Kansas City Plans ’10,000 Rain Gardens’ in Effort to Ditch Storm Runoff

By Karen Dillon, The Kansas City Star, Mo.

Nov. 9–Kansas City launched a program Tuesday to help prevent flooding in the metropolitan area.

The goal of the program, dubbed “10,000 Rain Gardens,” is to put rain gardens in every neighborhood and, it is hoped, every yard.

A rain garden, which one expert described as a “glorified ditch,” slows the flow of storm water to prevent erosion and gives it time to absorb into the ground. That helps stop water, often polluted by fertilizer from lawns and other chemicals, from draining into streams.

Experts believe the program — which the city hasn’t been able to put a price tag on — would be the most far-reaching of its kind in the country.

On Tuesday, Mayor Kay Barnes, Johnson County Chairwoman Annabeth Surbaugh, Jackson County Executive Kathryn Shields and about 100 other government officials, environmentalists and neighborhood leaders gathered at the Anita B. Gorman Conservation Discovery Center to kick off the program.

“Storm water knows no political boundaries,” said Barnes, who plans to build her own rain garden next spring. “We want to encourage citizens to connect to this issue while disconnecting their downspouts from the sewers and running them into rain gardens.”

Kansas City has taken the lead on the program, but other governments, such as Jackson and Johnson counties and municipalities, will support the initiative.

Barnes said that beginning in January for five weeks, the city will have a large marketing campaign on television and radio and inserts in newspapers to describe rain gardens and their benefits.

City officials said this week they don’t know how much the marketing campaign will cost or how much will be spent constructing several hundred demonstration gardens.

They also could not say how much the city has spent on a 74-page plan, a private public relations firm or a survey that found a large majority of people don’t understand the term watershed, the flow of storm water over land into tributaries and streams.

“We have not determined an exact amount yet,” said Colleen Newman, a spokeswoman for the Kansas City Water Services Department, whose department is responsible for a portion of the funding.

This is not the first time Kansas City has tried to embrace progressive environmental movements. However, historically the results have lagged behind the promises.

Last year the City Council passed a resolution that would require all new buildings to be constructed using a state-of-the-art green standard featuring natural lighting and heating and rooftop gardens. But within months, a police buildings construction project passed on building green since it wasn’t required by law.

In response, the City Council passed an ordinance requiring new buildings to be built to that standard, one of the first cities in the country to do so.

Then the council promptly exempted the $250 million Sprint Center, one of the largest construction projects the city has had in years.

And with the city’s KC Live construction project, officials used a loophole in state law to avoid obtaining a storm water runoff permit. That permit requires a developer to take strict preventive measures against storm water runoff.

Still, the 10,000 Rain Gardens program has a lot of support, said spokeswoman Lynn Hinkle.

“I think there is real commitment,” Hinkle said.

Over three years, the city’s plans call for 3,200 municipal rain gardens to be built, 1,600 gardens at nonprofit agencies, churches and community centers and 50 at corporations. Each school will have one. About 3,500 will be built by individuals. The plans also include several other sites.

The city plans to give away 3,500 garden kits that include individual plants valued at about $7 each and 45,000 brochures.

The city hopes to use Brookside as a case study for managing storm water. Flow meters have been placed in Brookside.

Individuals will be asked to register their rain gardens, and a possible incentive may be a reduction in their storm water fee. Homeowners are responsible for paying for their own gardens.

A rain garden can be cheap if you do it yourself, experts say. It’s a matter of time and plants. But if you don’t have a green thumb, it can be expensive.

Bringing in a professional landscaper to build a 20- by 20-foot garden could cost $800 to $2,000, depending on the size of the plants, said Rusty Schmidt, a landscape ecologist from Minneapolis.

In areas where there are renters or low-income housing, a community rain garden could be built and renters could take turns caring for it, Hinkle said.

Schmidt said he has designed them to be manicured and fit in grandmother’s front yard and to be “a wild and wooly prairie.”

“You can design them for butterflies and for shrubs, high maintenance or low maintenance,” Schmidt said. “Your imagination is the limit.”

But what about those people who have trouble even getting the yard mowed?

Newman noted that once the garden is built, “it’s less lawn to water, less lawn to mow, and over time it saves money.”

Newman and others plan to visit schools to teach children the concept of rain gardening.

“When I was a kid, nobody recycled,” Newman said. “But everybody does it now. We understand it takes time.”

—–

To see more of The Kansas City Star, or to subscribe to the newspaper, go to http://www.kansascity.com.

Copyright (c) 2005, The Kansas City Star, Mo.

Distributed by Knight Ridder/Tribune Business News.

For information on republishing this content, contact us at (800) 661-2511 (U.S.), (213) 237-4914 (worldwide), fax (213) 237-6515, or e-mail reprints@krtinfo.com.