The West Glendover Stormwater Improvement Project in Lexington, KY, is an unusual project that resulted from extraordinary cooperation on the part of all parties involved. They managed not only to cooperate to create a functional and attractive stormwater management solution but also to resolve concerns that were sometimes diametrically opposed.
Locating the stormwater project in an arboretum stopped flooding to nearby homes, enhanced the arboretum’s collection of plants, and allowed the public to see a large-scale rain garden.
The project resulted from several years of complaints by residents of the Glendover Road area about flooding in their streets and basements. When Lisa and Todd Mudd came home one day only to find their children’s toys floating in a foot of water in their basement, they added their complaints to those of their neighbors.
 |
Photo: Lexington Arboretum |
| James Lempke (back to camera) and a helper planting eastern gamma grass |
As time went by and more flooding occurred, Todd Mudd added a check valve and then a sump pump to the basement. The devices reduced the flooding, but there was always some water in his basement after a hard rainfall.
Across Glendover Road from the Mudds, Mary and Edward Kasarkis also coped with a flooded basement after every major rainfall. “When the ground became saturated, there was nowhere else for the water to go but into your basement,” Mary Kasarkis explains, recalling that one time she had three city engineers in her backyard observing the flooding. Both she and her husband credit Linda Gorton, then–Lexington-Fayette Urban County Government (LFUCG) Council representative for the district, for helping the different groups work together to solve the flooding problem.
In the summer of 2000, the LFUCG Division of Engineering mailed questionnaires to residents to better understand the scope of the flooding. A series of meetings with city government staff members and residents followed. When the extent of the flooding was understood, a project for the area was added to the city’s list of stormwater projects that awaited funding.
In 2000, the West Glendover Stormwater Improvement Project was added to the city’s official list of stormwater projects. By policy, projects have to wait on the list for two years before being started. This time lapses anyway because of lack of funding, because there are usually about 100 projects on the list.
In early 2005, the West Glendover Stormwater Improvement Project was funded by the LFUCG Council. Gregory Lubeck, a LFUCG engineer since 2002, was assigned to manage the project. Among his first actions was to issue a Request for Qualifications for design work from private engineering firms.
One possible way to accomplish the goal would have been installing larger storm sewer pipes to channel the water toward a main collection pipe. This approach would have meant tearing up the streets of existing neighborhoods, causing traffic problems and inciting complaints from residents.
Another possible action was for the city to buy the flooded homes and demolish them, creating open spaces. At least 10 homes were involved, each worth about $200,000, so the cost of paying the homeowners alone meant that this approach would be too expensive.
Lubeck felt that the logical approach was also the most cost-effective: Slow the flow of water by taking advantage of the nearby arboretum’s location and natural features.
The arboretum is situated on land owned by the University of Kentucky (UK). The area was once the working farm for faculty and students in UK’s College of Agriculture. Now it is the largest open space within the city limits and contains two watersheds. The arboretum, which occupies over 100 acres of the land, is funded jointly by UK and the LFUCG.
Stormwater naturally flows from northeast to southwest as it moves along the arboretum’s rolling hills. Backyards of residents on Glendover Road end along the south to southwest border of the arboretum. Glendover Road slopes downhill, increasing stormwater flow for residents at the lower, western end of the street.
But while the solution seemed logical, the hardest part of the project “was getting everybody to agree that this was the solution, getting consensus,” Lubeck says. The major reason for the project’s success was “establishing the comfort level with the arboretum folks that this would work in with their master plan, that it wasn’t just a hole for water, that it would have an artistic look,” he adds.
Lubeck did his best to warn the engineering firms wanting the design contract that the project was complex because it had “a lot of stakeholders with different interests to protect.” He also told them that a minimum number of meetings with arboretum staff members and other people involved would be required.
Establishing a stormwater project on or near the arboretum had been discussed for several years. A few years earlier, Gorton; Lubeck; Marcia Farris, the director of the arboretum; James Lempke, curator of native plants; Warren Denney, University of Kentucky architect; and some other UK officials “all got together and walked the area,” Farris says. They agreed that locating the stormwater project there was a good possibility.
 |
Photo: LFUCG |
| Construction of a shallow detention basin on the southwest side of the arboretum. Houses on Glendover Road border the area. |
Farris presented the proposed project to the arboretum’s board of directors. Six members are from the Lexington-Fayette Urban County Government, and six are from the University of Kentucky. The board supported her recommendation for the project.
With all parties involved tentatively in favor, the project shifted from being a possible alternative to the traditional concrete channels system for stormwater management to being a future reality, if all details could be worked out satisfactorily.
Farris and Lempke “were in on the project from conception. Jim [Lempke] and I even sat in as the design firms were interviewed,” Farris says.
PB Americas of Lexington was awarded the $58,000 design contract in April 2005. PB’s supervising engineer for the project, Douglas Mynear, and its landscape architect, Molly Davis, soon realized, as Mynear explains, that “issues that were important to one particular group were not viewed as important to one or more of the other groups.”
Residents with flooded basements wanted to know only when the problem would be fixed. Adjacent residents whose homes were not flooded didn’t care what was done, as long as relieving the flooding of their neighbors didn’t cause flooding at their homes.
The arboretum staff, board, and friends group members were concerned about damage to plants and that the stormwater project would fit into the arboretum’s master plan.
Mynear and Davis spent a lot of time answering questions at public meetings. From 2005 into 2006, they reworked their designs in response to concerns raised by residents, city government officials, UK officials, and arboretum staff members. Their final design was approved in the fall of 2006. Free Construction Co. of Lexington won the bid to construct the project, starting in January 2007.
The project “needed to be a positive for the neighbors and a positive for the arboretum, as far as our master plan,” Farris explains. “Jim [Lempke] spent lots of his time working with Molly Davis and Doug Mynear of PB.”
A major concern of Farris and Lempke was the damage the heavy machines required for construction could cause. Their weight—and that of the workers’ parked trucks—would compact the soil, which is anathema to anyone involved in horticulture.
Should a great deal of the arboretum’s ground become compacted during construction of the project, the arboretum’s staff would have to do extensive recultivating if plants were to grow and thrive there afterward. The arboretum depends on volunteers for much of its groundskeeping labor, so restoring major damage could take longer than a season.
Rubber treads on the machinery used limited the damage done. “They were better than what some companies would have used,” Farris comments, adding that “the city agreed to write that [requirement] into the bidding process.”
There were some compromises along the way, Farris notes. A major one was that Free Construction Co.’s workers parked their trucks in only one small area, rather than all around the perimeter of the construction site or at whatever spot was most convenient to that day’s work. The contract stipulated that only one truck run to ferry workers in was permitted each morning, plus one return trip at the end of the workday.
That restriction meant that the workers often had to walk farther than usual whenever they entered or left their work areas. Machinery was driven into location, as needed, and left there, locked after work hours, until work at that particular location was completed.
The construction company repaired the damage to the existing walkway by blacktopping back to the driveway it had used for access to the site. “This work meant that we didn’t end up with problems afterward,” Farris says.
Perhaps the biggest compromise the city and the construction company made was to do the work on the arboretum’s calendar, not the company’s. “We wanted them to start in winter to inconvenience our visitors as little as possible,” explains Farris. Working on the project from January through April also kept the construction from interfering with the work of the arboretum staff during peak growing season.
Besides the restrictions described above, Farris credits frequent communication among all parties involved for the project’s successful completion. Once construction began, she, Lempke, and the construction company’s superintendent for the project and other employees met at least once a week. “They gave me their cell phone numbers so I could reach them quickly,” she adds.
Lempke spends most of his working hours outdoors, so little that happens at the arboretum escapes his notice. One morning after a heavy rain, he saw the construction machines moving. Knowing that the soggy soil would be compacted even more than usual, he told Farris of the situation.
The arboretum’s director immediately called the construction superintendent (who was offsite), protesting that it was too wet for grading. When he said that he thought it was all right to go ahead with the work, Farris asked him to check for himself. He did and called her back to say, “You’re right.” The grading was postponed until the soil could dry out.
For Farris, the most difficult part of the project was “to watch the land being torn up.” She and her staff also had to deal with complaints from regular visitors who were denied access to their usual walking and jogging routes.
Some visitors ignored signs posting detours and went through fenced off areas. The most effective deterrents were messages that Administrative Assistant Dayna Baston chalked on the asphalt path. “Stop. Turn Around Now. This Means You” elicited the best compliance.
Asked what advice she would give to engineers and construction people who are working on areas where plants and land conservation are valued, Farris says, “Listen to the concerns. Our concerns were different from [the engineers’ concerns]. They were interested in water. We were interested in plants and how to work the project in with what we were already doing.”
Farris suggested that construction and technical people “be open to ways to work through problems. Nonprofits are used to making compromises because they often don’t have as much money as they need. That [a satisfactory compromise] can happen, but you have to listen to the concerns of everyone.”
Overall, Farris termed the project “a good addition to our exhibition. I hope it becomes a model to do this instead of a big concrete basin. Plants can make a big difference in the way we control stormwater.”
Lempke, the arboretum’s curator of native plants and natural ecosystems since November 2002, found that the project’s “disruption was hard for me to accept.”
Lempke had not only chosen the plants that were growing in the arboretum but also had planted many of them himself. He and his staff and volunteers had worked hard to repair the damage to many of the arboretum’s trees that happened during Lexington’s major (“once in a hundred years”) ice storm of February 2003.
Constructing the stormwater project where plants were already growing meant losing some of those plants. “They removed eight or 10 trees that were well established,” Lempke recalls. “Some willow oaks, a rare water locust, a bald cypress.”
To save as many plants as possible, he says, “We had to move maybe 100 shrubs, small trees, grasses and canes, and wildflowers. The majority of them have survived and been replanted.”
With the construction imminent, Lempke and his workers dug up the plants and then took them to Drop Seed, a nursery near Louisville that specializes in native Kentucky plants. There they were replanted, with the hope that they would stay healthy, until they could be transplanted back at the arboretum when the construction was finished.
The arboretum’s Walk Across Kentucky exhibit features plants that are native to each distinctive geological region of the state. Plant specimens are collected from their respective regions or purchased from Drop Seed and then transplanted into separate sections of the exhibit. Each section of the exhibit begins with a cluster of attractive native plants growing around the large gateway sign.
The Mississippi Embayment section of the exhibit is the site of the West Glendover Stormwater Project. Here, visitors see plants native to the far western part of Kentucky. Many swamps and wetlands are found in this section of the state, which leads to the Mississippi River. Here Lempke and his workers have planted such wildflowers as wild hibiscus, dayflower, aquatic milkweed, sweet coneflower, black-eyed Susan, cardinal flower, and partridge pea.
Shrubs and vines in the Mississippi Embayment include eastern swamp privet, wild honeysuckle, buttonbush, and wild plum. Native trees include persimmon, swamp honey locust, bald cypress, water elm, water hickory, green ash, and several species of oak (basket, swamp white, shingle, cherry bark, and pin).
Describing his work on the Mississippi Embayment, Lempke says, “One of my challenges is not just to curate an exhibit of interesting plants or ecosystems but to have a wetland system that is functioning, that uses water.”
He cites eastern gamma grass as one example of the effective plants in the arboretum’s wetland. “It’s good at breaking through compacted soil because it produces an incredible amount of organic material—leaves, root system. Gamma grass is a very good biofilter.”
Wetlands, he cautions, “are complex and take a long time to develop. It would be arrogant to claim that you could just magically create a functioning wetland.”
Because every wetland contains ranges of moisture level, plants growing in some parts will not grow in other parts of the same wetland. Within the Mississippi Embayment, “We tried to simulate four different zones,” Lempke explains. The four planting zones are wet with occasional standing water expected, wet to mesic (moderately moist) transition, mesic, and upland dry.
Besides selecting plants that would thrive within each specific zone, Lempke also chose plants that would tolerate the impact of people and a variety of different conditions. Plants that are rare or those with a high index of conservation were not included.
When the construction for the stormwater project was finished, the soil where machines and trucks had been was “as hard as a parking lot,” Lempke says. He and Farris were concerned that there would be erosion if a lot of rain fell, because the plants were not yet reestablished. Fortunately, the end of construction coincided with the beginning of a very dry summer. That seasonal aberration, plus the coconut-fiber (coir) mats put down by the contractor, slowed soil erosion until the plants began to grow.
Now that the shrub layer and the tree layer are established, Lempke’s goal is to have no erosion at the site. As sedges, rushes, and grasses begin to cover the bare patches of ground, their roots will stabilize the soil. Eventually they will form a dense ground cover, along with the wildflowers.
He looks forward to the summer of 2008, when, with a full year of growth behind them, “Masses of wildflowers, [producing] a real ‘wow’ factor,” should bloom throughout the Mississippi Embayment.
Even in the first summer after completion of the project, Lempke has noticed that the swamp milkweed has drawn more butterflies, including swallowtails and skippers, to the area. “You can see and hear more bird life over here than anywhere else in the arboretum,” he adds.
The idea that “wetlands are swamps, ugly mosquito-filled undesirable places, is a common misconception,” Lempke says. He hopes that this part of the arboretum “will show that wetlands are essential to cities, farms, nature. They have the ability to provide diverse life forms.”
Bringing people into the environment and demonstrating that it is uniquely functional and beautiful, and that it’s cared for, was planned for as part of the design. A major component of that design is the 280-linear-foot boardwalk, or footbridge, that replaced a section of the arboretum’s regular asphalt path.
Made of recycled plastic that looks like wooden boards, the 6-foot-wide footbridge allows walkers and joggers to travel through the section without getting their shoes damp or trampling on plants or soil. Visitors can pause at any point to look a few feet down to the plants and ecosystem below.
Steps lead down to the area, but they are temporarily blocked, because the newly situated plants “are in intensive care,” Lempke says. Next year he will permit visitors to go down the steps and walk on a path within the wetland area itself.
Lempke, who has more than enough to do at the arboretum, would probably never have wished to become involved with a stormwater project. However, he sees both the need for such a project and the diverse interests of the parties involved. “I don’t know how we bring together the contractor and the biologist. No matter how good their intentions are, [there are conflicts]. Our technology only takes us so far, and there is much demand for speed and efficiency. But Mother Nature has other requirements. We have to find ways for new technology to manipulate the land but not destroy the ability of the land to respond and heal. Given half a chance, Mother Nature will heal.”
Mynear agrees with Lubeck that the most challenging aspect was to devise a concept that was acceptable to all of the parties involved. He thought that the most interesting part was “looking at more environment-friendly alternatives for reducing runoff discharge from the site.”
The final concept includes plantings of native species, a boardwalk, and a series of three water-storage features that are intended to detain stormwater flows up to the 25-year, 24-hour event. (That measurement is approximately 2 acre-feet or 5.1 inches of rainfall within 24 hours.)
Two berms with rock spillway outcroppings were created to slow stormwater and function as shallow detention basins. Water that continues to flow will reach the largest water-storage feature, a permanent pool approximately 2 feet deep located on the south to southwest side—the lowest point—of the area.
Areas of native plants upslope of the three basins intercept sheet runoff and increase infiltration and evapotranspiration rates by virtue of their deep root systems. They reduce the overall amount of runoff reaching the basins.
The native plants chosen by Lempke for the project fit into the arboretum’s master plan. As part of the contract, the city government paid for the purchase, planting, and care of the plants, which was all done under Lempke’s supervision. While the city government has an urban forester, arborists, and landscape employees, everyone involved felt that Lempke was best suited for this responsibility. The cost was approximately $139,000.
Construction cost was approximately $470,000. This figure included payment for approximately 1,800 cubic yards of excavation, 280 linear feet of recycled plastic boardwalk, 1,500 linear feet of 2-inch waterline, and 88 tons of gray bluegrass region limestone bulk rock.
The West Glendover Stormwater Improvement Project meets the EPA’s stormwater guidelines for public education. As schoolchildren, recreational and fitness walkers, and other people tour the area, they learn about the problem of stormwater and an effective and aesthetic way to manage it. In its cost range division, the project won a Best of the Year 2007 award from the Kentucky chapter of the American Public Works Association.