Get Full Government Meeting Transcripts, Videos, & Alerts Forever!
Get email alerts on the Stormwater topic
No spam. Unsubscribe anytime.
Sierra Club urges Hamilton County to adopt impervious-surface charge to tackle stormwater
Summary
A Sierra Club representative urged commissioners to accelerate MSD's impervious-surface charge implementation and include funding in next year’s budget, calling the current targeted pilot plan too slow and bureaucratic and offering five recommended changes.
A Sierra Club representative told the commission that recent extreme weather events demonstrate the need to accelerate stormwater-management reforms and urged adoption of an impervious-surface charge.
"This is climate change... it's still just the beginning of climate change," Larry Falcon said, arguing the county should adopt an impervious-surface charge as the "quickest, cheapest, and fairest" way to manage runoff. He criticized MSD's targeted implementation plan as too slow and bureaucratic and said Sierra Club submitted five specific recommendations and left copies for commissioners to review.
Why it matters: Commissioners and staff acknowledged the growing costs of overland flooding and described regional coordination efforts underway to seek federal funding. Commissioner Driehaus said she convened MSD, city stormwater, county stormwater and engineers to pursue coordinated federal grant applications, citing a $3 million Norwood project as an example of the scale and cost of mitigation work.
What’s next: Sierra Club urged the county to include implementation funding in MSD's next budget submission; commissioners said they will continue convening regional partners to build grant proposals and consider long-term, countywide stormwater strategies.
