Stormwater continues to be a major source of pollution to the Great Bay estuary. When it rains, runoff carries a wide range of pollutants – from dog waste and lawn fertilizers, to gasoline and oil, to heavy metals, nutrients and sediments – that flow into our waters with little or no treatment.

To combat this pollution, the UNH Stormwater Center and other local groups are working with Seacoast communities to implement projects at a neighborhood level to reduce the flow of untreated stormwater reaching the estuary. While many of these projects are small in scope, they demonstrate the value of dealing with stormwater close to home. One of the most interesting approaches is based on a program that was developed in Maine.

In 2009, the Kennebunkport Conservation Commission, in partnership with the University of New England, the Maine Lobstermen’s Association and others, developed the Lawns for Lobsters program. The program’s goal is to educate homeowners on steps they can take to ensure a healthy lawn with minimal impact on the environment. The program was also recently renamed Lawns to Lobsters, giving greater emphasis on the flow of water from our lawns to the ocean.

Other communities are now adopting the program, including one in New Hampshire. New Castle, the only town in the state composed entirely of islands, covers approximately 500 acres and sits at the mouth of the Piscataqua River. With a residential population of slightly more than 1,000, the town’s Conservation Commission is committed to reducing the impacts from non-point sources of pollution and launched the Lawns to Lobsters program last summer.

Residents who want to participate in the program take a pledge to use sound stewardship principles in managing their own property. This includes testing the soil before using a fertilizer, applying the correct amount, and not applying fertilizer if rain is predicted in the next 48 hours. Other measures include keeping the grass at least three inches in length (tall grass needs less water), planting clover as a fertilizer substitute, properly disposing of dog waste, and using herbicides and insecticides sparingly. Homeowners also are asked to consider replacing all or part of their lawn with native plants.

Long term, the town wants to encourage citizens to install rain gardens and vegetative buffers as a way to prevent polluted runoff. In a compact community such as New Castle, all of these steps can add up and help to protect our waterways. You can read more about the New Castle Conservation Commission’s efforts to protect the Great Bay estuary here.

In partnership with the Great Bay Stewards and the NH Department of Environmental Services, we plan to launch a similar program for homeowners next spring. The program will be based on the Department’s Homeowner’s Guide to Stormwater Management. Stay tuned for more information!  In the meantime, there are lots of resources available to homeowners on how to install a rain garden. The University of NH Cooperative Extension Services offer an excellent guide called Landscaping at the Water’s Edge.

As Waterkeeper, I find it encouraging that New Castle is addressing the serious issue of stormwater pollution. We all need to work together to solve the problem. By becoming responsible homeowners, New Castle residents are taking an important first step.

For more information about the Great Bay-Piscataqua Waterkeeper and my work to protect the Great Bay estuary, visit: http://www.clf.org/great-bay-waterkeeper/. You can also follow me on Facebook and Twitter.

We didn’t always have a love affair with our lawns. Until the late 18th century, most rural homeowners had a patch of packed dirt outside the front door or a small garden that contained a mix of flowers, herbs and vegetables. Up until then, lawns were not practical and were seen strictly as a luxury for wealthy landowners who could afford grounds keepers to maintain the grass with hand tools.

That all changed with the invention of the rotary mower and garden hose. Since then, green, weed-free lawns are common today and millions of Americans spend billions of dollars on landscaping companies to cut and maintain their grass. According to a 2000 Gallup survey, over 26 million US households hired a professional landscaping company. That little patch of green has become a big business.

Unfortunately, when homeowners over-fertilize or apply fertilizers incorrectly they are contributing to the nutrients pollution problem facing so many of our waters. The Great Bay estuary is no exception. The total nitrogen load to the estuary has increased significantly in recent years leading to declines in water quality, as evidenced by significant losses of the estuary’s cornerstone habitat – eelgrass. Preventing nitrogen pollution from lawn care is one of the steps needed to restore water quality and the health of the estuary.

Personally, I have never understood the allure of a green lawn. I don’t want to spend my weekends cutting grass or hire someone to do this work. However, if you prefer having a lawn it is important to make it as environmentally friendly as possible. First, consider downsizing your lawn by planting native shrubs and flowers. Most of my yard is a wild field or landscaped with native plants which provides excellent wildlife habitat. My family enjoys watching all the birds that are attracted to the diversity of plants living here.

Many people choose to have low-maintenance lawns which require no fertilizer. This is a great way to have an environmentally friendly lawn that does not impact water quality. For those who choose to use fertilizer, I encourage you to get your soil tested at the NH Cooperative Extension to learn what fertilizer best meets your needs and how best to apply it.

If fertilizer is required, the best strategy is to use an organic (not synthetic), slow-release nitrogen fertilizer. On the back of the bag, slow-release nitrogen is listed as “water insoluble nitrogen.” By using a slow-release type fertilizer, fewer applications are needed and some experts suggest only fertilizing once a year in the fall. Always remember to carefully follow the directions, as applying any kind of fertilizer can have an adverse impact on water quality. You should only use fertilizer with a content of at least 50% water insoluble nitrogen to protect against adding excess nitrogen to the groundwater that could eventually flow into the estuary.

Other tips for maintaining a healthy lawn with less environmental impact include:

Mow High – Taller grass has deeper, healthier roots; 3 inches or higher is recommended;

Leave Grass Clippings Behind – Grass clippings are a free source of nutrients;

Aerate Your Soil – Aeration allows water, air and nutrients to reach the soil more easily;

Fescue Seeds – Use seed mixtures with a high percentage of fescue grasses, which require less watering and mowing.

More free tips on low input lawn care are available from the UNH Cooperative Extension. The Extension also offers an excellent publication called Landscaping At the Water’s Edge, which provides excellent advice on how to create a natural buffer between your lawn and a waterway.

For more information about the Great Bay-Piscataqua Waterkeeper and my work to protect the Great Bay estuary, visit: http://www.clf.org/great-bay-waterkeeper/. You can also follow me on Facebook and Twitter.

When people think of Sugarbush Resort, they envision scenes like the one pictured below: high mountain peaks blanketed with pristine snow beckoning skiers to swoosh down the slopes.  Of course when springtime comes that snow melts, feeding small streams that flow first into the iconic Mad River and eventually to Lake Champlain.  These high mountain streams are incredibly important yet sensitive and vulnerable links in the clean water chain.

A skier rests on a sunny day at Sugarbush. Photo by pinneyshaun @ Flickr Creative Commons

Rice Brook is one of the streams that flows through the heart of the resort area.  Over the years, runoff polluted with sediment from gravel roads, driveways, and parking lots degraded water quality and habitat conditions in the stream. By 1996, the Brook no longer supported a healthy community of aquatic wildlife, leading state officials and EPA to “list” the Brook as “impaired.”

Sadly, it was a story unfolding around build-out at other ski areas across the state and in areas around lower elevation streams where forest and farmland was being converted into stripmalls and other pavement-heavy uses.  By the early-2000′s, sixteen other Vermont streams were also officially listed as impaired due to runoff pollution, a.k.a. “stormwater,” with many more placed at risk of impairment.

During this time, Conservation Law Foundation and other partners began an 0ngoing advocacy campaign pressuring regulators to enforce requirements in clean water laws designed to ensure that developers of properties that contributed polluted runoff to streams were doing their part for cleanup.

Sugarbush got ahead of the curve in accepting responsibility and committing the resources necessary to do its part for clean water moving forward.  Sugarbush partnered with the environmental consulting firm of Vanasse Hangen Brustlin, Inc. (VHB) to tackle the problem.

Through implementation of a time-bound, state-approved “Water Quality Remediation Plan,” the Sugarbush team restored clean water and healthy aquatic communities to Rice Brook, creating a template for action that can be copied by others responsible for restoring degraded streams around the state and the region. Sugarbush and VHB:

• Identified the specific sources of the problem
• Established cleanup targets by studying conditions in healthy streams similar to Rice Brook
• Designed and implemented “best management practices” and structures to restore the landscape’s natural flood storage and pollutant-removal capacity
• Educated resort employees and contractors about streambank restoration, erosion prevention, and other water quality practices
• Monitored water quality and aquatic organisms to track progress
• Committed resources to ongoing operation and maintenance of runoff control and treatment structures

In recognition of the results, EPA approved the removal of Rice Brook from the list of impaired waters and Governor Peter Shumlin bestowed Sugarbush and VHB with a 2012 Environmental Excellence Award.

Too often, critics complain that it is either too expensive or too difficult to restore clean water to degraded rivers and streams. In their application for the Environmental Excellence Award, Sugarbush and VHB answered those critics, pointing out the multiple economic benefits to the tourist-based economy from their successful cleanup effort, including:

• water supply protection
• access to recreation such as swimming and fishing
• aesthetic enjoyment of clean waters by resort guests and others
• ecological sustainability
• greater certainty in future permitting processes based on proven approaches to mitigate development runoff impacts

Congratulations to Sugarbush and VHB for showing Vermont how sweet clean water success can be.

Until the last week or so, it’s been a dry spring here in Maine and so most of us have welcomed the recent spate of rain. But as I rode past the Back Cove and the East End Wastewater treatment plant in Portland this morning, it was hard not to think about the downside of all this rain–the runoff from streets, rooftops and other hard surfaces that overwhelms our sewer system and treatment facilities and washes untreated right into Back Cove and Casco Bay, carrying pollutants like oil, metals, waste and other accumulated debris along with it. It’s no surprise that these concerns might occur to me, given CLF’s long-standing involvement in tackling this issue, but it doesn’t take an advocate to see the need for action. For Chris Aceto, CLF’s landlord here at 47 Portland Street in Portland’s Bayside neighborhood, a recent article by Seth Koenig of the Bangor Daily News brought back some not so great memories of a dirtier Casco Bay and was a reminder that we still have a lot of work to do:

“I am 46. My mother used to take me to the East End Beach when I was 6 which would have been 1972. I can remember it so clearly because although I was 6, I thought, “This is not a beach!!” You could SEE the raw sewage like some kind of movie footage!  I think she wanted me to see the “beach” she went to when she was a little girl. My brother was the first lifeguard hired when that beach was opened up for swimming. It may have been 1979 or so. My cousins used to have a place at Peaks Island and NO ONE wanted to go there because the Ferry used to pull in to the docks on Commercial Street and you could not “see” water – it was brown, gross, stinky filth floating on top of the water.

Once the city showed some initiative to clean the water and build its first treatment plant, economically, Portland started to turn around. I am sure I am preaching here to the choir, but that article just brought back a ton of memories.” — Chris Aceto

Thanks to Chris for recounting that story that reminds us all about how important our continued vigilance is on finding short-term and long-term solutions to the problem of polluted runoff fouling our waterways, not just here in Portland, but around Maine and the country.

The City of Portland has made good progress in the past few years, but there remains a good deal of work to do.  CLF will continue to push for a solution that will allow us to stop sending untreated pollution and sewage to Casco Bay.

On April 14 U.S. District Court Judge William G. Young issued a final judgment in CLF’s favor in our suit against the MassHighway Department, bringing to a close nearly five years of litigation to push the department to manage stormwater runoff from state roads that was polluting nearby waterbodies. The court found that MassDOT (which now includes MassHighway) is finally, sufficiently carrying out its obligations. As a result of CLF’s suit, MassHighway has now built new stormwater treatment measures at the three sites that were contributing to discharges that cause on occasion instream exceedance of water quality standards. In addition, it submitted a revised Storm Water Management Plan that addressed the numerous deficiencies in the original plan which the court approved. The court noted, however, that MassHighway has more work to do. MassHighway has committed to assess its storwmater impacts on over 600 locations over a five-year schedule and to install new treatment if necessary.  MassHighway will have to submit two more reports to the Court detailing its activities throughout 2011.

When CLF filed suit in 2006, MassHighway had not even obtained permit coverage for its stormwater from EPA as required under the Clean Water Act. Two years later, in 2008, Mass Highway had done nothing to comply with the federal court order to clean up three sites in Milford, Franklin and Lancaster, Massachusetts, and had not revised its statewide cleanup plan for degraded waters.  CLF took MassHighway back to court, and at a hearing in May, 2010, Judge Young called MassHighway to the mat for non-compliance with federal law and issued an order to begin the cleanup immediately. (For a more detailed history of the case click here.)

At long last, the Judge issued a final judgment in CLF’s favor. This lawsuit sets a precedent for how stormwater is managed, on MassHighway’s remaining 2,500 miles of roadways in Massachusetts and the 600+ locations throughout the state where stormwater is being dumped into degraded rivers, lakes, and streams. The true measure of our success, however, is cleaner water. One important thing to note is that Judge Young, in the court’s final judgment, explicitly said this does not preclude suits for future violations so you can be sure CLF will be closely monitoring MassHighway for years to come. Until next time…

In an effort to clean up the Charles River—and as the result of years of CLF advocacy—residents in Bellingham, Franklin, and Milford, MA may soon be obligated to comply with a proposed EPA mandate to reduce phosphorus runoff by 65 percent. As with most important initiatives to restore our environment, implementing this program will cost money, and there are constituencies opposed.  This Milford Daily News article chronicles some of the factors at stake and how residents have reacted to the news.

What’s most exciting about the public dialogue is to see that the discussions have advanced to real thinking about HOW to finance cleanups through stormwater utilities and other fee structures for reducing polluted runoff.  In Massachusetts, polluted runoff is the number one cause of water pollution.  Conversations about how to secure dedicated funding to solve the problem have generally only happened in a few communities under enforcement orders. They had to sort out issues of what’s fair, what’s practical, and what’s most palatable to residents in order to finance the fixes.  Now we’re seeing similar discussions in more communities where new stormwater regulations are proposed. These communities can serve as a model of forward-thinking investment in the clean waters that are critical to a thriving New England.

Learn more about CLF’s work to restore and protect New England’s waterways.