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Barre launches neighborhood flood-walks and free workshops under Climate Catalyst grant
Summary
The council announced a small grant-funded effort to hold five neighborhood flood walks and four public workshops on rain barrels, rain gardens and permitting to capture local flood knowledge and teach residents mitigation steps.
Barre City will hold five neighborhood “flood walks” and four free public workshops this spring after receiving a Climate Catalyst Innovation Fund award from the Vermont Council on Rural Development, councilors were told.
Councilor Guston, presenting the plan, said the neighborhood walks are designed to gather hyper-local knowledge about how water flows through streets and yards. The first walk is scheduled at Currier Park on Saturday at 1 p.m., with Prospect Street and other neighborhoods planned on subsequent weekends. "Residents will gather and walk the length of the street together, to identify ways they've seen water flow and cause problems," Guston said.
The grant also funds four educational workshops at the Aldrich Library. Two hands-on, registration-required sessions will cover how to build rain barrels and how to plant rain gardens; attendees at those sessions will receive a $25 hardware store gift card to help implement improvements on their property. A Storm Smart property-assessment workshop (open registration) and a brown-bag permitting overview with city staff are also scheduled; the permitting session is intended to explain when city permits are required for property work and how permit questions should be routed to staff.
Guston said the project follows door-to-door outreach done by volunteers after recent storms and will be coordinated with the Chittenden County regional planning partners who will collect and centralize walk findings for use in systems analysis and the city’s flood resiliency planning. "We'd like to do this again in the future if the initial rounds prove useful," she said. The council asked staff to return with a summary of findings after the walks and workshops are complete.
