MSD's Lawsuit / Philly's $1.6 Billion

Aaron Renn, the Urbanophile, recently blogged about a $1.6 billion dollar plan in Philadelphia to transform the city over the next 20 years into a stormwater absorbing sponge.  That seems like a lot of money, but it's actually quite small in comparison to what other cities have been spending on band-ade solutions like interceptor tunnels.  In fact, St. Louis has been spending money on these tunnels as well.

The idea is that old cities like Philly and St. Louis have pre-Civil War sewer systems that are extremely expensive to update and replace entirely.  When a lot of rain comes down, the stormwater fills the sewers, mixes with waste water, and the dirty overflow goes into local rivers.  That overflow goes against the Clean Water Act, and the only way to prevent it is to either replace the entire sewer system (impossible) or trap the stormwater somewhere during peak periods.  In St. Louis, where we are already blessed with a number of water-holding caves, we've built a few interceptor tunnels to meet peak demand.  In Philadelphia, they're hoping to stop the water where it falls in rain barrels, rain gardens, and the ground itself.  The idea is that it is easier and greener to absorb the water where it falls, than to put it all in one mega tunnel.

In his blog post, the Urbanophile offered a few criticisms of interceptor tunnels in general. 

•They are ridiculously expensive. Washington, DC is spending $2.2 billion on one, Indianapolis $1.6 billion, Cincinnati $3.5 billion, and Cleveland $5 billion – or thereabouts. The prices seem to vary depending on the source you read, but the operative term is always “billion”.

•Like all projects designed to deal with peak of the peak capacity, it will be un-utilized or under-utilized 90% of the time. It’s mostly wasted capacity. If you can, it is generally better to use demand management techniques to smooth out demand spikes, such as congestion pricing for roads.

•It’s a hack. We’re still basically taking clean water (well, not entirely clean, but that’s another post), combining it with raw sewage, and creating even bigger amount of, well, sewage. That doesn’t sound too smart.

•It adds zero to the city. What does your city get for a deep tunnel no one can see? Not much. The environmental benefits will never generate a rational economic or recreational ROI and no one even attempts to justify it on that basis. We are simply doing this because we’ve decided it is the right thing to do.

The idea is that building these tunnels is like adding an expensive band-ade to a problem that fails to fix it and ends up costing citizens a lot of money. 
 
The Metropolitan Sewer District in St. Louis is not totally foolish.  They're working from both ends.  They added some peak overflow tunnels, and they are out there looking into rain gardens and rain barrels.  They've just been put at a disadvantage recently by an unfortunate lawsuit. 
 
Philadelphia has a progressive stormwater billing charge based on the amount of impervious surface a property owner has.  The idea is that a large land owner like a Wal-Mart will pay for the amount of water that runs off his or her property and have an economic incentive to add a green roof and a pervious parking lot. 
 
MSD's had the exact same kind of policy until very recently when it was defeated by an absurd lawsuit.  St. Louis has been set back into an older fee collecting scheme with no incentives for smart property development.
 

St. Louis is water rich, and could be said to have an advantage because of local fear related to the Great Flood of 93 and the fact that all the local environmental groups are lined up on the same page due to the annual Earth Day Symposium.  Yet at the same time, the best we can do is a series of token projects around town like the now slightly water absorbing parking lot at the Botanical Gardens or the single poorly designed rain garden installed downtown... in the middle of a sidewalk.

 

 
It has already been accepted by the local community as a supplemental garbage can.
 
St. Louis has been ripping up sidewalks all over town as part of the Great Streets program, but we've been replacing them with yet more concrete.  Our trees are raised above the sidewalks so water runs away from them.  The ground cannot breathe.  Why can't we see that part of the solution is in our civic DNA? 
 

 

Dear citizens, no mortar is required.  We are a city of bricks.  In the 1821 inventory of our fair city by John Paxton there were 651 houses, 57 grocers, 5 billiard tables, and 2 brickyards... among other things.  Our bricks have always been with us.  A brick sidewalk drains.  If it's pushed up by tree roots, it can be relaid in an hour with no extra materials needed.  It can be repaired, arranged in seasonal/neighborhood patterns, or temporarily removed for the price of a few laborers and maybe a truck.  Brick paths = healthier soils, healthier trees, healthier government budgets, and better looking sidewalks.

 

I'm not saying we need to go back to cobblestone streets (hard to ride a bike on), but we could recognize that there are cities around the world (Seoul comes to mind) where bricks and pavers are the standard.  Our cracked and annually jackhammered and replaced walkways are silly and expensive.

This,

Could look like this on a rainy day,


Seoul, where I lived before moving to St. Louis in September