Vancouver adopts tougher stormwater rules

For decades, rainwater was something you wanted to channel away from your land to prevent a muddy mess.

"You needed to find a ditch or a creek or a river to put it in," Vancouver Councilwoman Jeanne Stewart said Monday night. "That’s how you did it. Now, as the expression goes, the chickens are coming home to roost in terms of degraded water quality."

The city council, with the backing of business and environmental interests, late Monday unanimously approved tougher controls that will require some developers to spend more to prevent stormwater from cascading off future projects.

Runoff carries dirt, oils, fertilizers and other contaminants into urban waterways, all harmful to fish and other aquatic life. A major downpour can create a torrent that scours stream beds and destabilizes banks, sweeping away spawning gravel and removing vegetation that helps keep water cold for fish.

According to the Washington State Department of Ecology, polluted runoff is "the state’s biggest urban water quality threat."

The city’s approach almost certainly would pass muster with state regulators. Greg Winters, the Ecology Department’s municipal stormwater permit manager in Vancouver, said Tuesday that although there is no formal review process in place yet, "I would have no problem approving their ordinances."

For Vancouver, it has been an arduous process to find a balance between protecting the environment, complying with federal and state law, and not handcuffing business during a bad economy.

Those stressing the importance of safeguarding the environment far outnumbered other points of view Monday night.

Joyce Namba told the city council that, according to an Ecology Department report, stormwater carries 6.3 million to 8 million gallons of petroleum into Puget Sound every year, roughly half the volume of oil the Exxon Valdez spilled in 1989.

"We are in a similar situation," she said. "Stormwater is pouring off city streets, rushing through our drainage system and into our water bodies."

Leslie Zega urged the city to comply with state requirements and adopt tougher controls.

"It’s very simple," she said. "Just follow the rules."

Those rules will require newly developed parcels to drain as efficiently as they did before European settlement, when most of the city was covered by forests and prairies.

City estimates indicate about 20 percent of development projects will be affected by this flow control standard. The rest have soils that allow runoff to filter into the ground or can receive an exemption because they drain into a large water body, such as the Columbia River.

The new rules could require some builders to construct larger stormwater ponds or use pervious concrete and other low-impact development techniques to control runoff.

Vancouver still has work to do, namely coming up with "general requirements" that will provide technical guidance. The city envisions a "living" document, with ongoing review by local engineers, that can be administratively updated (without city council approval). The idea is to have flexibility to nimbly incorporate new techniques as they are developed.

It’s also a process that could lead to disputes over how the city will enforce and interpret stormwater requirements.

Or, as Ron Frederiksen, owner of RSV Construction Services, put it Monday, "The devil is in the details."

In early March, Frederiksen stood before the city council and testified that adopting tougher stormwater regulations would be "a disaster of unmitigated proportions." After the council balked at moving ahead, the city assembled a "stakeholder" group of engineers and others to sort through different issues.

Brian Carlson, Vancouver public works director, said that no drastic changes occurred during that three-month process.

"Through the stakeholder process, we provided a lot of clarification," Carlson said. "The engineering community was able to hear directly from staff on how we would approach things, how we would interpret things, that we do have flexibility in our approaches."

Mike Bomar, public affairs director of the Building Industry Association of Clark County, was the only development representative at Monday night’s meeting who did not advocate approving the stormwater regulations.

Bomar objected to the pre-European settlement standard for flow control on new projects. He applauded Clark County government for refusing to adopt that standard and for seeking ways to share costs between developers of new projects and the public.

County Commissioner Steve Stuart said the Ecology Department’s approach, which Vancouver embraced, will not restore watersheds.

"Taxpayers shouldn’t have to pay for new development," Stuart told the city council. "Developers shouldn’t have to pay for old development. That might not be popular, but it’s fair."

So far, the county has yet to comply with Ecology requirements for flow control. Stuart said the county is working with state officials to win approval for its alternative approach.

Carlson said the stormwater rules address only new development, not what was built years ago.

"The new standard isn’t addressing the sins of the past," he said. "The new standard is asking new development to be responsible for their own runoff."

Jeffrey Mize: 360-735-4542 or jeff.mize@columbian.com.