Explanation
The purpose of this legislation is to authorize the Director of Public Utilities to enter into an agreement with the Franklin Soil and Water Conservation District (FSWCD) for continuation of the Urban Watershed Delineations Project, for the Division of Sewerage and Drainage.
Recently, the US Environmental Protection Agency recognized the importance of allowing cities to take into consideration all of the regulatory challenges of complying with the Clean Water Act, and to prioritize work to achieve water quality goals more efficiently. They issued a policy encouraging cities to integrate the work needed to comply with both stormwater regulations and elimination of sewer overflows, and are strongly promoting the use of green infrastructure to meet these challenges. This approach is referred to as Integrated Planning.
In August 2012, the City asked Ohio EPA for permission to delay some of the WWMP projects to allow time to explore whether there are better alternatives associated with the proposed integrated planning approach. Ohio EPA has granted the City’s request to explore options and the City is to develop an integrated plan by September 15, 2015. The City has initiated the Integrated Planning process and has hired the consulting firm Arcadis to assist in the coordination process.
Core to developing an integrated plan is having a thorough understanding of the municipal separate storm sewer system (MS4) including, but not limited to: the extents of the system, system components and system connectivity, as well as land cover, land use, and land ownership across the landscape contributing flows to the MS4. However, when evaluating urban watersheds in an environment such as Columbus, understanding the makeup of watersheds is complicated by the fact that subsurface drainage changes the configuration of watersheds from boundaries which originally corresponds to naturally occurring surface drainage to configurations dictated by the extensive networ...
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