Closed Caption Transcript

Good day and women come to this afternoons Webcast sponsored by the U.S. Environmental protection agencies watershed academy and the Office of wetlands, oceans and watersheds also known as ox WAW. The title of todays Webcast is wastewater utilities using sustainable what aer shed approaches. I'm Ann Wineburg, the communications coordinator and I will be your moderator today.

We're going to get under way here shortly, but as we wait for others to join us, a allow me to cover a few housekeeping notes. These are especially important as participation in this seminar is filled to capacity. The materials in this Webcast have been reviewed by EPA staff for technical accuracy. However, the views of the speakers and speakers organizations are their own and do not necessarily reflect those of EPA.

on a commercial enterprise product, our publication is mentioned it does not mean that EPA en sdorss them. Attendees for this Webcast participate in the Webcast in two ways. About half of you are participating by phone and have downloaded the PowerPoint slides. For those of you that are joining us via phone, we require that you mute your phone during this seminar. The Webcast has several question and answer intermissions built in, at which point, you are welcome to take your phone off mute and ask a question.

We have a lot of people participating today online and on the phones, have we may not get to all of your questions today. The other half of our attendees are participating by streaming audio. When you registered you were directed to this seminar specific web address. The seminars homepage has a short abstract of todays session. This web page has a number of resources that you will notice including a link button, this button has a series of informative web links and resources on todays topic and it is archived indefinitely.

The links page also has a rebroadcast section where you can access and listen to the seminar, even after todays live presentation. The sound track of the seminar will also be available as a podcast. So, in the near future, you'll be able to access the slides and listen to a recording of todays Live Webcast.

Also on the left-hand side bar is the button for the online feedback form. You'll be reminded about this at the end of the seminar today. Please join us now on Slide 1 of the presentation. If you're viewing todays slides online, by now you should have clicked on the " Go to seminar" button and you'll be on slide number 1 of the presentation. If you're following the slides online, note the navigation buttons at the top of the page. I'll run through some of the buttons now. To submit questions, please just click on the button showing a question mark. You don't have to wait until the question an answer periods to submit your questions. In fact, we encourage you to submit them in advance of the question and answer sessions.

If you experience technical difficulties with the audio stream at any time during todays presentation, you may use the question mark button to alert us. Please include a telephone number where you can be reached and a technician will help you trouble shoot the problem. If you'd like to activate the closed captioning feature simply click on the CC button. If you're going to use closed captioning you must have internet explorer Version 5.5 or higher.

The speakers will announce the number of each slide as they progress through todays material, so you will know when to advance. Phone participants, please monitor your participation and noise levels. Now at this time, please mute your phones. Everybody is muted, I hope, okay. So I believe we're ready to kickoff this session.

The topic today is wastewater utilities using sustainable watershed approaches. As a nation, we have built extensive network of infrastructure to provide the public with access to water and sanitation. Much of the drinking water and wastewater infrastructure in the U.S. Was built in the 30 year period following World War II, mirroring the increase in our population. Utilities are facing tremendous costs to rehabilitate and replace this infrastructure. EPA has a new initiative to promote sustainable infrastructure an help utilities identify the best practices to address a variety of Management challenges.

This Webcast will provide a brief introduction to EPA's sustainable infrastructure initiative, and will highlight the work of two utilities to use sustainable watershed Management approaches.

So, let's meet our speakers. Our first speaker, Andy Crossland works in EPA's Office of wastewater Management as the agents infrastructure, sustainable infrastructure coordinator. In this role, Andy serves as the national lead for EPA's initiative to promote and foster the adoption of sustainable practices and addressing the challenges we face in renewing and maintaining our water infrastructures.

Our second speaker, Kevin Shafer became executive Director at the Milwaukee Metropolitan sewage district, in March, 2002. Prior to this, he served as MMSD's Director of Technical services, since October 1998. Since becoming executive Director, Mr. Shafer worked diligently as MMSD's $1 billion overflow reduction plan. He also coordinated a $58 million long range planning process that produced the most intensive water quality research ever for six Milwaukee area watersheds. Additionally under his leadership, MMSD instituted a regional storm water run-off rule and has been a leader for innovative ways to manage storm water run-off.

Our final speaker, Stephanie Farrell has been instrumental in applying the watershed Management approach to improve stream quality in the areas surrounding Knoxville , Tennessee. During her employment as engineering services coordinator, the utility district successfully negotiated the first national pollutant discharge elimination system knownas NPDS permit in the State of Tennessee to feature a watershed Management component. For several years, Ms. Farrell worked diligently to strike a balance between Management engineering operations for the utility and developing the districts water quality initiatives.

So now, that I've introduced our speakers, let's get started. Andy? Take it away.

Hello, everybody. I think we're starting up here on Slide 3, so we'll probably flip to that for those of you out there. As Ann said I'm coordinating EPA's efforts on sustainable water infrastructure, an I guess my role here today is just to sort of give you an overview of what that really means, and all of the various pieces of it. So when I say sustainable water infrastructure, I mean water , I mean wastewater, I mean storm water, and the infrastructure being all the pipes and plants and natural systems that help us deal with our water, wastewater and storm water.

So, where does this initiative come from? Well, as probably many of you know, and as Ann said, we're really facing sor of a pending silent crisis perhaps or underground crisis where a lot of our infrastructure is getting quite old, and deteriorating, and across the country, we have not always kept up with maintenance an replacement of that infrastructure as well as we might have liked, so, we sort of have a big Bill coming due to replace and maintain that infrastructure through time. Sustain aboutly so that we'll have it, you know, in perpetui ty.

So, with all of the stuff aging, we also have lots of other problems that are sort of heaped on top of that. The U.S. Population is increasing, and I think shifting more fors the cities, so that sort of places an additional burden. The investment in Research and Development through the years has actually really declined quite a bit since I don't know, the 70's probably is when it was at its peak. Also, on top of that, we have been hearing a lot about climate change lately, getting a lot of buzz in the national press, and that also has impacts on our infrastructure and our long term infrastructure needs, whether it's folks along the coast whose systems potentially inundated to areas of the country where you're going to see more rainfall or a lot less rainfall, and all of the implications that brings for water what our infrastructure needs are going to be.

Last bullet on the bottom of the page talks to the fact that we do live in an emerging regulatory environment, and issues will continue to come up and potentially stronger requirements come down down the past from EPA, so again, I think that adds on to this, this already existing problem of all of this aging infrastructure.

I'm flipping to Slide 4 and actually, I've somehow messed this up so you have to hit the thing like three times so you have two boxes come up on the screen so anybody flipping through on the computer make sure you do that.

But this is just, this slide just speaks to the infrastructure gap, that back in 2002, EPA released what's been called the GAAP analysis, sort of looking country wide, nationally, at what are our anticipated needs over the next 20 years, 20 years starting in 2002 or perhaps 2001 actually that came out in 2002. Anyway, back in that the time frame, and this slide just gives you a rough idea of how those numbers came out and it came out pretty big. The box on the left is sort of our baseline no revenue growth scenario, but if you add up all of those numbers for drinking water as well as clean water, and both capital and O & M costs, you add up all of those numbers and you're somewhere in the vicinity it of half a trillion dollars which is a lot of money.

So, over on the right we have this revenue growth scenario, just for basis of comparison and you can see those numbers are much much lower and this is under the assumption that we have 3% growth in the revenue streams over the amount of growth from inflation so it's like whatever the inflation is plus 3%, if we were able to grow revenues at that rate each year, this is what the numbers come down to, which is a lot more, a lot less scary I should say.

So anyway, this is sort of the scope of the problem, I'm switching to Slide 5 here. And is sort of the root of where this initiative comes from. And we've sort of broken up the initiative into sort of four , with what the have been called the four pillars and these RI think useful constructs for talking about areas in which we can take some actions to achieve efficiency and try and close this gap, but they all overlap and whether it's better Management reading them down here, better Management, full cost pricing, water efficiency and watershed based approaches to infrastructure, and it's a nice construct for us to talk about some of the things that we hope the folks can do in order to meet this challenge, but again, I don't want folks to this of this as some sort of ridge it divisions here. It's just to me, a good way to talk about it.

So, I'll flip to Slide 6, I'm just going to buzz you through each of the pillars really quickly here and then end on the watershed approach, which is what we're mostly talking about today.

So better Management. This is better Management sort of includes a number of different things, whether it's utility Management systems, hopefully a lot of you have heard of Asset Management programs which are starting to get a great deal of traction. We have utilities across the country, so utility Management systems such as that, EMS's environmental Management systems which take up plan, do, check, act approach to utility Management so there's sort of constant improvement against environmental criteria. So, systems like that which can really help a utility become more efficiently managed and achieve some efficiencies there , and thereby hopefully be able to address their own personal gap better.

So I wanted to highlight on this slide, this utility Management collaboration, which EPA has been involved with and this is a group of six of the big national water utility professional associations have all gotten together with EPA and endorsed this 10 attributes of effectively managed utilities as well as keys to Management success that also come in that same document.

So, this, we think, I mean this is a real historic, a real historic thing to have all of these different associations come together, and sort of agree upon what are the key things with we need to focus on and we think it's a real springboard in the future for utilities to see where they stand against these attributes and plan to better their operations. If you flip to the next slide, I just included, I would list 10 attributes and keys to Management success, I'd at the least give you the list of what those are, I'm not going to go through these here but they're in your slides in case you want to see them and the website down at the bottom will give you a link, and you can go read a bunch more about that if you want to.

So I'm on Slide 8 now and I also wanted to touch on energy use issues which is also getting a lot of buzz lately and I think it's because of all of the stuff we've been hearing about climate change, but also, because energy use is really one of the biggest things that one of the biggest costs for operations and maintenance, and again, with a growing population, shifting populations towards the cities and coasts, that demand is going to just, it's just going to grow. So, it's a real opportunity, with we think, for folks to look at their energy use and the ways for them to limit that and it has multiple benefits, both in terms of infrastructure sustainability by adding to the utilities bottom line, but also obviously climate change, mitigation and that sort of thing.

I wanted to make sure to touch on that as well. We actually have recently put up a web page that brings together a number of different resources that we have been pulling together on that, and there's going to be actually some workshops with utilities around the country, in the next year. That's in the planning stages so I don't know where they're going to be yet but they should come up on this page if you want to check back there.

Let me flip to the next one, Slide 9. Touch on full cost pricing, the next pillar here. And this goes to the fact that in many cases, systems are sub say is dized from a number of different sources, they get the money to run the system from a variety of places, whether it's from federal money or from local taxes, or whatever, and what you really in order to have the infrastructure be sustainable ideally, you need to have a source of revenue that is sustainable, that is not in doubt, that's not dependent on the wims of Congress or whatever local politics might affect that funding source, and so we're trying to encourage folks to look at their pricing structures and try and gear them more and more such that the rate structures are set up to bring in the money that will deliver the service, so that people actually are paying for full cost of the service that the they're receiving. So that's what that's all about. Again we got the web page down at the bottom for full cost pricing and we got one of these for each of the pillars there.

Let me hop to Slide 10 and talk about water efficiency, the water efficiency pillar. It's amazing, you know, the U.S. Is so ahead of many folks around the world, and many things an yet in the water efficiency where we're not listed, we wouldn't be listed among the top folks, in fact we use more water per capita in the United States than any other developed country, and you combine that the with the fact that there's a government accounting office report that came out and said that 36 states are expected to have some water shortage problems, by the year 2013. Well we're seeing that pretty heavily this year has been a banner year for shortages, folks down in Georgia and various places across the country really struggling with this, and so, efficiency is one way that we can deal with that and it also helps reduce the demands on our infrastructure, if we're needing to provide less water through the pipes, we reduce those demands and hopefully reduced our costs and helped close that gap.

So under the water efficiency pillar are things like reducing water loss through leaky pipes, reuse programs, and water sense, and we see the water sense logo up on the left corner of the slide, and if you flip to the next one, Slide 11, give you a little story about water sense. This is a program launched a year ago Summer, here in the Office of Water, sort of modeled after the Energy Star program which has sort of become a household word across the nation, and in fact across the world, and we're trying to do something similar to be able to label water efficient products, your water efficient toilets or faucets or shower heads and these sorts of things and the label is the folks who run the water sense program make sure I say this right, which is to make sure that it's not just a matter of using less water but it's a matter of a product that is able to both useless water and achieve the same efficiency and effect of its sort of more water intensive counterparts.

So you'll see these hopefully more and more in the stores and, you know, Home Depot and that sort of thing, but there's been these numbers are probably actually slightly outdated since I did this a week or two, these numbers are always going up, but at least 120 toilets and 30 faucets have earned the water sense label and should be able to go into your stores and see that and say I know that's going to work as well as something that uses more water.

So look for that in your stores, and, you know, this is a way that EPA is hoping to just get this more into the consciousness of folks around the country. That we use so much water and that there's ways we can useless. So I'm going to flip to Slide 12 and finally get to watershed approaches to infrastructure and I always take it all the way out to that long title instead of just saying watershed approaches, because under sustainable infrastructure, we're really talking about that gap and things that we can do on a watershed basis that help us with that by making decisions for our infrastructure on a watershed basis, and watershed approaches can mean a lot more than that. You know, it's a lot more than just an infrastructure issue even though that that's my job, {LAUGHTER}, there's a lot of folks and a lot of other concerns where it really helps us to look at things on a watershed basis, so when I'm talking I talk about watershed approaches to infrastructure, and I think we're lucky to have a couple utilities on the phone with us today who have some really good examples where what they're doing does impact their long term infrastructure planning and stuff.

But anyway, the idea here is that utilities and communities and folks need to look beyond the fence lines of their utilities and I say fence lines I mean not just where the plant is but where all of their pipes and stuff are and try and make our infrastructure dollars really count, so there's a number of different ways that you can do this and I sort of popped up a couple of them here, EPA has been starting actually just this past year, last Spring I guess, last April really tried to get a lot of visibility to get infrastructure approaches to wet weather. A lot of folks out there dealing with wet weather problems from overflows, from combined sewer systems, and there's a lot of these sorts of green infrastructure approaches and we'll hear about a bunch of them in a few minutes when I get out of your hair, and that can really help mitigate those problems, or at least in a long term way, help reduce the burdens that are placed on more gray infrastructure solutions. I don't know that green infrastructure approaches are going to be able to entirely solve all of our wet weather problems but they can do an awful lot and help us down as we go down the road.

I'm going to leave that there, and leave that to my cohorts here, later in the talk to give a bit more about that. Also have up here, watershed based permits, and water quality trading programs, which I think our second utility from the Knoxville area will talk some on as well as source water protection. So, and again, just wanted to sort of emphasize sort of the protection end of things how that can actually have an infrastructure impact, if you're able to have cleaner source waters coming into water treatment plant, hopefully that reduces the burden there and the costs and we're able to close the gap a bit.

So, I'm flipping through the next slide or two here, Slide 13. Oh, it looks like I broke out each of these in their own slides, {LAUGHTER}. Okay, but this is just, I guess a good thing to point out here with the green infrastructure stuff is that there are many benefits to this besides just the infrastructure stuff which I focus on, and that can be everything from reducing heat affects to hopefully reducing urban run-off such that the water quality in our streams and Rivers improves as well as if we can get more water going into the ground, recharge some of our aquifers that are depleting across the the country.

Flipping to 14, touching on watershed based permits, I guess maybe I sort of talk to each of these a little earlier. I'm going to go ahead and flip to, um, Slide 15. Oh, which is just putting up our two utilities that are speaking here after me, Milwaukee who has done a whole bunch of great green infrastructure stuff, as well as the utility district which was working on a watershed basis with their permits an trading programs and stuff.

So that gets me to the end of my schpiel. Slide 16 has my contact information, so that's in there, feel free to call me and follow-up or e-mail me to follow-up on any of the stuff or if there's anything I can do to get you in touch with or materials or folks that you need to talk to about this sort of thing, and Slide 17 is a mug shot of me, sitting in my office, and has the caption " Questions" at the top, so I guess we're ready to turn to any questions that folks might have?

Thank you, Andy. We will pause now briefly here to take some questions, and we're first going to begin with those questions that are submitted online, and just as a reminder, you can submit questions online at the any time by clicking on the question mark button at the top of the slides page.

The first question we have is for Andy is from Tatiana in Gainsville, Florida, and she asks a very interesting question about this issue of how can can utilities address the need to address water conservation, like the reduction of water use and waste, with the companion activity of generating revenue, particularly when rates typically are set on the per gallon of water that's used or the per gallon of wastewater that's treated?

Yeah, it's an excellent and fair and relevant question, and something that I think is a real tension point for utilities out there drinking water utilities. I mean, we want to promote water conservation and there's really really good reasons for us to useless water, and yet, we would like to see folks being able to recover the costs of the service that they're providing, so I can see where the question comes from with the big tension. I don't know what that there's any one uniform solution for folks out there, in areas where there's increasing de man, it's probably less a little bit less of a conflict in that I'd say for instance out sant santa f where they are looking long term, what will they do with it as the town begins to grow and they have no choice but to do water efficiency and find a way to pay for that, hopefully through rates, but it's funny, I got my, I got my water Bill actually in the mail a couple weeks ago, and here in the DC area, and with it came a notice that in fact they're going to be charging a flat fee that is just for the service, and on top of that, there will be the fee for how much you use. So, there's sort of a baseline fee that I'll be paying as well as something that my usage that's tied to my usage, so I don't know, that's one approach that I've seen in the last couple of weeks in my Bill. So, it is a challenge, and I don't know that there's a simple solution for solution for everybody but hopefully, there's a way to, such as a way that's happening with me that can work out for folks.

Thanks, Andy. Good question. We have another question from Chris in Maryland and he asks: Could you please discuss how some utilities are addressing the likely impacts of climate change to their operations?

Well, this is really an emerging issue, and I think becoming a very hot topic across the country, and I don't have great examples off the top of my Head of Utilities that are doing this. I know that New York City has done an extensive plan. I have not seen the details of it but I've heard of it, looking very carefully at what the implications for sea level rise in Manhattan are going to be because if those of you who have been to New York City, it's not the high country there, surrounded by water and there's some real implications there, but it's a challenge, and as you look at the climate models that are out there, they're general Lly sort of on a really broad scale, and in order to know how a whater dynamics are going to change in your area, you really need a model that's going to point to a more local level, so I think that it will take that for us to get more refined in this, but we do have a sense that overall, there's likely to be more intense storms, that the number of storms may decrease but the ones we get may be more intense. We do know areas of the country that are likely to see greater drouts and even areas where there's likely to be more water. So if you're planning in the long term for those things I think you work that into your Asset Management plans, when you're looking at the risk that various assets may pose for your various assets and planning for that, and their rehab, and replacement.

Thanks, Andy. Again, another excellent question. EPA here, we have something called climate ready estuaries. Perhaps we should develop something called climate ready utilities, but anyway, just a thought. The concept might apply that the utilities developed some sort of plan similarly like our programs have developed to address climate issues, and maybe some of the utilities I imagine are across the country are already doing that.

This time, we are going to open the phone lines and I'm going to take one question, our time is running a little short here, but if anybody has a question, please identify yourself, and let us know if you have a question. Any questions?

Hearing none, we'll move forward.

I have a question.

Okay.

This is Region 3. The question of the usage per cap ipt a, I think I've heard numbers from New York City of 200 gallons per day per capita and other people using 1 hundred gallons per day, how do you reconcile that this, I think this usage considers newspapers and industry? Isn't there, shouldn't there be separation between industry and residential people?

Sure. Hundred a day is higher than the numbers that I've typically heard. I've seen them broken down in a number of different ways. You can look at just household use. You can look at per capita use that includes agriculture whichbump ps it up considerably and overall if I'm remembering right, there's U.S. GS numbers on all of this and if I'm remembering it right the actual household use has sort of slowly been climbing, not going up fast but slowly been climbing, but the overall use including agriculture has sort of leveled out and maybe slightly decreasing for the last five or eight years so you're absolutely right. Got to make sure you know what those numbers mean, but the one that is stick in my head is around 100 gallons a day, as something typical for in home use. I referred to my water Bill earlier, and in fact, it says right on there, typical home use 75 gallons a day is what they put on my Bill, so I would know how I compared to that, so --

Thank you.

Okay at this time we'll move to our next session. And Kevin I'm going to ask you to unmute yourself an take it away.

Good afternoon, everyone. My name is Kevin Shafer, I'm sitting in sunny Milwaukee, Wisconsin where it's about 15 degrees so our water issues are a little frozen right now. I would like to thank the EPA for inviting me to present the Milwaukee program and really compliment them on some of the major green infrastructure issues that they took up last year, I believe in August of last year, where they put out some different directives on trying to utilize green infrastructure in a more sustainable fashion by utilities, and there's a lot of buzzwords out there, climate change, sustainability, green infrastructure, the challenge for myself and other utilities is to try to take some of these approaches, and build them into a long term program that really provides the best service for the lowest cost and as Andy talked about there's all of these cost constraints that are going to be hitting us and fewer dollars so we really need to find that dedicated revenue source to help address these issues. I'm on Slide 18 now and I'm going to proceed to Slide 19. What I need to do is really talk about some of the gray infrastructure that the MMSD has in place and talk about our system so that you understand it and you put it in context with what the we're trying to do with the green infrastructure projects.

We are a State chartered regional agency, we provide both wastewater treatment and flood Management, to 28 communities with 1.1 million people and we cover an area of about 411 square miles.

Slide 20. We have two award winning treatment plants, one at Jones Island which is downtown and one at South Shore, which is on the South side. Both of these treatment plants on a normal day will treat about 70 million gallons per day and can go up to 300 MGD each during a wet weather event, so there's a constraint there on flow but how do you design a system? How do you plan a system in a cost effective manner to deal with those one or two big storms a year that the might hit it and that's some of the challenges that the we all face. Next slide, Slide 21.

This map that you see on the right really depicts what the sewage system service area is area is SD treats. We have both a combined source system which is the light gray area in the center of this map an it's about 5% of the 411 square miles that we treat and the rest of it is a separate sewer system. We have a regional system that has about 300 miles of pipe that is Fed by 3,000 miles of pipe from community sewers, and then another 3,000 miles of pipe from private laterals and some of these are estimates of what the pipe links are, but it really shows how the flow comes from the house or the business all the way down to our two treatment plants so we do have both combineded and separate sewers, and it's an integrated system. You also see on this map a dark purple line. This is our existing deep tunnel that was put online in 1993. We are in the process of expanding this tunnel system and I'll talk about that here in a minute.

If we go to Slide 22, back in 1975, right after the clean water act passed, our regional planning Commission sewer pack took a snapshot of loadings going to our waterways, and as you note, right after the clean water act passed, we had about 49-50% of our loadings were coming from combined sewer overflows. About 2% were separate the sewer overflows, 5% wastewater treatment plants, industrial discharge was just a little bit above zero and then urban and rural agricultural and non- agricultural run-off so it's storm water, urban storm water was 23%, rural storm water was 21%.

So, with the grant program that was in place, and some of the financial incentives that came in after the clean water act passed, the district embarked on a huge gray infrastructure effort to improve our system and looking at this pie chart, we targeted the largest pieces, the CSO's, SS O's and wastewater treatment plants. Next slide, Slide 23.

As I said earlier, we built a deep tunnel system that was completed in 1993, the first full year of operation was in 1994, and at that time it had 405 million gallons of storage , it's 300 feet below ground, 19.4 millions long, diameter ranged from 17-32 feet and it was designed to minimize basement back-ups and combined sewer overflows to about one to two a year. Now, as you see in 2006, we added on to the tunnel, we added another 89 million gallons of storage bringing us up to 494, and we're up to 26.5 miles long. We currently have an active construction project which will add another 27 million gallons of storage to the system. Next slide.

So this shows what all that work that came out of the clean water act and then working 1980's and 1990's did for us, prior to the deep tunnel coming online, we average between 50-60 combined sewer overflows per year. We also averaged between 8-9 billion gallons of overflow per year. The tunnel came online as you see the first full year of 1994, and immediate reduction in volume and right now, we're averaging just under 1 billion gallons. We went from eight to nine billion down to one and we went from 50-60 combined sewer overflows down to an average right now of 2.2. We've had some very good years, 2003, 2006, where we almost caught every combined sewer overflow, but we've had some wet years as well, and that has brought us to the realization that we really need to look at more different ways, more unique ways to try to deal with storm water and wastewater flows. Next slide, Slide 25.

One of the things that we're implementing now which the tunnel expansions are a part of is a billion dollar expansion of our system, the original tunnel cost about $3 billion, we're putting in another billion dollars into it now, and by 2010, so this includes treatment plant upgrades, deep tunnel expansion which I talked about, and sewer rehabilitation, really trying to address the in flow and infiltration that's getting into the system from the satellite systems. Next slide, Slide 26.

I also said that we have flood Management authority, and Lincoln Creek is a great example of some of the work that we've been doing. This$119 million project, started in the mid 1990's and we completed it in 2002, before and after we removed a lot of concrete, we tried to naturalize the waterway, minimize the floodplain without buying out a lot of hopes and really try to bring the habitat back into the region. We tried to take a typical flood Management approach but use a sustainable Management approach so that it's not just a concrete line channel but we're trying to really utilize nature as we November forward in our flood Management. Next slide, Slide 27.

With all this work, with all of the overflow reduction, we do sit right on lake Michigan and we still have beaches that close, and what we started to see in the early 2000's was that we could stop every single overflow from all the wastewater treatment plants upstream of us and ourselves and stop all overflows and we could even discharge distilled water if we could through our treatment plants and we would still have beaches that close so we started scratching our heads saying okay, why would the beaches close if there's no overflows and we put out water from the wastewater treatment plants? And we started working with some of the universities in the region to really start analyzing this. Next slide, 28.

What they started showing us was that we needed to do more with storm water, both in the separate area and the combined sewer area, so we started a series of projects, best Management practices, that at the time we just called storm water DMP's before the term " Green infrastructure" really started becoming so popular. We sell rain barrels on our website, these are pickle barrel s that we convert into a storage vessel that you can put at the bottom of the downspout. We are promoting downspout disconnection in the combined sewer area to go into a rain barrel. Rain gardens are another initiative that we have offered half price plants on rain gardens in the region, really trying to get people to look at the way that the they landscape their properties and to control the run-off from those properties. Green roofs, that's a picture of the roof right above my head. We have a green roof on our headquarters building. We've probably installed three or four of these throughout the region. They're really something that in communities like Chicago and other large cities we're seeing this more and more to try to address CSO's and storm water run-off but there's so many other benefits to a green roof, as with some of these other initiatives that help with reducing the cost of air-conditioning for the green roof, help reduce some of the cooling or I'm sorry, the heat islands that occur in large municipal areas, so it's just an approach that with green infrastructure, our target is storm water and reducing overflows, but there's so many other benefits we need to really remember as we move through these. Next slide, Slide 29.

The green seems project is really a program to go out and purchase buffers along our waterways. We started this in 2001, we spent close to $ 9 million on this, over 1300 acres have been purchased, in 2006 alone, we had 454 acres purchased, so we continually are looking at the trying to purchase these bufferer properties, we put an easement on them and then we turn them over to a local land trust or in most cases to the local communities because they use these for park space and Parkland, so it's really a win- win, where we can help control flooding, we can help reduce non-point polution getting into the waterways, and they can utilize this property for Parkland and for some of the land trusts to expand their property holdings. So it's been a great success story here in Milwaukee.

Also in 2002, we realized that to do a lot of this we need to make sure there's a regulation that really helps us control future storm waters so that we're not always chasing our tail. We need to make sure that we can try to get to the point where we control new run-off from either redevelopment or new development, so in 2002, we passed what we call a storm water rule, and the district has rule making authority over our 28 communities, so if we pass a rule, then that has to be implemented through ordinances by the 28 communities, and they've all done that and this rule basically said that for all new area greater than a half acre, they need to control the 100 year run-off release rate to .5 CFS per acre and a two year to .15 CFS per acre so it really puts some key into redevelopment and new development trying to control that future run-off that would come from that expansion of our areas. Next slide, 31.

This is just a slide showing the rain barrel program, over 7,000 have been sold, they usually aren't painted like this. We've had some partnerships with some of the different educational groups and youth groups in the region. They like to paint them, the Cub Scouts have been a great partner on this and it's really a way to teach people how to manage water. This is a barrel, it has to be emptied, it has to be managed by the homeowner. I've got two of them at my house. You real Lly, it allows you to use water in a better fashion , I water a lot of my flowers and garden with this rain water. Next slide, Slide 32.

This is another picture of our green roof. This is a green grid system that we installed. It's from a manufacturer in Beloit, Wisconsin, and it a allows you to basically have your normal roof but you put these trays of plants on top of the roof so that if you have an issue with the roof itself, you can remove the trays, take care of whatever problems you have. This has been installed since 2003. This is a great Fall picture. It's really quite beautiful, and it's actually grown up a lot the more than this now.

Slide 33, we also have gone out with some pilot projects as I said we call it these storm water best Management practices projects where we tully pay developers, communities, non-governmental groups to build a best Management practice. We've got over 23 of these in place since 2003. We budget these as we have money available each year when we do the budget. That's gone anywhere from $100 thousand up to $500 thousand, actually I think one year we had $800 thousand, so it really depends on how the budget works, and this picture that you see here is actually a wetland for the parking lot in our headquarters building here where we actually converted an open area to a wetland to treat some of the storm water run-off from the parking lot before it goes into the River system.

Next slide, Slide 34. Rain gardens have also really blossomed if you want to call it that here in the State of Wisconsin, Madison has been utilizing these quite a bit and in Milwaukee we're trying to foster that growth as well. In Shorewood, one of our suburbs, they've actually taken this and partnered with us where they match us in dollars and they've disconnected some of the downspouts in the combined sewer area, they've built over 50 rain gardens so it's been a huge success story for us and for our community. Urban ecology center is a local education center, and they've helped utilize some of the funding for that we provide for rain gardens, and the benefit of that beyond just building a rain garden is that it allows us to educate people that go through this center, so that they understand the connection between what runs off their property and polluted with storm water and overflows.

We've also installed rain gardens on some of the their auto recycling centers, and taken the run-off from a very mruted site and tried to clean that before it goes into the Rivers. Next slide, Slide 35.

I talked about a rain garden program, we've called this the lake Michigan Rain Garden Initiative, we've partnered with a local non-profit that grows the plants and we provide these to our residents at half cost, so for them, it's a way to get native species, deep rooted plants, that they can build a rain garden with and a reduced cost, and on the day when they come and pick these up, we have a program where we tell them how to build a rain garden, we show them how to lay out the plants and it's really a great community effort. Next slide, 36.

Cisterns, this picture is actually not the from Walnut Way , but we had a neighborhood in a low income area of Milwaukee that has just been a tremendous partner on working for storm water controls, and installing four residenti cist erns on homes they also have urban gardens in empty lots adjacent to these homes so they use the water from these cis terns to water the urban gardens and then they take the vej ables and plants they grow there and distribute it through the neighborhood so again, very educational piece for that neighborhood, takes the water off our system, uses the water to benefit the low income region and it's just one of those things where you drive through the community and you're so proud to just be part of an effort like that. Next slide, 37.

We also had a historic pump station that was built in the 1890 time frame, we called it the mill wawx see River Flushing Station, and basically, this was our first wastewater treatment plant in Milwaukee. We pumped water in the 1890's out of Lake Michigan over a ridge and with we flushed the Milwaukee River out into the lake because it was filled up withpolluted sewage and in the time frame, we converted this pump station over to a storm water Management education facility, we actually partnered with a local coffee roaster, and it's now half coffee house and half education center, and if you go to the next slide, Slide 38, it's the Altera Coffee is the Company that's partnered with us on this public/private partnership and on the picture to the right you'll see a darker pavement versus the lighter pavement. The darker pavement is asphalt, you can pore a gallon of water on this an it soaks right in. Downspout, disconnection, rain barrels, we installed a water quality inlet filter for the rest of the run-off from this parking lot, so it's another great way to connect public education, public outreach, with great ways to manage storm water and we estimate about 30% reduction in run-off from this site.

Here is a larger park we had to rebuild for one of our flood Management projects and we put in bioretension as you can see in the lower right, where we're squirting water on to this parking lot which is for us asphalt, we have curb cuts to take the water so it's just another very good way to manage storm water and hopefully get people to understand they can do this on their own property.

Here is some of the numbers Slide 40. From the volume reductions that we've seen, if you did just a downspout disconnection we're seeing about a 12% reduction if you combine that with a rain barrel it would go to 14% combined with rain garden 36% and you can see the numbers as they go up. Bioretension, and green parking lot which is really a combination of pavement and bioretension, those are, these numbers show that there's a significant benefit that can be realized through some of these practices and these are very sustainable practices. Next slide, 41.

This shows some of the reductions in pollutant levels that we're seeing. All of this data is continually being added to when we started some of this work, we realized there was not a whole lot of good, scientific engineering information on how to handle these or what the benefits O of these practices were so we've been working with others to try to do that. Next slide, 4.

Just last year working with the regional planning Commission, we took a very holistic approach, what we wanted to do is to blend the gray infrastructure with the green infrastructure, and show that this was a way to improve water quality and to really see how we could do that, so this is really the road map to working into the future and we use the EPA's watershed approach to do that, so the red box that you see on the map shows our service area, but we really worked with the planning agency to model a significant area upstream and downstream of our service area , and looked at natures boundarys, the watersheds themselves. We modeled over 1127 square miles of area, for every type of land use, urban, agricultural,pourus, really looking at what the quality of water was and the quantity of water that came from these various land uses in nine counties and 83 municipalities, it took about six years to do this work, as I said we just completed it last year, it was a monumental effort by my staff and by a lot of people at the Department of Natural resources and at the regional planning Commission , but it really has told us where we need to focus in the future. And some of these graphs come from last August, they have been updated a bit but the numbers are basically the same. On the Milwaukee River watershed, using this watershed approach, what we found for total phosphorus is wastewater treatment plants were about 19% of the source, industrial 30 %, 34%, non-point rural, 34%, urban non-point urban 12%. If you look from the bottom, it basically shows that CSOs and SSOs have gone to about 3-4% of the total load and it's really switched over to a storm water run-off issue here in the Milwaukee River base in.

The next slide is 45. This shows the transformation from 1975, that pie graph I showed you before, to where we are right now, and we use a baseline of 2000. We put $3 billion into CSOs, SSOs and wastewater treatment plants and we were able to reduce the size of the pie by about 25%, and we also reduced the contribution of CSOs, SSO s and wastewater treatment plants to be about 11% of the load where before, you know, you were in the 56% range. So now, what this graph tells us is the green infrastructure , the storm water Management, the ways to address urban and rural storm water run-off, that's 89% of the loading and we need to really try to focus on those constituents and move forward. And as I said on this last pie chart, I think this latest pie for 2000 has been updated where the 55% is more like 65% for urban and the rural piece is a little bit less, but it's still about 11% point and 89% non-point. Next slide.

So taking that information, we started looking at where we want to proceed in the future, we started working more with our local universities, University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee, and Great Lakes water Institute, they were doing DNA typing for us, they did transport to tell us once the pollution got in the water, the bacteria, how did they survive through the waterways, we did human source studies of storm water and disruption investigations as well trying to bring the science out so that people could understand that what the modeling was showing us was connected to storm water. Next slide, 47.

We were in the process of expanding our water quality monitoring program. We're putting in some in stream continuous ambient monitoring stations. Next slide, 48.

We're trying to build off existing frameworks, we're working with the local municipalities to try to develop a collaborative effort and this also includes the NGO's in the region, an we're calling this right now the Milwaukee Regional Partnership Initiative. Take that pie graph and say where is pollution coming from, how do we spend the next hour and most beneficial way to address that and how is a region through this partnership are we going to address that? There's currently eight municipalities on the mchlenominee River watershed that we've talked to about really using an expanded municipal monitoring program, so that their individual permits could eventually be really morphed into maybe a watershed permit and that's maybe one of those future goals we're working towards and providing some of the monitoring author fos communities to do that. Next slide, 49.

We've also kicked around the idea of total maximum daily loads and this presentation I'm showing was one that I gave last August to a SWI PGA conference and since last August we've been talking to our Department of Natural Resources and right now we're probably going to step back a little bit from a third party TMDO, which is what we have been thinking of doing and really take the next step which is to develop a watershed action plan and develop these plans that identify, they still identify loads, they still identify actions that need to be taken to address those loads but it's not quite to the TNDL point just so we can allow some of the discussion to catch up with the science and modeling.

We're also hoping to pilot a watershed permit, by using this what will now be a watershed action plan, as the basis for everything, and then use some of the existing programs for green infrastructure, green to seems and some of these other adaptive approaches that we move forward with. And then hopefully, and I'm hoping we can get to this, get to a water quality trading program, on Slide 51, to really bring a market based approach, because what we're going to have to do at first veelly concentrate on the urban storm water piece, but we need to make a market model that makes sense for the agricultural community to come into this discussion and so hopefully a market based approach through water quality trading will help us to meet that leap. Next slide, 52.

This really is a generic depiction of the partnership initiative itself, trying to bring government, non- government business and educators all together by watershed, so have it structured by watershed into this community council so that issues that the may be important to the River and aren't important to the Menominee River, we can focus our resources and prioritize the project the and make them pertinent to the neighborhood level to address these different a approaches. And most importantly, working along what is now the action plans, get to the permit, the water quality trading will provide the path and what we're really looking to do is go beyond current regulatory requirements, because we've really addressed the CSO issue, the SSO issue, we still have 30 3D listed water days and we need to try to find ways to go beyond what's required, still improve the waterways but do it in a manner that's maybe cost less, less costly than some of the other approaches we've looked at and it gets back to leadership and this is what I started with EPA took huge steps last August with the statement of intent on green infrastructure at a water quality trading toolkit on August 7th. The MPDS permits and enforcement use of green infrastructure and those on August 16, and then the guidance on the watershed permitting on the 23rd. These are the tools that we needed. We need to take the next step and really start implementing these in some of our permits themselves. And there's slide 55, an ugly picture of me, so, I will take any questions.

Okay, thank you, Kevin. we will briefly pause here to take some questions and we'll first take those that are submitted online. Again, as a reminder you may submit questions online any time by clicking on the question mark button at the top of the slide page.

Kevin, the first question that we have is from Paula in Washington D.C. And she asks: How do you enforce your storm water rule?

Am I still muted?

No, you're good.

Okay, thank you. Our storm water rule, the 28 different communities that are a part of our sewage district are required in the rules to adopt ordinances that are compliant with the rule, so it's built into the back bone of the district that these rules must be implemented. There's a variety of steps we could take if we had to. We've never had to do that, but the rules themselves are enforceable and the communities have been absolutely great partners on helping us develop these rules. The storm water rule itself took about two years of just discussion through all of the technical folks at our municipalities to make sure we addressed all of the issues and we had something that the would really improve water quality so my hats off to my communities. They stepped forward, they did the right thing, they knew this was the right thing and it's been a real success story for us, but it is enforceable through those local ordinances.

Thank you, Kevin. We have another question from Dianne in Spokane, Washington and she says, it seems that water reuse is an important approach to sustainability, yet there are significant permitting issues to address. And she poses the question: How can we bring industry and regulatory agencies to a closer partnership with respect to agriculture in urban reuse opportunities? So it's a question of water reuse, how can we get that to happen?

I don't know if it applies just to water reuse, but what we've done here in Milwaukee is we've really tried to rely on the scientific community. We've gone back to the University, we've done some of the DNA studies that the I talked about really trying to get the science to say that this is the right thing or this is the source of this pollution, where do we need to go next. On water reuse, for us wooshtioner right on the Great Lakes. We don't have a water supply problem like some areas of the country do, but water conservation, water saving devises are still very important here. I think our per capita usage is only 58-60 gallons per capita per day so we have a lower number than some of those you heard earlier, so water use is still important on industry in the Milwaukee area we've seen a reduction in flows from some of our wet industries, but it's really been the economics of water that have brought them to that an it's better for those industries to reduce their water usage by reusing it or more efficient using that water, but it's been more of an economic driver for them.

Okay, thanks, Kevin. We have another question from Talio in Los Angeles, California. And he asks, or she, I'm not sure: Any data on costs of the BMP's versus the cost to treat?

That's what we're hoping to get to. We don't have a good comparison on dollar per gallon treated versus some of these various different approaches. When we started the BMP program we really took a shot gun approach and went out and whoever would apply, we found that there's good existing data we could do a before and after could comparison on, we selected those projects and built them so what we're doing now is gathering the data, trying to determine some of the costs on the BMP side because we can compare that eventually with the cost to treat, but we got to get to that point, and I need to stress, green infrastructure is not the total solution. It needs to have a strong back bone from gray infrastructure which in Milwaukee we're fortunate to have. Green infrastructure will help immensely, but you really need to guide your program so it's a mixture of both.

Okay, thanks, Kevin. Although the question is not exactly important to what I'm going to say here, we just put out a document cost related to reducing storm water costs through using low impact development strategies and practices, and I guess it does get to this issue of cost. This report we issued in December 2007 looked at 17 case studies from across the the country, and found that in general, in most cases, it was less costly to use so-called low impact development practices as opposed to traditional storm water practices. In fact the capital cost savings ranged from 15-80%, so this is one aspect, that we're not going to be able to compare the cost of low impact development to treatment but we are finding that using LID practices are generally cost effective, so I urge you to take a look at this report at the our website at www.EPA.gov/OWOW/NPS/lid, for low impact development. If that toos many words there just go to look at our page and you'll find it at the top of the page.

I have one more follow-up question that's sort of a spinoff, Kevin, that the we received from Mark, from Urbana, Illinois and he asks: Do you have any data on how well the various BMP's have reduced microbial pathogen run-off particularly non-bacterial such as viruss?

Urbana a, Illinois, I grew up in Rontoul, so that's my old stomping grounds. I don't think we have anything on microbial or bacteria reductions from some of these approaches. I think that's the next step to really get into getting a clear picture of where these approaches might benefit the region, so I guess to answer the question is no, we don't, but it's something we need to move towards.

Okay, thank you. Another question, Kathy from Albany, New York, asks: Kevin, what funding sources are you utilizing for these efforts?

Any and all that we can can find. The capital program itself is paid for off of a property tax equalized value, that we receive from the residents in the region and businesses I should say. The operation and maintenance cost of our system are paid for through a user charge billing that we send out to our communities for the green infrastructure program, the best Management practices program, majority of that is coming from that property tax levy, the equalized capital improvements, and we have received some smallgrants from different organizations, actually with the green seems to buffer program we've gotten a substantial amount of funding from coastal zone Management grants and through the State, and they've been a big partner on this but a lot of it is just out of our capital improvement program.

Okay, thank you, Kevin. At this time I'm going to ask if anyone would like to ask a question over the phone so please unmute yourself and give us your name and organization before you ask a question.

My name is Sharmain Barry, I'm at Region 9. My question was I was surprised at the high percentage of co liform of urban storm water run-off and I was wondering if you had a sense of what the source of that was, if it was urban wildlife or pets or how much was from leaking sewer pipes or what?

Yeah, and that's a great question. That's one of the questions that we internally asked ourselves when we started seeing results from this watershed approach we started seeing this high urban load and that prompted us to go back to the Great Lakes Water Institute and on one of my slides I talked about human typing of storm water. We went back and took samples of flow coming through storm sewers during dry periods and wet periods and we started finding human indicators in that storm water, and this is in a separate the sewer area, so we've worked with those communities a and we're still going through that process. We've only done just a small sampling, but Milwaukee is an older community, there's pipes that the have aged and cracked and are now, you know, probably inner connected through some of the groundwater flows, so we've gone through and said okay, that seems like a high percentage. How much of it is actually illegal connections or broken pipes from sanitary sewer getting into storm sewers, and we've also done DNA typing at the beaches and at the beaches , we're on the lakefront, so we have a heavy seagull population, and you have a young Great Lakes again back in 2000-2001 time frame found that 85-80% that was closing the beaches were coming from the birds, from seagulls, so depending on what area and the watershed you're looking at, it's a mix of sanitary flow, getting into storm sewers but it's also a mix of wildlife.

Thank you.

Okay, thank you, Kevin. I'm going to ask if there are anymore questions from phone lines, one more question possibly. Okay, if there are no more questions?

yeah, I have a question.

Go ahead.

This is Cheryl with EPA Region 9 and I just recently had to redo my asphalt in my property and I was hoping to get some asphalt that, now, going through the bidding process, I was told that water is the enemy and a if I want, you know, something, a durable product that's going to last a long time, that I should go with this asphalt, which I assume is a regular asphalt, so I'm wondering, how cost effective and durable this pourus asphalt is that you use compared to the traditional asphalt.

And with the asphalt, the biggest cost differential between that normal as fat is the sub base because the water is going to infiltrate through the asphalt, it needs to go somewhere so it needs to have a good subbase to take that water and sometimes have you to have a drain in there to drain it off so a big cost differential that we've seen is in that base course and not so much the asphalt itself. As far as durability, we've had the flushing station parking lot in for three or four years, through the cycle here in Milwaukee, it gets plowed. It's waering just as well as the regular asphalt and then the large site that we just in stalled in Heart Park, that went through last winter fine, and right the now, we're in the second winter on that pavement, so as far as wear and tear, I don't believe anyone that tells me that it's not as durable, as regular. But the cost, it is more costly. It's just in the base course itself.

Okay, thank you, Kevin and thanks for the good questions.

All right, before we move to our next session, I want to you move to Slide 56. The watershed academy's next Webcast will be on March 19th. This Webcast will cover managing nutrients in your backyard and community. Please visit the watershed academy Webcast web page at www. EPA.gov/watershed Webcast for more information about this Webcast, the information and registration and so fourth will be posted probably by the beginning of March.

Okay, now, please move to Slide 57, and we are now ready to move on to our final section of the presentation, Stephanie, unmute yourself again and please take it away.

Good afternoon, my name is is Stephanie Farrell, and I'm representing [INAUDIBLE} utility district this afternoon, I've been working in the beaver creek watershed efforts since 2000. I'm very honored at the opportunity to present the Beaver Creek initiativeto you this afternoon because it's a true reflection of the team effort. Each team member has brought their own valuable contribution s to the table, as the presentation evolves, I will provide specific examples to demonstrate this fact.

Before I begin I'd like to recognize a few key partners, V ivian Doyle and her watershed team in Region 4 in Atlanta have been instrumental in assisting us in always being available for questions or systems in any manner through the watershed efforts that we have been engaging in, and then also the home folks in Knoxville, those are very instrumental in working with the Beaver Creek Task Force, and finally I'd be remiss if I did not mention the utility leadership that the I've been serving under for the course of the last eight and a half to nine years, Darren Cardwell, the two of them together have allowed me the privilege of working with this watershed group for the last eight years and I appreciate that opportunity.

The title of my presentation this afternoon is " Holistic watershed Management". We'll be discussing integrating a treatment plan upgrade with water quality improvement in Beaver Creek.

If you'll advance your slide to 58 I'd like to begin with discussing a little bit of the background and describing some of the characteristics of the watershed to you. Beaver Creek is the watershed that will be featured during this section this afternoon. As you can see from the inset, the watershed is located in the Eastern portion of Tennessee, slightly North of Knoxville. However, it is entirely within the Knox County boundary. It falls within the watershed which is outlined on your map in green, and of the 630 square mile portion of the lower watershed, Beaver Creek consumes roughly 86 square miles. The focus of our discussion today will revolve around those 86 square miles of drainage base in with 44 stream miles that empties into the River. Thebasin is long, narrow and a valley bound on the North and South side by two significant ridgelines.

Moving ton to Slide 59. The pie chart on the left depicts the watersheds land use classifications. As you Mesa sum, the land use characteristics are in keeping with the highly urbanized watershed. Population projections are currently indicating a rapid increase of nearly 45% over the course of the next 25 years. The population growth. All these factors combined contribute to the impairments outlined on the right, again indicative of a highly urbanized watershed. The cause of impairment listed on the 303 de list for phosphorus, nitrate, E-coli, habitat alteration, and developed oxygen.

Moving to Slide 60. The next two slides will be reviewing some significant projects within the watershed. Like to begin in 1998, when the Task Force was formed it consists primarily of agency folks that have been the back bone of the effort. Each agency represented will be outlined in future slides. Also in 199, Knox County updated FEMA flood study lead primarily by public outcry concerning flooding and resulted in a no fill flood line expansion in 2000.

Stephanie I'm going to ask if you could please speak up, dear.

Okay.

Thank you.

Uh-huh.

In 2002, then the initial Beaver Creek watershed assessment was completed, and from this, initial assessment, there were 12 focus areas outlined. These established areas are the foundation for the monitoring plan. Our goal is to utilize historical data and establish measurable results. And in 2003, the Beaver Creek watershed association was formed and this was where Task Force members assembled a public meeting which then formed citizen based watershed association. Currently, the group meets monthly with a attendants around 30, but the membership roster and mailing list includes 300 contributors. In 2003, Knox County was able to hire a part-time watershed coordinator, one of the first instrumental tasks that he implemented for the Task Force was to arrange the committee in such a manner that each committee member could serve in their specific areas of interest, so some examples of the subcommittees that were established is a grant running committee, a technical committee and an education outreach committee.

In 2003, there was a watershed education initiative that began and this was under the leadership of the education and outreach committee and we'll be discussing some of those activities in further slides. In 2003, Knox County established a site planning roundtable, and the roundtable was the brain child of Knox County storm water department, established as a precursor for the new storm water ordinance. It consisted of a series of meetings established to provide a venue for the development community to speak up about their concerns and their objective was to produce an agreeable ordinance that both regulators and development community felt they could adhere to.

Moving on to Slide 61, in 2004, assessments for 23 subbas ins were completed and a green infrastructure plan was Commissioned. This green infrastructure plan was a missing component until the Task Force sought assistance from the University of Tennessee school of architecture and design. The local metropolitan planning Commission is in the process of developing a new plan for the area surrounding Beaver Creek watershed. Through their involvement with the Task Force, the MPC has learned about the green infrastructure plan and are seeking ways to incorporate the recommendations of the plan within the new sector plan.

In 2005, the State of Tennessee awarded the Beaver Creek watershed initiative the necessary funds to develop a watershed plan for the 604 B planning grant, and also a several best Management practices were implemented or initiated in that year. In 2005 as well, we updated the GIS land use, Knox County has the benefit of a very established and advanced GIS system. The GIS is partnership with the Task Force has given us the ability to generate very accurate data, which has been absolutely instrumental inland use calculations and cover analysis.

In 2005, EPA Region 4 granted us a consolidated watershed grant and was looking at pilot market based ecological credit trading programs, and it was awarded for over $300 thousand. the goal is aimeded at developing the framework for a trading program and I will elaborate on this concept in a future presentation. And this was the firm elected to assist the the Task Force with this project and some examples of the deliverables include market assessment, market framework, market transactions and credit development. And in 2006, the most recent watershed plan, very specifically outlines pollution reduction goals. These were identified through the utilization of two watershed models and the first was developed by Jim hchlager man and primarily analyzes the watershed for nutrients loading and the second model focuses on sediment reduction and was developed by John Schwartz from the University of Tennessee. The day a generated by each model, has been used to simulate scenarios prior to and following the MP implementation. The most effective practices were then used to generate cost estimates that are outlined in the plan. The generation of the plan has divided the team with the leverage necessary to successfully pursue implementation funding. The Task Force has recently accomplished this goal with an award from 319 funding for over $900,000.

Move to Slide 6, I'd like to mention each of the partners , early in the presentation I mentioned each of them had some significant an very valuable contributions to the team so I'd like to go through and name each one individually. The beaver Creek watershed association if you'll recall is the citizen based group. CAC Americore, Knox County, Knoxville, Knox County MPc. NRCA, Knox County conservation district, Tennessee Department of Environment and Conservation, University of Tennessee, USGS, and West Knox Utility District so we have a very diverse group represented on the Task Force including regulators, residents, academics and utilities.

Moving to Slide 63, now we'll be discussing some of the improvements projects, the first of which is the environmental stewardship program which is a cost share and available to Knox County residents that experience significant quality or quantity storm water issues. It is available throughout the greater county area, however several projects have been completed within the beaver creek base in due to the impacts of nooding. Several BMP projects looked at livestock exclusion, sensing as well as alternative watering sources.

We pretty much discussed the watershed planning process as the two major documents to remember there, the assessment conducted in 2000 and the most recent plan completed in 2006 , more specifically targeting our reduction goals. Again, the education and O outreach initiatives have been very significant under the leadership of Malinda and Ruth Ann under the education and outreach subcommittee. Some of the sample projects include the AAW or adopt a watershed program that's really citizen watch effort. The residents opt to go through a training course and then elect to serve as a watch dog for a designated stream section. Activities include assessments in annual clean ups, and secondly, developing a strong relationship with a local media has proven vital to the outreach effort. Every year, on the education plan there's a line item indicating the target number of articles for publication. Thanks to our local paper, the Hall Shopper, the group has been able to meet and exceed this goal for every year.

We've also developed several construction best Management demonstration sites, and basically we were working with specific developers and causing them to be aware of some of the practices that they maybe performing on their individual sites, contributing to the sediment loading, expanded our ag BMP program, and then we have the echo trading grant totaling $35 3,000 and the Senate the approved $500 thousand that was specifically directed to the utility district, to implement some other best Management practices, however it did not make it through the House and we'll be revisiting that Bill in the future, and finally the 319 grant most recently awarded for $919 thousand.

We'll move forward to Slide 64. I'd like to discuss what watershed base permitting is, and primarily, it is an approach to MPD permitting that results in permits that are A) designed to attain watershed goals with the consideration of all sources and stressers in a watershed or basin; B) a component of the watershed framework to better integrate standards, non-point source controls and source water protection. So really the beauty is in the very holistic and comprehensive nature of this approach.

Moving to Slide 65, we have a brief discussion of total maximum daily load or TMDL, clean water act section, 30 3D requires the State to identify waters that will not achieve water quality standards after implementation of technology based limitations, and TMDL's are required for most impaired waters TMDL is defined as the amount of pollutants that may be discharged into a water body with the water body still meeting water quality requirements.

Moving to Slide 66, we'll discuss the components of a TMDL . We have on the right hand side, we'll be going through the bullets, waste load allocations and they are assigned to each point source discharge, so so that, so so that would be district and the other wastewater treatment facility in Beaver Creek watershed which is West Knox Utility and then we have assignments to the non-point sources, waste load and load allocations are established so that predicted receiving water concentrations do not exceed water quality criteria, and reserve capacity may be included to account for new or expanded discharges as the factor safety is needed so basically, we have a pie chart here that allocates each point source and non-point source in the pie shape and what we would be discussing through watershed based permitting or water quality trading is just playing a little bit with the size of the allocation or the amount of loading allocation per pie size.

If we'll move on to Slide 67, I've outlined the steps for watershed based permitting. You select your watershed, identify and engage the stakeholders, those would be the individuals primarily contributing to the waste load or load allocation, analyze the watershed data, which would include some monitoring data , Step 4 would be to develop permit conditions, Step 5 would be issue that permit and then Step 6 would be measuring report progress, and again, we are looking to always try to accomplish measurable results so that we can show those agencies and regulators that we're accomplishing the goals that we set fourth initially.

Moving to Slide 68, expected benefits and challenge of this a approach, the benefit would be emphasis on environmental results, promote watershed monitoring plans, encourages efficiency and targets resources, and increases stake holder involvement, so all of those things speak more to local efforts and local influences, so that you have a watershed plan that really addresss the targeted issues for your watershed, and then some of the challenges, the involvement appears on both. Sometimes it's challenging to get people to come to the table and discuss the issues so that they want to be encourage them to be involved, that can be a challenge. They involve non-point sources which are often unquantified and are challenging to quantify, and investment of agency time and resources. So, we're charts a little bit into an area of unknown and that can bring about some challenge.

Moving to Slide 6, we discuss water quality trading, these are general concepts about water quality trading and not necessarily specific to the beaver creek efforts. It's an opportunity to meet water quality goals at a lower cost primarily addressing nutrients but potentially in the future other pollutants as well. Watershed trading creates more environmental benefits an cost savings and we've seen recent momentum increase in years with EPA guidance coming out, and prerequisites highlight best opportunities, multiple sources, significant different pollutant control costs, sufficient modeling and monitoring, and then the EPA handbook issued in December of 2004.

Moving to Slide 70, we'll begin the discussion revolving around the catalyst that lead the utility district to explore a watershed based approach. A little background about us, throughout our small scale of utility, water and wastewater provider, and we have roughly 26 thousand water customers and 20,000 wastewater customers, and most of the infrastructure, the utility was established in 50 years ago and most of the infrastructure is ranging between 30-40 years old so we're looking at some of the things mentioned early on in the presentation, ways to accommodate the growth of the area, compounding the effort to replace aging infrastructure, and initiative to reduce SSO s and rehab ill it Tate existing infrastructure has begun, and the utility leadership felt like they had an obligation to the right players to at least investigate what the best way to go about some of these improvements were and look into the prospect of doing some watershed based permitting or watershed based approach to utilities.

Moving to Slide 71. We have a wastewater treatment facility that is currently rated for 7-8 million gallons a day, wastewater treatment capacity, and we are looking at, well we have begun construction actually for an expansion to this facility and basically, the improvements will be implemented in three phases with the first phase already in completion. The first phase will allow for us to operate and deal with the high influence loads quickly by restoring the existing lagoons that you can see in the upper left hand corn tore use as flow equalization base ins and they've been online for I believe it will be a year and they've been functioning very properly in assisting the utility and managing wet weather. And Phase II, there will be a State of membrane reactor, bio reactors, excuse me, installed and will in ceels the capacity of the plant to 12 million gallons a day.

So the discussion was as we began to layout the phases and begin the design of the expansion, how much will it cost the utility to put a nutrient removal treatment in the process. And initial estimates from the Jordan Jones and Goulding Engineering Firm, they said we would need nearly $10 million to invest in the infrastructure necessary and that's not including long term operation and maintenance costs, revolving around the nutrient removal process within the treatment train itself.

So, when we began to negotiate the permit or discuss the permit options with the State of Tennessee, the discussion revolved around the option of looking at doing some non- point source load reductions through best Management practices in the watershed, and seeing how that evolved an how that improved the water quality prior to us implementing the nutrient and remove L all process within the treatment plant itself, and the plant still has still has a for the nutrient removal so that's something that the can always be installed in the future, should we not be able to prove our efforts within the watershed through best Management practices.

So moving to Slide 72, this slide demonstrates for you or illustrates for you rather portions of the stream that the would be, could be potentially restored with that $10 million we initially discussed installing nutrient removal and the treatment plant so the green is the watershed delineation, and the purple highlighted section in the middle represents an approximate portion of the stream bank that could be restored with HPUD funds in lieu of nutrient removal process at the wastewater treatment plant. So please note here that the significant portion of the watershed that the could be enhanced which is slightly less than half of the watershed, and I'm saying stream restoration, I'm talking about stabilizing the stream bank and possibly repairing buffers, those types of things. We had some cost estimates for that and estimated that roughly 10 miles could be restored with that money.

Moving on to Slide 73, another potential opportunity for the utility district is to involve itself with some land conservation practices. The characteristics of the watershed lend itself nicely to these practices because it is a valet system and there is a significant amount of land that is non-buildable, just due to the floodplains. So, that the would result in if you took that $10 million nearly 2500 acres of available land and through this mechanism, we would be able to accomplish multiple goal, and we saw those goals being aesthetically enhancing the quality of watershed in a sdiingz to significantly reducing the pollutant loading.

So moving on to Slide 7, the next several slides we'll be discussing some of the best Management practices, excuse me, that we've been looking at isolating to address the specific problems that we've seen in our watershed. The first and probably most prominent problem has been an issue of flooding, again getting back to the topolography of the land, we kind of lay in a valley system here bound by two ridges, and so we do have significant issues with nood ing. Most of these best Management practices would assist us in getting, reducing the flooding problem for residents. Slide 75 is an example of a targeted best Management practice. Here we have some poor land use. We've got a land owner that has decided to basically dump soil very near the stream bank and it's rather nasty stuff, as you can see from the pictures, and so we would be looking at trying to restore the buffer in this area, and pull his land use practices back from the stream bank. The stream bank is just beyond the tree line there, in the pictures.

Moving to Slide 76, we have a typical scene of a yard and along the Beaver Creek watershed where we have a land owner that's going right up to the edge of the stream and we would like to speak with these land owners about the possibility of restoring the buffer and pulling their land use practices back a little bit so that we could allow for that the extra filtration of the storm water.

Slide number 77, this targeted BMP would be addressing cattle exclusion, fencing, and keeping the farm practices or providing better Management practices for our farmers. Okay, and moving to Slide 78. Some of the benefits of this approach for the utility is we see that the watershed based approach is poised to solve multiple water quality and quantity sh uses, with less duplication of effort. In a sdiingz, the outcome is a sustainable product that also can be viewed as a community asset such as green space, and land conservation practices. And finally, Slide 79, the big news about this project is that the State of Tennessee partnering with the utility district and is willing to allow the district to pursue a reduction in nutrient loading in the watershed with no nutrient standards on the end of pipe discharge.

So as I said before, this process will be evolving and will have pretty beefed up monitoring program to prove measurable results, so in return for this, the utility district has agreed to quantify phosphorus loading in their watershed, produce a watershed play aimed at offsetting their discharge loading, and not only contribute but ramp up the monitoring efforts to include a biological component.

Okay, that's the end O of my presentation, and we'll be taking questions.

Okay, thank you, Stephanie. With the remaining time, we'll address some of the questions that the have come into Andy, Kevin, and Stephanie. We've got a couple of questions, Stephanie for you and I guess one thing when we first spoke, Stephanie you mentioned that you're taking a watershed approach to nutrients and instead of just setting a nutrient limit at the end of the point of discharge you're addressing nutrients by implementing BMP, and they also reduce a lot of other pollutants including sediment, temperature and DO; is that correct?

That the is correct. Some of the things I did not include that we had discussions with the State of Tennessee about would be looking at the specific downstream impacts to our discharge, to the creek, rather, from our discharge, and some of the things that the we discuss there would be some tree canopy to address the temperature loading and also, reintroduce oxygen into the stream, so there will be some ancillary benefits to the best Management practices that we're looking at employing that would be in addition to just the nutrient removal, just I guess more bang for your buck if you will, I've indicated in one of the slides that the one of the beautys of the approach that we could get more benefits than just strictly nutrient and phosphorus removal by installing a vegitative filter strip where we can actually filter out some of the pollutants that the we wouldn't be limited just to the nutrients.

Okay, thank you, Stephanie. We have another question for you, Stephanie, from Mark in St. Paul.

Uh-huh.

He asks: What type of treatment system is being used and what phosphorus removal treatment options were considered? Was enhanced biological phosphorus removal, where costs are often less than chemical precipitation considered? And conservation limit of one milligram per liter or something else?

Yes, the engineering firm that did the analysis for us looked at both chemical and biological removal of nutrients in the treatment process, and costed that all out. The figures I've provided were from them and I'm sure it could be scrutinized and possibly have evolved over time. However, they did look into all the treatment technologies that are available and currently, the treatment is oxidation ditch, so we anticipate that the nutrient loading will change from the treatment plant in the future as we move to a membrane bioreact or, so, we requested to work with the State through this phase right now as we're developing the new permit and implementing the new plant, so that we can look at what the new loadings will be and establish the future MPDS permit accordingly.

Thank you. We have a question here for Andy from Amy in Honolulu, Hawaii. Do you know of any, and she asks, do you know of any water utilities that incorporate a fee or tax on the water Bill, to help with protecting watersheds or water sources?

Thanks, Amy. I guess I'm thinking through this and I don't know that I know any water utilities that the do that. I've seen cases where other folks have been doing that, I know, in the State of Maryland, we have a flush tax that we pay every month, and it's actually a statewide tax that goes towards restoration of the Chesapeake bay, and also I know the folks in benton Texas have adopted a program where you pay storm water fee based on how much surface you have, so that if you have lots of ways to infiltrate your groundwater , you pay lessor something like that, so I know of examples like that but I don't know specifically of a water utility doing it, maybe for I would think they maybe would put that towards sort of our protection or something like that, I know a lot of utility DOS look upstream to try and figure out how to have water, cleaner water coming into their water treatment plants but I don't know a specific example of a fee on the Bill, specifically for that.

This is also a question, Kevin, or Stephanie, if you want to weigh in. If not, we will just go to the next question. Stephanie, we have a question from Lawrence in Madison, Wisconsin. He asks: Is the watershed plan that you refer to enforceable through land use restrictions or other regulatory agency or do you rely just on education and voluntary efforts to reach your goals?

Locally, there has been some discussion concerning establishing a storm water authority, currently there is no regulatory authority that the district nor the Knox County storm water department has with regards to land use; however , as I mentioned in one of the slides, we have been working with the Knoxville metropolitan planning Commission who obviously does have authority over land use, and they've been a partner with the Task Force and are very interested looking at ways to move towards incorporating the concepts of the watershed based approach in their planning, so that certainly is a significant step that we've been able to make that currently we do not have any regulatory thing I guess to make that p happen; however, we are trying to counteract that the with a significant education program within the watershed, and have targeted those people that are practicing land use uses that may not be the best for the water quality and specifically the development community since in this particular watershed, sediment is such a substantial issue.

Okay, thank you, Stephanie. Related question here, for you, Stephanie. Is the utility paying for some of the BMPs being implemented ?

Yes. The utility has been very involved with implementing BMPs, allocating dollars for that, for the BMP, but then also just kind of makes sense because we have some of the equipment necessary to actually do the practices and so we've allowed for example, our construction staff to work very instrumental to develop an outdoor classroom that was very proud of under the leadership of Ruth Ann Hanihan, and the Halls High School in our district, so we basically provided the machinery and man hours to build a rain garden which has become a center piece for the effort for demonstration purposes and invited the community to come in and view the asset and hopefully encourage rain gardens to pop-up all over the watershed, so, not only we allocated dollars, but we've allowed for our staff and our equipment and so fourth to be utilized whenever possible.

Okay, thank you, Stephanie. We had within of our persons in audience provided some information about how water utilities are incorporating fees and Andy will share this with us.

Right, yeah, this just in, {LAUGHTER}, from Frank in Lawrenceville, New Jersey. He let us know that in New Jersey, they are in fact doing the New Jersey water supply authority has a rate component that they use to fund preservation of critical watershed parcels, and I guess this has been up and running since 2003 , and they've done preservation of over 2500 acres, so, there's a good concrete example.

Okay, thank you, Andy. A question here for Kevin Shafer. This question is regarding rain garden,cisterns and rain barrels and the person is from Kelly in Chicago is asking West Nile virus control an issue and if so, how are you addressing this, and he or she is saying also, thanks for mentioning the green grid.

Oh, sure. The question is the impact of the EMP on viruss? Hello?

Yeah, impact of, um, rain gardens and whether West Nile virus control is an issue and how you're managing that.

Oh, okay. We've not the had an issue with that. Rain barrels themselves have a screen on the top just like you'd have on your screen window so we're able to control some of the mosquito issues. On the overflow from the rain barrel, you can put actually an old nylon hose, you know, like what my wife wears on the end and that keeps them from going up that hose into the water. For the rain gardens themselves, for West Nile, it's standing water that's an issue and the rain gardens generally drain quick enough that you don't have that standing water issue, so on rain barrels we've thought about it, had a lot of people question us in the beginning but it isn't really an issue because of the precautions that we've taken.

Okay, thank you, Kevin. We had a question from Tolio also from Los Angeles and he's asking, Kevin, if there's a report on the study area available online.

The study area for the green infrastructure?

Yes, I assume so.

There actually is, if you go to MMSD.Com and I can't do it right here, but what I could do is send that to you and a link, if you'd like to have that, there's a report on our storm water program that I could send to you and maybe send it out.

Okay, well, thank you. Hopefully people can find that on the MMSD.Com website.

It's under the reports section so you can look there and see a lot of this information.

Okay, thank you. One last question, for Andy, we have a question from Jan in Kansas City, Kansas, and the question is, are long term control plans being submitted now with green infrastructure in combination with gray infrastructure, consistent with EPA direction and policy and appropriate for submission? So are long term control plans being part of this package?

Yeah, I think we're right on the cusp of having more of that happen. I haven't talked to the folks over across the hall there, as to how many they've seen but I have heard anecdotally that a few of those are coming in, and last I think Summer some time, we sort of formed or maybe it was late Spring formed sort of a work group with our permits folks, and the folks in enforcement to try and get model language out for permits , for long term control plans on how to incorporate this into the agreements that the we come to. So, I think we're on the cus p of seeing more than that. There's probably just a couple of them around, but we're definitely moving to try and get that to be more common.

This is Kevin, if I could chime in, I think that's a critical step. I think more utilities would be able to utilize green infrastructure if they really had the EPA and the State agency saying that this is something you have to do as part of a permit or part of a long term control plan, so I applaud EPA on what the they did last year but we need to take that the leap and start seeing it in some of the permits.

Yeah, Kevin, I absolutely agree with you, we're definitely trying to get there, and it's a matter, it's an, EPA is sort of at the top of the pyramid or something or maybe the bottom, how do I say this but most of the states are the folks who issue the permits so we're trying to work with them to get more of the stuff Incorporated.

Thank you. Any questions from the audience? We have maybe time for one more question if anybody has a burning question.

Okay. If not, we will move back to Slide, well move forward to Slide 81, I urge you all, if you're participating by phone line to type in these url's to find out about our additional resources that are available, links to Milwaukee's information and be a's information and to also please provide us feedback on our Webcast if you're participating by streaming audio, you can just click on the links button at the top of the page and also the feedback button. This concludes todays watershed academy Webcast and on behalf of the entire EPA watershed Webcast team, I'd like to thank Andy, Kevin, and Stephanie for their help with this Webcast. And of course, thanks to everyone O of you who joined us, this is Ann Wineburg from EPA's Office of oceans, wetlands and watershed, signing off, have a great day.