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Council has questions about storm-water ponds
Ordinance on hold while task force talks with developers, business leaders
Journal Photo by David Rolfe
This stormwater pond is at the corner of McGregor and Jonestown roads.
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Published: May 9, 2008
The Winston-Salem City Council is giving itself more time to work out the details on a proposed storm-water ordinance, mostly because council members say they still do not understand portions of it.
The city has been working for about two years to draft an ordinance to reduce pollution in storm-water runoff and to prevent flooding downstream. Runoff has been a concern for council members for years. As the city grows, the council has heard an increasing number of complaints from residents about flooding in their yards and homes when it rains. Increased development over the years means that there are more hard surfaces and less dirt and fields to absorb runoff.
The storm-water ordinance had been scheduled to go to the full council for a vote last month.
"It is a very complicated ordinance," Council Member Robert Clark said, "and every time I think I understand it, I learn something that I don't understand."
Under the ordinance, most new development and redevelopment projects, from subdivisions to businesses, would be required to have ponds to trap runoff to prevent it from running directly into nearby creeks. The water in those ponds would be released after pollutants have had time to settle or be absorbed by vegetation.
The ponds would have to be able to control water from two-, 10- and 25-year storms. Because the storms are known to drop different amounts of water, the ponds release storm water gradually through a pillar that has holes at varying heights. The city would mandate how big the holes could be in order to control how fast the water is released.
Currently, the city requires ponds to be able to handle the volume of rain dropped in a 10-year storm.
The size of the ponds would be different for each location. Keith Huff, the city's storm-water manager, said that larger developments may have ponds that span more than an acre, and smaller developments may be able to avoid building a pond by installing things such as vegetation ditches.
Members of the development community are asking the city to change the ordinance so that developers can build smaller ponds. Several council members said recently that they were not clear on how this could be done.
Council members formed a storm-water task force to sit down with developers and business leaders to talk about the options. The first of two scheduled meetings was last week. The second meeting will be Tuesday.
"There are snippets of information you get and you are trying to piece the whole mosaic together," Council Member Evelyn Terry said.
Nancy Gould, who represents area real-estate agents and homebuilders, told the task force that the ponds could be smaller if the city reduces the time that water has to be held before it is released.
The proposed ordinance would require developers to build ponds that can hold water for two to five days. Huff said that the gradual release would allow more water to be absorbed downstream, and would do a better job of preventing flooding.
Gould presented a plan that would require ponds to hold water for hours instead of days. If ponds could release the water sooner, she said, developers could build smaller ponds. It would allow developers to save more of their land for houses and buildings.
"I don't think anyone can have a handle on what all the consequences will be," Gould said before the meeting. "That's why we have encouraged our city council to move with caution and possibly wait and see if these standards work in other communities that have adopted them."
Both Gould and Gayle Anderson, the president of the Greater Winston-Salem Chamber of Commerce, said they are not surprised that council members are still asking questions two years into the process. Both said that the ordinance is complicated and technical.
Anderson said she does not believe that council members will understand all of the technical details of the ordinance. But when council members finally vote, she said, she thinks they will be ready.
"I will feel like the council members understand in general what they are voting on," Anderson said. "I don't think they will understand all of the specifics, but I think it would be impossible to ask them to do that."
Kathy Smith, a political science professor at Wake Forest University, said that elected officials should reach out to experts when faced with complicated public policy issues.
Smith said there are experts within city government and in outside organizations.
"The city council has an obligation and also an opportunity to locate the expertise," she said. "They should never be placed in a situation of voting without fully understanding the issue in front of them."
Council Member Dan Besse said that some questions will likely not be answered before the council votes. He said that many of the issues would require an engineering degree to fully comprehend.
"If you wait on an important environmental and public-safety rule until everybody says that they understand everything, you will never act, and that is a recipe in a modern society for disaster," he said. "We have to do the best we can with complex topics on a timely basis."
■ Blair Goldstein can be reached at 727-7284 or at bgoldstein@wsjournal.com.
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