A debate currently going on in Albemarle County, Virginia, highlights the conflicts that often
occur between environmental stewardship and development, as well as the struggle
to implement stormwater credits that work as they were intended. What’s
happening there has implications for other areas that have been trying to
control new development in the same way.
The county has long been trying to limit new development to designated
growth areas, thus reducing the amount of sprawling, low-density development.
This is a smart-growth principle and, among other advantages, can lead to a
reduction in overall stormwater runoff. (See an article by
Randel Lemoine from our October 2007 issue about a study in Grand Rapids,
Michigan, showing how high-density development, despite its higher percentage of
impervious area, can have less impact on a watershed than an equal number of
residences spread out over a larger area.)
The Virginia Department of
Conservation and Recreation, meanwhile, is trying to speed improvements in water
quality—the area lies within the Chesapeake Bay
watershed—and has proposed new stormwater management guidelines that some feel
will undermine the county’s long-term efforts. The aim of the DCR guidelines is
to reduce the number of pollutants entering waterways, and to that end they
would allow developments to use stormwater offsets—that is, to exceed
water-quality standards themselves but make up for it by purchasing offsets from
other developments in the same watershed.
In addition, a new development
could gain credit for the use of certain BMPs, such as permeable pavement and
green roofs. While these measures may, in fact, reduce the number of stormwater
pollutants, they also allow developers to meet the regulations while building
low-density, rural neighborhoods—and in most cases, it will be much cheaper to
take this route than to build higher-density urban developments.
You
can read more about the situation
in Albemarle
County here .
See Randel Lemoine’s article on high-density development here.
Read an article by Glenn Brooks—an engineer with Albemarle County—from our September 2007 issue
here.