never know what’s going to happen when you stage your material somewhere and then kids play in it. So you know, we told them what we learned, and then we asked them what they thought. We asked them how they felt about the project being in their neighborhood. And the overwhelming answer was that if we, as in the city, had learned something and we were keeping the storm water out of the sewers, then it was a good thing that it came to their neighborhood. So the level of education and the level of knowledge that those people had when it was over was pretty profound. Most people love it. And the rain gardens that we have, though they’re ours and we maintain them and they’re in the right of way, as long as they don’t mess with the entire system, they can work within those rain gardens so we have some people in the neighborhood that have placed flowers around the rain garden, or some bulb plants in the basin of the rain garden. So overall, they seem pretty impressed with it. Yes?

Q

It’s very well spoken, put together very well. What was the largest obstacle for you in this presentation that you had to work on?

Lara Isch

The largest obstacle as far as the overflow control program, or as far as green infrastructure? I guess good question. The largest obstacle probably is breaking down those mindsets that we already have. It’s learning that we have to think out of the box to make things happen. It’s learning to involve people and projects to a level that we may not have involved them in in the past. So over time, we have to put in a pipe. We’re a water department. We have an engineer. He designs a pipe. We put that pipe in the ground. That’s what we have to do. This is different. This is something that all of a sudden we’re working above ground. We’re working above ground. We’re working where people can see it. We’re working where people have to be involved. So that’s sort of been the learning process for between us and the public, is we need to get the public involved. How do we get that input? How do we take that input and move forward with it? So probably the biggest issue has been that, has been breaking down those barriers and learning how to work with those partnerships to the degree we need to make this move forward. Yes, sir?

Q

Did you give them the guidelines to build one in their back yard? And did anyone do it?

Lara Isch

Actually I didn’t talk much in this about the level of partnership that went on in this process, but we worked with the EPA quite a bit. So we talked about rain barrels. We talked about downspout disconnecting. The EPA also went into that neighborhood, and the EPA installed rain gardens on private property while we were installing rain gardens on public property. So I think there were nine rain gardens installed in the Middle Blue as part of this project that were installed in people’s yards. And they’ve since installed more. So there’s more rain gardens out there now. So yes, there was private property installation of rain gardens.

Q

I have more than one question, probably, but the rain gardens, can you hear? Okay, thank you. The rain gardens have been quite significant in my own looking around Kansas City since I live near Troost and get to watch them. I was concerned, however, after they were put in as to how they would be maintained. And you mentioned that, and I was wondering if you’d describe it a little bit. Because I do notice sometimes that some of the rain gardens suffer, of course, during the winter. And some of them seem to get removed. Over there on 43rd by the little health food store, there was a planting that doesn’t seem to be there anymore. Anyway, so I’m curious about that. I had another question, but I’m going to leave it.

Lara Isch

I’m not familiar with the one on 43rd.

Q

I think it’s 43rd Street.

Lara Isch

I’m not familiar with that one. It’s not part of the Middle Blue project. But as far as the Middle Blue project goes, like I said, this is new for us, too. It is a pilot project. So we did have the company that did the installation of the plants and things, we have them under contract for three years. And what they’re doing is they have a level of service. That level is service is lower in the winter. They only go out every couple of months in the winter. But during the warm months when the plants are growing, they have to go out on a regular schedule and pull weeds. They have to go out and put mosquito briquettes into the gardens. They have to actually clean those fore bays where the water goes into the rain gardens. We actually pulled a tractor trailer of silt and leaf litter out of those at one point in time. So they are going around on a regular schedule and cleaning out those rain gardens. They pick up trash when they’re out there. We haven’t asked the neighbors to do that, to get in their own rain gardens. Some of them are deep and we do have some elderly folks out in that area. But we do have some people who do get in their gardens. And one of the major complaints is people say, well there’s trash in the rain gardens. We always see trash in the rain gardens. And our answer is good! That means they’re working. So they’re picking up storm water off the street, they’re going to pick up that trash, too. We would rather it be in the rain garden than in the system. We can clean it out of the rain garden. After that three year process is over, that started this past year. So we’ve got two years left on that maintenance agreement. Once that’s over, water services does have a green solutions maintenance team that we’re bringing up to speed. They go out and they maintain some of our other rain gardens as well. We have a rain garden on our property to maintain. They maintain some of the rain gardens on Troost, the Troost MAX lines, there’s rain gardens out there we maintain. And they do work in the Middle Blue as well. If it happens that we have a huge rain and a really big growth spurt, and plants are getting taller than they were supposed to, our guys will actually go out and make sure those are leveled out so they’re not blocking site distances and things like that. So we have a team. They’re learning along with the contractor so they can be up to speed at the end of that three years.

Lara Isch

I was on the Wet Weather Community Panel for five years developing this program. And the public/private part is an area of major concern, because they’re required – the city is – to prove that they’re reducing by so much. You have to have numbers. You’re going after a target. And yet how can you do that? I mean you can do so much on city property. But you really need it on some private property, too. So how do we incentivize those people in order to that? And then how do we make sure they maintain it? In Target Green, they’ve got a lot of rain barrels there. How do we make sure they stay connected? How do we make sure that the rain gardens are doing what they’re doing? And how can we count that, or can we really count that? I can say that recently now, we’re getting ready to start discussing that, reconvening the panel, and coming up with how these – basically how we’re going to incentivize the private side to do this. And then what can we do to maintain it? Some cities have done things where they do a cost-share putting in the rain gardens, and others have done you get a reduction in your storm water bill. But of course our storm water bill is so ridiculously low that, I mean what, you get $2.50 a month off your bill. How does that incentivize you to put in $300 worth of rain garden and maintain that? So these are some of the things we’re looking at and some of the issues we have. But basically with the Overflow Control program and the consent decree, they can only count what they know they can do. So everything we can do on private property is really almost a bonus.

Q

I’ve done everything I can for my gutters to get in my yard. I live on a little incline. My question is, I have a huge driveway. Last night’s rain, I watched it just roll down the driveway. Are there incentives for homeowners to help divert, maybe, that rain, or change it to more porous type? Is that something that the Water Department is looking for down the road? And also another question is, what about all these big parking lots?

Lara Isch

I would love to say we had incentives for that. But actually right now in Kansas City, there are some development codes that may even limit your ability to put in a porous driveway. So like I said, this is a learning process. As we’re moving towards green infrastructure, the rest of the city has to move along with us. Also, we have green infrastructure we want to put in. Your neighbor calls it your new weed patch to code enforcement, and then code enforcement is out there saying your native plants are weeds and need to be torn up. So it’s a learning process for the city as well, and we’re moving forward on that. Now as for incentives for parking lots, there are – when you develop in Kansas City, so Kansas City does have a fairly robust green infrastructure program outside of the Overflow Control program as well. So new developments going in in Kansas City have to manage that storm that hits their site to pre-development levels. And they have to do that somehow. That’s either a detention basin they may put in, or if they choose to put in a porous parking lot or a green roof, however they want to do it, they have to come before the Development Board and say hey, we want to manage our storm water on site this way. Then our storm water group actually approves those ways to manage their storm water. So we are working towards that going forward. Retrofitting is a little bit different story. We’re just hoping people are going to realize how important it is and how wonderful it is, and hopefully we will have incentives going forward in the future to make that happen.

Lara Isch

It’s all about dollars and recommendations aren’t worth a whole lot, unless you can prove that it’s beneficial.

Q

Lara, if we want to see your pilot project, where would we drive? Do you have some cross streets?

Lara Isch

The pilot project, I did not even say that. Our pilot project runs pretty much from Troost to The Paseo, between about 73rd and 77th. So we have a couple across 75th. Most of them are between 75th and 77th between Troost and The Paseo. So if you head up that way, you’ll be able to see the bollards and know you’re there.

Q

The results are very impressive. Congratulations on your forethought on that. One just minor question is, can you comment on the durability of the porous pavers and driveways? I mean porous and freeze and thaw seems like it might not last very long.

Lara Isch

Once again, as far as that goes, we are in our learning stages right now as well. Now when we put the porous sidewalk in, we put it in in several different configurations. Sometimes we would butt that directly up to a driveway. Sometimes we would put one square of non-porous, just regular sidewalk before the porous sidewalk. So we’re putting in these various configurations to see where (Spalding 13:44) is happening to see where we’re losing those corners, where things are cracking, how it’s working. That’s kind of over time, that’s where we’re going, is trying to figure that out. So far the big issue has not been with the porous pavement cracking. And we’ve had a lot of snow and ice. Our big issue has been with it silting up. So the Middle Blue has a lot of big trees – big, old trees. And fall gets here and people are crunching those leaves as they’re walking the sidewalk, and it’s just crunching that all into our sidewalk. So we do have gentlemen who go out and vacuum our sidewalks. That’s part of our maintenance agreement. It’s kind of fun when they’re out there to watch them with their vacuum out there vacuuming. So we’re having to do deal with those issues as well. It’s all part of the maintenance learning process. We’re probably going to give that a few years to see what we get in the end. We have had a couple of areas where that’s been an issue. I know we’ve had areas where not so much with the sidewalk, but we put in some areas of porous gutter. And we silted those up almost immediately, just because of the amount of leaf litter and road salt and sand that’s in that particular area. So we’re probably not going to move forward with porous gutter going forward.

Lara Isch

That’s a good point. The porous asphalt is totally different than regular asphalt. With regular asphalt, if you have a crack in it you were definitely worried about water getting in there and freezing, because that’s just going to make that bigger. But the porous pavement is, combined with a polymer, it’s like Rice Krispies.

Lara Isch

Yeah, like a Rice Krispy treat.

Lara Isch

And the water goes through it. So it’s not sitting in there. It’s not freezing and then expanding and cracking that. But the biggest problem is the siltation and the dirt. And that is how you maintain porous surfaces, is to vacuum them. And if you’ve got one that you can’t vacuum, I want to know. Don’t try it. That’s another thing, too, about the Middle Blue project, is like just what you were talking about with the porous concrete and the different ways that you’re testing and applying it and joining it to other surfaces. It’s the same with the rain gardens and the different bio retentions. There are some of them that have under drains, some of them that don’t. Some of them that have more native plants. I think we actually saw some lilies in one of those slides, and others that are larger natives with more root systems. But typically we find in these neighborhoods is the people like more of the formal look. I believe there’s a lot of cultivated natives, where they’re doing things with the natives to get them to more maintain a reasonable size, a standard size, not look quite as weedy.

Lara Isch

Right. Almost all of our natives in the Middle Blue are cultivars of native plants, because native plants have a tendency to just do their thing. They’re native. They work really well here, and they just take off. So some are cultivars that are bred to be a little shorter, a little bit more compact. And we did take into consideration when we did this project that we were working in a neighborhood. We weren’t working out in a field or in a big industrial area. This was somebody’s front yard. So we’re trying to promote native species. We want people to love native species and realize their value. We also want them to be comfortable with what’s in their yard. So we tried to give them things that they understood – plants that they knew, plants that they liked. A lot of the rain gardens in the Middle Blue are edged with boxwoods. They’re edged with liriope, which is a grass that people are used to seeing. They have obedient plant in there. And we do have some gardens that are a lot more ornamental plants than natives. However, most of our gardens are native to some degree. Overall our mix, we try to keep about 80 percent native in there to about 20 percent non-native. But we’re working with a lot of different things. So some of them are a lot more ornamental plants than native plants.

Q

How much longer will your formal monitoring and evaluation go on? And will you come back in a year or two and give us an update?

Lara Isch

I would love to come back and give you an update. The EPA monitoring has actually stopped in the rain gardens. They were only under contract for a little while to do that. They got their results, and then they moved on. But water services will be monitoring this probably for the life of the consent decree. So we actually have monitors in the sewer system that tell us what we’re getting, what’s coming through the sewer system, because we have to go to the EPA and say, you know, we are capturing what we need to capture. And since this was just a pilot, as we’re moving forward with the other two green infrastructure projects in the Middle Blue, they need to be complete by 2017. So then we’ll be monitoring the project as a whole coming out of outfall 59 and outfall 69. We’ll be monitoring at both of those outfalls.

Q

Given the reality that you’re not going to capture everything that you need to, and I think we all would accept that, are there included in the plan increased treatment capacity also?

Lara Isch

The plan currently has – we’ve got some plans for increased treatment capacity. New plants are expensive, but we are modifying existing plants to allow for more capacity when necessary. There is a possibility we may add high rate treatment plants down the road. Those are all so far down the road, and like I said, we’re trying the early stuff first before we do that. Then storage is a very easy way to go on that. When we talk about these storage projects, what we’re doing is we’re putting in a tunnel, we’re putting in a tank. And what that’s doing is that’s just holding the water during the storm. We’re keeping that water during the surge, and then we are slowly releasing it back into the sewer system after that surge has passed. So in the end, it’s kind of just prolonging the process so that all that water can get through the wastewater treatment plant, and it doesn’t actually go in overflow.

Lara Isch

So there are several deep tunnels planned. The biggest one is going to be along Brush Creek. And probably no matter how much green infrastructure, we’re still going to end up with that deep tunnel. They call them deep tunnels. They go down about 200 feet, and they’re probably 30 feet in diameter. I believe the Brush Creek one is, what, a half-mile?

Lara Isch

I’m not sure exactly how long that one is.

Lara Isch

It’s a big one. There’s another one under Town Fork Creek. And that one, there’s a good possibility with what they’re learning in the Middle Blue project, that they might be able to totally eliminate that, or maybe substitute it with some in-ground storage tanks. But while originally the engineers wanted deep tunnels, and that was the easy fix, and they knew what it was, that was all underground. All the money was down underground. It was nothing we saw. And we saw with this much money being spent, a great opportunity for these multiple benefits. And this Middle Blue project just shows how a neighborhood who knew nothing about this, and yet with the multiple benefits in mind, we go in and we look at what the neighborhood’s priorities are and how we can fit the storm water priorities in with that, that reunited that neighborhood and has energized them totally, which is exactly what we were trying to do. It’s really something you can’t put a value on. And yet the engineers are right with the overflow control. With the consent decree, they have to have numbers and they have to have a timeline. So the best thing about this plan is the adaptive management and being able to learn from what we’re doing now and apply it to the program later on.

Q

That was actually going to be my question. Given that public opinion was kind of the biggest issue and stumbling block for the keep-and-treat implementation on this project, how are you focusing on that in the future? Like on the east and west side, how are you addressing that, and how are you bringing it to them in a more efficient manner than obviously before?

Lara Isch

Like I said, lessons learned. So we’ve already had our first meeting. We had just a general meeting with the Marlboro Community Coalition to say after we had our results and we picked our engineers, we had them come and present to the Community Coalition. Going forward, hey, this is who we picked. This is kind of what they’re looking at. We already had our first public meeting for both sites where we went out and we talked about water quality, and we talked about the types of amenities we were looking for. And we got feedback on what we might do to help the neighborhood. And we’re looking – some of the big feedback when we had that original neighborhood meeting was stay communicative throughout the entire process. We really involve them during design, and then during construction. We just constructed. That’s what we did. We got out there, and had a timeline, and we made it happen. So they wanted us to continue to communicate throughout that construction process. So we’re going to be doing that. We’re going to have a single point of contact during construction for people to talk to, and we’re looking to involve the neighborhood a lot more in maybe picking some of the plants – maybe a plant palette that they can pick from. It may be picking some of those bollards. We might show them some renderings of what we could possibly do and let them pick from some of those renderings. And we’re moving forward kind of with design right now, because in the end, first off our engineers have to design these to capture the storm water we need. So we have to get that process out of the way first. It has to work. So once we get the working part designed, then we can add that aesthetic part on top of it. So we’re working in that design right now, and then we’ll move the aesthetics on later. But we are definitely continuing to communicate with the neighborhood. And it is all in the Marlboro Community Coalition, all the area. So we’re working on different blocks and different parks. We’re working with a lot of the same people, and we’re working with a lot of those same neighborhood champions that we were before.

Q

Following up on Annie’s question, what have you learned in the pilot project that you – making changes in the design for the next two projects?

Lara Isch

Like I said, the big thing we learned is that you get more bang for your buck with bigger storage areas. And what we’re trying not to work with these small areas. I mean they’re great, but that’s a lot of maintenance going forward for us. We’re maintaining these hundred-plus, 150 green solutions out here. It’s a lot of maintain. So we’d rather have bigger amenities that hold more water in one place. So going forward, like I said, we’re going to be working in parks. Arleta Park is one of them. It’s a natural drainage-way right through there. It’s perfect. We’re actually looking to increase storage sizes by maybe adding some wet ponds – like actual ponding areas where we just run the storm water into a pond amenity and make it into a park. So those are the kind of things that we’ve learned. We’re going to try to avoid – we’re not going to completely avoid, but we’re going to try to do less work in business corridors. The utility conflicts are really a big thing that we learned that we don’t want to have to deal with if we can avoid it. It’s a lot of cost and a lot of mess to get very little storage. So bigger spaces, more public spaces from a maintenance standpoint. Then spaces that have natural flow patterns and not a lot of utilities.

Q

Just a follow-up on what everyone was saying about the rain gardens, in my neighborhood, our neighborhood association likes to do a fundraiser. And they send out an email saying, okay everybody, buy our flowers and plants. None of them are native. And every year this happens. And I say something to my neighborhood association. I say, “Hey, we need native plants.” So what I’m wondering is, is there some way that a private person such as myself could come talk to you, or talk to somebody, about native plants and what I could plant in my own garden or rain garden, and also, I would like to have a piece of paper, and I don’t know where I would get it. Would it be from you or from the Department of Conservation or what? That I could take to the President and these people who – they believe it’s a good thing. I believe it’s awful because they’re raising money in a bad way. So I don’t think it’s an appropriate way for us to be doing fundraising for the neighborhood green stuff.

Lara Isch

So you’re looking to how you can find native plants?

Q

I would like them to have a credible source – not just my saying it’s a good thing or it’s a bad thing.

Lara Isch

The Missouri Prairie Foundation is a great resource for native plants. They keep lists of native plants. So Grow Native is great. We actually just finished our Homeowner’s Guide to Creating a Rain Garden. We just finished that. We have a landscape architect that we hired as part of this process. She’s wonderful. And she put in some plants that were perfect for our region – a mix of sun, shade, flowering plants, grasses, and things like that. So I can get you a copy of that. Take my card. You can email me and I’ll mail you a copy of it.

Lara Isch

So there are a lot of resources out there. And certainly if you Google rain gardens on the Internet, you’ll find all kinds of things. I think Milwaukee has like a 32-page booklet. What Lara has told me about Kansas City’s booklet is color wheel palette, which is extremely helpful for people trying to plant a garden. And there’s lots of local resources. The Prairie Foundation took over the Grow Native program from the Department of Conservation, Missouri Department of Conservation that had it. They have a great website and a fantastic search engine, too, where you can put in that you want yellow flowers in June, three feet tall that are deer resistant, and if there is such a thing –

Lara Isch

There is!

Lara Isch

And I’m sure there is, they will come up with that. But we can certainly get with you. I go out and do – well I’m doing a library program next Tuesday. But I’ve been doing rain garden programs at libraries for years. So I hate to put myself on the spot, but yeah, I’ll come out and talk to you.

Lara Isch

And I’ll come out and talk to you.

Lara Isch

I’ll talk, talk, talk.

Lara Isch

To expound on what Larry said, there are a lot of resources out there for rain gardens. But sticking with Missouri resources are best, because obviously if you go to Michigan or something, their plants are completely different. The plants that are native there are completely different than the plants that are native here. And even if you’re in Missouri and you go outside of this region, you’re going to see some difference in plants. So a great resource is just your local nurseries. Local nurseries – not your big guys that are everywhere, but you get a local nursery and they’ll be able to help you out. I happen to live really close to Soil Service. Soil Service has a great native plant selection. They’re willing to talk to you about them. So find your local guys and talk to them.