Stormwater Commission

Stormwater Commission Meeting Summary Thursday, July 13th, 2017 Members Present: Fred Kudert, Steven Vinezeano, Joseph LoVerde, Rich Wlodarski, Thomas Powers, Mary Anderson, Robert Callero, Andrew Vitale. Others present: Jeff Wickenkamp and Jeff Macke from Hey & Associates, Jack Grana-Utilities, Max Theccanat - Intern The Stormwater Commission meeting convened at 8:00 a.m. in the EOC room at Village Hall. February 24th Meeting Summary: The Meeting Summary for the February 24, 2017 was approved. Storm Recap July 8th to July 11th Chair LoVerde asked for a recap of how the Village stormwater system performed during the early July storm. Mary Anderson reported visual inspection of Oak Park Bioswale, Cleveland Sewer area, and Oconto/Mulford area indicated no flooding. Jack Grana indicated some street flooding at Main and Oconto, and Main and Osceola due to sewer surcharge. The majority of calls were from the north end of town where the gages indicated 3” of rain fall. Twelve total calls were received. We also received a call near Western and Knight near Glenview for water in front yards. Ballard Road near Delphia Avenue was overtopped due to Farmers Creek, this information was shared with IDOT. Steve Vinezeano asked about improvements Glenview made to the Golden Forties and asked how that affected the system. Hey indicated they had received the data but were not sure of the impacts. Tom Powers indicated that Glenview made some conveyance improvements but also oversized some pipes and added restrictors in series to maximize storage. Old Business: The following topics were presented and discussed. Flood Control Assistance Program For FY17 $50,000 was budgeted and $48,000 has been obligated. Two people have been placed on a waiting list. Community Development presented a unique case needing interpretation of the reimbursement program. Recently a resident who received flood control reimbursement passed away and her son then proceeded to rent out the house. Community Development attempted to obtain refund of the reimbursement, however that was challenged by the new property owner. Since there was no sale the legal standing of the Villge request was questionable. Community Development presented revised language to the reimbursement policy to address this situation in the future. The commission indicated that the Village Attorney should be consulted both for the revised language and for this specific case. The commission reconfirmed that the intent of the flood control protection program was for residents who actually live in homes in town. 9101 Greenwood The building has not been occupied since last October. Fore a period of time, the Village continued to receive expensive electricity bills and worked with ComED to cut off the power completely. There are funds in the budget for demolition, so the process to demolish the building is moving forward. New Business: The following topics were presented and discussed Yard Drainage Policy The Engineering Department presented a white paper on yard drainage in the Village. The paper was updated based on the discussion held at the August 2016 Stormwater Commission Meeting. The current policy is that staff will provide limited assistance for nuisance flooding problems and that residents remain responsible for design and construction of solutions to address yard flooding. The primary update to the paper involves the legal interpretation of back yard sewer. Back yard private sewer maintenance The legal department indicated that the current language on the books is sufficient to divest the Village of responsibility for back yard sewers for all scenarios. The legal department did make some recommendations for best practices including: 1) Publish a notice in the newsletter re- establishing the policy and ordinance 2) The Village should not perform any maintenance on private property sewers or should charge to perform such maintenance 3) Any new rear yard sewers should be placed in an easement indicating that the sewer are private and include language about private maintenance responsibility. The commission indicated that charging for maintenance creates a bunch of problem in terms of politics, ability to pay, and equity. A better approach would be to provide a list of contractors to perform the work for residents. For legal, liability, and insurance purposes Public Works employees should not be doing work on private property. If a home was being immediately impacted via overland flood into the home an exception could be made on an emergency basis. Staff will work up language for a notice to be posted in Focus on Niles. Private property yard nuisance flooding Currently Community Development addresses downspout issues, while engineering addresses lot grading complaints. Staff has prepared a list of both designers and contractors developed from a public RFQ process. This list can be provided to residents to assist resident with the next steps when property improvements are required to resolve yard flooding. Staff also met with Rain Ready representatives to learn about their program. The concept behind rain ready would be outsourcing the issue addressing of nuisance flooding complaints to provide a higher level of service to residents. Currently nuisance flooding complaint resolution does place significant demands on work load for both Community Development and Engineering Departments. The Village has responded to 23 requests for back yard flooding assistance, year to date in 2017. The Rain Ready program would provide a more complete start to finish approach for residents who want to address a specific problem, and would possibly provide avoid the tendency of residents to want to overly rely on Village staff for services that are not available. Rain Ready offers three main Programs: 1) Rain Ready home for addressing single lot level problems. 2) Rain Ready Community program for helping resolve flooding issues that affect multiple properties 3) My rain ready, an online tool for self assessing property and could be updated to add Village programs. A discussion was held regarding the value of the program and comparison to current Village services. There was a concern about making residents pay for consultation without any construction taking place. Residents will likely focus on getting piped solutions to dry out their yards. The resident may be better served to attempt to hire a contractor directly. The Commission remains focuses on getting water out of basements, homes, and streets. Attempting to resolve back yard flooding is a no win situation. Village responsibility for back yards should be limited to providing utility and lot information that we have on file. The Commission felt yard flooding was not a priority for the Village to address compared to other stormwater issues in town. Village staff should limit their involvement with yard drainage problems to regulatory code enforcement only. The Commission also discussed example regulatory program from Downers Grove regarding the mapping known overland flow and poor drainage areas. The Niles engineering department mapped out rear yard drainage paths based on current data. While back yard drainage is not a priority, an incremental change to the ordinance may be beneficial. Staff will may some regulatory recommendations to the commission at a future meeting. MWRD Green Infrastructure Grant A meeting was held with the Forest Preserve District of Cook County (FPDCC) to present some potential green infrastructure projects with stormwater benefits to the Village. FPDCC did not respond positively to our Green Infrastructure concepts on their property. The Village of Niles staff requested commission approval to apply for funds from the MWRD to pave a portion of the senior center parking lot in lieu of the preferred projects. A future project at Notre Dame for permeable pavement at the North East Corner of Oriole may also be considered in future calls for projects. The commission approved the request to apply for funds for the senior center project. Stormwater update Hey presented a revised prioritization scoring system to the commission. A flood severity ranking was added to the system to prioritize projects that provide good value and address severe problems. The benefits were based on the number of structures benefiting, severity was based on a binary yes/no scoring system of known common flood problems. The value of the 25-yr storm was increased compared to previous iterations to provide more value to projects which benefit structures that flood more frequently. Hey felt that the scoring system was pretty stable and that making adjustments to point values did not change the rankings. A scatter plot was provided to show the interrelation of benefit and problem severity. The Commission decided to proceed with the rating system as presented which prioritizes project which provide the most benefit, value, and addresses severe situations. Hey was directed to vet the list to remove duplicate projects. Chair LoVerde inquired as to why the senior center green infrastructure (GI) project was prioritized over the previously identified Prospect Court cul-de-sac project. Previous correspondence indicated that Prospect Court was likely the only stand alone green infrastructure. Staff explained that the senior center project was more likely to score well with the MWRD due to the high profile nature of the project being located in a municipal campus and adjacent to a school. The Prospect Court project ranked lower due to only addressing street flooding, while the senior center project provides some downstream benefits to an area that has structure flooding. The senior center was not identified previously, but was developed as a result of being rebuffed by the FPDCC for the preferred GI projects. The MWRD green infrastructure project includes scoring for project visibility. Many of the green alley and cul-de-sac type projects do not score as well with the MWRD when this is taken into consideration. The schedule for completing the stormwater update would be to finalize project list with engineering staff, hold an open house in September, and adopt the plan in October. The goal is to target a 4th quarter MWRD call for projects. Another potential funding source includes a stormwater detention banking system which is under consideration by the MWRD and Openlands. A general discussion was held about the Open House. Next Meeting Date The date of the next meeting will be determined at the call of the Chairman. The stormwater open house was tentatively planned for September with adoption of the plan in October. The meeting was adjourned at 10:20 a.m.