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02-14-2017 Informational Presentation (Queensbury Planning Board Informational Presentation 02/24/2017) QUEENSBURY PLANNING BOARD MEETING INFORMATIONAL PRESENTATION FEBRUARY 14, 2017 INDEX Discussion Warren County Soil &Water Conservation 1. Lake George Association THESE ARE NOT OFFICIALLY ADOPTED MINUTES AND ARE SUBJECT TO BOARD AND STAFF REVISIONS. REVISIONS WILL APPEAR ON THE FOLLOWING MONTHS MINUTES (IF ANY) AND WILL STATE SUCH APPROVAL OF SAID MINUTES. QUEENSBURY PLANNING BOARD INFORMATIONAL PRESENTATION 1 (Queensbury Planning Board Informational Presentation 02/24/2017) FEBRUARY 14, 2017 6:00 P.M. MEMBERS PRESENT STEPHEN TRAVER, CHAIRMAN CHRIS HUNSINGER, VICE CHAIRMAN GEORGE FERONE, SECRETARY BRAD MAGOWAN JAMIE WHITE DAVID DEEB JOHN SHAFER, ALTERNATE LAND USE PLANNER-LAURA MOORE WARREN COUNTY SOIL &WATER CONSERVATION-NICK ROWELL LAKE GEORGE ASSOCIATION-RANDY RATH MRS. MOORE-The presentations are loaded if you want to start. MR. TRAVER-Okay. Welcome. MR. ROWELL-Thank you. I'm Nick Rowell with Warren County Soil and Water. I'm the Natural Resource Specialist over there, and with my boss, Jim Lieberum, we run the majority of the Queensbury MS-4 Program along with other individuals throughout the Queensbury departments, and we also run the Warren County MS-4 Program as well. So I'm kind of covering both of those. We do similar things for both of them. There's slight differences in the management plan for each of them. Queensbury's is a little bit more in-depth than the County's. So the MS-4 Program, I'm sure you guys have heard of it. I've done a similar presentation before, but there are always updates to the program. It's an EPA mandated program, but it's run by the DEC thankfully. I'd much rather work with the DEC than the EPA, but it's a stormwater management program and there's six minimum control measures and within those minimum control measures there's a list of tasks for each. I'll go over them, and the way the MS-4 Program is broken out, it's the municipal separate storm sewer system program and it's created for urbanized areas of certain sizes. So our program runs the majority of Queensbury, and as of two years ago it now runs up Route 9 and it has encompassed the Village of Lake George and part of the Town of Lake George as well, and then within that all Warren County roads encompass that as well. So stormwater, why is a concern? Stormwater is one of the biggest pollutants in any developed watershed, and when it comes to stormwater runoff, the pie chart right there is an estimate of the breakdown of like construction site runoff, agricultural runoff on-site would be in septics and residentials and other would be natural depositions, stream erosion, similar. MR. TRAVER-Now as you know one of our main areas of concern is Lake George, and I'm assuming, looking at this pie chart, that in our area most of the time around the Lake George basin we're looking at what would be considered agricultural runoff, with lawns going down the lake and that type of thing? MR. ROWELL-That would kind of be on-site residential, then with any development construction would be involved in that, and then just roads in general and just impervious surface in general. So a good way to define stormwater is any sort of precipitation that is not infiltrated into the ground, and you would get that in an undeveloped watershed as well. So what we're really trying to control is the pollutants from impervious surfaces, roads and everything that goes along with that, the deicing materials along with other municipal operations. So this kind of shows a breakdown between undeveloped conditions and developed conditions, and the two things to really note would be the runoff percent, in an undeveloped watershed first runoff in a developed watershed, and with the developed watershed, like I said, you get a lot more impervious surface. You get a lot more runoff, but then also another thing to look at is the groundwater recharge. So when the water is not infiltrating into the ground it runs off to the stream and goes downstream much quicker, causing issues with streams and deltas and everything that's gone along with that. So this is a map of the Queensbury area. The red is the urbanized area of the MS-4 boundary, and you can see where it goes up Route 9 towards Lake George, and this area expanded two years ago, but the way our office in Queensbury kind of treats the MS-4 Program, we do the entire Town boundary, but when it comes to certain things like outfalls and water sampling, we really keep it within the MS-4 boundary, but we mapped all the stormwater conveyance through the whole Town. So these are the six minimum control measures. I'll briefly describe each one of them and kind of some tasks that we are currently working on and 2 (Queensbury Planning Board Informational Presentation 02/24/2017) they have to work on them every year to fit under the report, you know, public education and outreach, similar to what I'm doing now, all the way up through presentations for lake associations, public participation involvement. We do stream cleanups. We work with schools. We have an EM river table that we'll bring out. We'll describe erosion and stormwater runoff to a lot of the kids at different events, illicit discharge detection and elimination. That is mapping of outfalls, doing water sampling at outfalls, keeping up on water quality data, construction site runoff. That's inspecting sites, construction, making sure they have their best management practices in place. Post construction site runoff, making sure the permanent stormwater basins are put in place, making sure they're maintained, and then pollution prevention and good housekeeping of municipal operations. So that's working with like the Highway Department, Buildings and Grounds, you know, making sure all their operations are in order and what they can do to improve them and evaluate them. So public education. We also do four hour erosion and sediment control trainings for contractors and that's a requirement for any development over an acre, and this is a three year certification to be a daily inspector, and we do it for a lot of the Town folks and other contractors throughout the Town. So public participation. So we have volunteers. We're always looking for volunteers to help with the program. We do a lot of outfall sampling with volunteers. We do storm drain markers, only rain in the drain type things. This year, we had a really good stream clean up this year. We did Halfway Brook along Hovey Pond, and then also along Quaker Road in front of Lowe's. That's always an area we try to get. MR. TRAVER-You must have found some interesting stuff. MR. ROWELL-You really do. A lot of plastic bags, a lot of coffee cups, but, yes, actually we had, a lot of these volunteers were from Chazen. Chazen Companies came and helped us out and we had some public participants. I think Steve Lovering was in there. It was a good crew this year. We had a lot of fun. MR. HUNSINGER-So when did you do that? MR. ROWELL-We did this one, God, I want to say maybe July or August. MR. HUNSINGER-Okay. MR. ROWELL-And we usually put out a notice. We send it to the Town. We send it to kind of our folks, our water quality committees. We usually reach out to a few different businesses. We write letters. We've tried to get Lowe's a couple of years in a row to help us out, but Chazen has helped us out in years past and they helped us out this year. MR. TRAVER-And do you send that to our Planning Staff so we can put it on our Town website? MR. ROWELL-Yes, I think we do. MRS. MOORE-It is. It goes up on the Town website. MR. TRAVER-Great. MR. ROWELL-So, yes, this was a good one this year. Illicit discharge detection elimination. So what we'll do every year, we'll pick 25% of the outfalls and we'll go and collect water quality data, collect things like this, what this little cotton swab does is absorb water. We leave it in there for five minutes and then look for detergents. We'll do pH testing. We'll do ammonia testing, and then from there we'll pick some higher risk outfalls in more developed areas and we'll bring them up to the Darren Freshwater Institute and they'll run E.coli. They'll run a fecal coliform, metals and everything for us, and illicit discharge covers everything from outfalls to things like this. We were actually out doing some stormwater mapping and there was a car driving down the road leaking either gas or oil and it was just like a perfect time for a photo, but, yes, you know, illicit discharge is anything in the stormwater system that's not stormwater, and then in winter the Highway Department also does winter sampling for chlorides and conductivity, and then along with minimum control measure, three, we also do all the mapping of the stormwater conveyance in the Town and keep that up to date, and this kind of shows you the process. You've got the drop inlet. You look in there. You see where the pipes go, and then eventually to an outfall. MR. HUNSINGER-You have all of the stormwater in the Town mapped? MR. ROWELL-Yes. I mean, I never say 100%, because, you know, there's always new updates, pipes we didn't know that were there. 3 (Queensbury Planning Board Informational Presentation 02/24/2017) MR. HUNSINGER-Is that on-line or is that otherwise available for the public? MR. ROWELL-It is. George Hilton, the GIS guy, created a beautiful website for it where you can find even all the outfall data, look on the points and see where they are, see what's been sampled. George does a good job at all the information I sent him. He makes it look good. MR. SHAFER-In the wintertime when you test for salt, is there a standard above which you're concerned, below which you're not? Because there's always going to be salt. MR. ROWELL-Yes, and, you know, you certainly do find it, but what you want to look for is kind of a reduction over time. You don't want to, you know, and I usually require, with the Darren Freshwater Institute, to ask them, like, how high is this level in comparison to what you've seen from your professional opinion? We haven't seen anything too extreme. MR. SHAFER-Do you have time series data going back several years? MR. ROWELL-Yes, we've been collecting those samples for five years now I believe. MR. SHAFER-Because the articles in the paper say the salt content of Lake George is rising. MR. ROWELL-Certain ly. I mean, that's probably, that data was probably over the 30 year data that has been collected, certainly, but I think with the techniques that are coming on now like brines and the new plows, the live edge plows. So I saw one of those the other day with a Lake George truck and it worked really, really well, but also you have the fun doing GPS tracking of the trucks, to kind of get a better idea of how much it's spread you know, per lane mile, the Lake George basins, and certainly, you know, over the 30 years you are going to see an increase. This is kind of what some of the stormwater conveyance maps look like, and what's been good with doing this mapping and finding areas in the field, it's led to grants and grant projects. We currently have two stormwater grants that incorporate Queensbury projects. So a lot of good has come out of this, and then construction site runoff controls. So Bruce Frank will go out and he'll inspect the sites, he'll inspect their temporary stormwater management structures. Similar, this is like road erosion and silt fence, he'll make sure that's in place, drop inlet protection, making sure sediment isn't runoff through the site into the system, and then post construction site runoff control. So the Town's got to maintain an inventory of all the post construction stormwater management practices, and a lot of times what gets lost in developments is who's supposed to maintain it, and that's a part of the stormwater management plans, and this is a sediment basin and eventually it will have to be maintained, but this is also a permanent stormwater control, and then pollution prevention. So there's a list of tasks under this, but some of them that the Town Highway does is they clean out all the drywells that are installed each year. They have a crew out there, but they're only required to do 25% a year, and they do well over that. They do a great job at maintaining these structures, taking out all of the sediment and then also the stormwater separators. This one's this is Halfway Brook right here, across from the big Price Chopper on Glen Street, and there's a big stormwater separator in there that we clean out with the Highway Department each year, and they do a really good job, and then current projects. So right now in 2016, 2017 we have two grants. One of them I'm trying to get through right now. I've got one resident on board that we're going to install, it's a green streets program, and this is really a pilot project, and that's taking those grass medians between the sidewalk and the road and doing curb cut outs to bio-retention basins that are planted with, you know, like sedges and grasses and so we have one resident on Fort Amherst that is going, that is on board. We're going to install one next year, and I'm hoping when people see it, it catches on to, you know, this is a benefit, it takes stormwater runoff, you know, infiltrates it instead of just going to the drop inlet and out to Halfway Brook, and I think once people see it it will catch on, but it's an aesthetics thing, too. People like their maintained grass. MR. HUNSINGER-So the plants that you put in those, how readily available are they? MR. ROWELL-Actually the nurseries around here are becoming more aware of it. They're all native New York plant nurseries that we have worked with, but, yes, these plants are becoming pretty easy to find now and, you know, usually we sent out quotes for raingardens, for plants that are hardy for salt, that are New York natives, that can handle the drought and the flood conditions of a raingarden, and we get, you know, one quote back, and the rest of them would say go to that nursery, go to that nursery, but now, you know, we're getting five quotes back because a lot of them are starting to carry these plants because they realize, oh, this is an area that is selling plants now. MR. TRAVER-And where are these grants largely coming from? 4 (Queensbury Planning Board Informational Presentation 02/24/2017) MR. ROWELL-These two grants are through the New York State DEC. They're a water quality improvement program, then we've worked with the Pine View Cemetery. They had some issues last fall with some stormwater runoff that kind of damaged their banks. So we put in a grant this year to get that bank fixed for them. Also in the Glen Lake watershed we've put in raingardens, bio retentions with drywells and them to kind of capture all the stormwater runoff from this area before it gets to the stream. We did porous pavers at the Glen Lake boat launch, at 3800 square feet. I remember when Steve called me. He took this picture. This is with porous pavers and this is without porous pavers. The first year he put them in, and he's like, these things are great. Let's do the whole boat launch. Because you can see in winter, you can see the snow here, it stays nice and dry. Once it melts you don't get those frozen puddles. MR. TRAVER-Yes. It's pretty neat. I mean, I've been over there quite a bit in season kayaking and stuff like that and it's pretty neat the way it works and it's nice looking. It basically looks like gravel, but you can see the framework underneath. MR. ROWELL-Yes, and they're easy to install, and in areas where you're so close to the lake, you're so close to the groundwater, there's really not a lot to do. So this form of kind of shallow infiltration works really well. We did vegetative swales. This was at the Pine View Cemetery, two years ago where they were having flooding problems at one of their garages. That would actually flood and then freeze shut in winter. It's coming off the large, what's over there. MRS. MOORE-Texas Roadhouse. MR. ROWELL-Panera and everything, and now it's kind of coming off there and the hillside and this swale diverted in and infiltrated it and it worked out really well. So no longer are they freezing in winter. This is the website George Hilton created, and it's got, this is the stormwater sampling sheet, and you see all the stormwater conveyances. This isn't a very good photo, but he did a good job with that website, and these are our two MS-4 websites. This is at our website for Warren County Soil and Water, MS-4 section, then Queensbury has the whole stormwater section that covers the MS-4 Program. MS. WHITE-Do you have like a handout or anything so we can catch those later? MRS. MOORE-1 can get a copy of the PowerPoint. MS. WHITE-Awesome. MR. TRAVER-Yes, could you e-mail that to us maybe? MRS. MOORE-Yes. MR. TRAVER-That would be neat. MRS. MOORE-All right. MR. TRAVER-In fact what we were talking about earlier, I think Tom would be interested in that. Thank you. MRS. MOORE-Okay. Yes. MR. ROWELL-And then I've got the two management plans here, if you guys are interested in looking at it more in depth, but it covers all the tasks that run with all those minimum control measures and everything included. So thank you very much. MRS. MOORE-Thank you. MR. TRAVER-Thank you. RANDY RATH MR. RATH-My turn. So Nick and I are kind of tag teaming this. So basically Jim ask if we could talk, if the LGA could come and talk about essentially what can homeowners do to help with the MS-4 Program. So we have a couple of interesting things. Just a little quick blurb on the LGA. It was established in 1885 and we are the oldest lake association in the U.S. and we try to take a balanced outlook, I guess, in looking at water quality issues and lake management issues. We try to educate people. We have our floating classroom. We also do what I do. I'm the Project Manager and we do lake saving projects. So we do stormwater projects. We 5 (Queensbury Planning Board Informational Presentation 02/24/2017) work with Soil and Water all the time. We also work with the Town of Lake George and we try to help out with some funding on a lot of the projects. Nick already talked about stormwater. I think my graphic is a little nicer than Nick's, but essentially it says the exact same thing. You get your 10% runoff. Basically you have an undeveloped site versus 55% with a fully developed site. So looking specifically at Queensbury, and this is the Champlain watershed. So we actually got a data set of impervious cover for the entire Lake Champlain basin, but this is specifically to the Town of Lake George. So in that we have about 28,000, or excuse me, 29,800 watershed acres. Of that about 2400 of that is impervious cover, and so 2400 acres, and you can see all this basically right through here, Downtown, there's Lowe's and this is Glens Falls here cut out. So you see where it's highly developed. It's about eight percent of the watershed, and in looking at this, the Lake George watershed kind of comes down through here, and you have the Halfway Brook watershed and some other watersheds. So as the watersheds become smaller, as you get them in the sub watersheds, that develop, percentage develop in that watershed is going to change and in this area it's obviously going to increase it by quite a bit. So what we did is we looked at, Jim Lieberum and I were talking and we said, okay, well, what is, how much, what's impervious, roads, obviously, and then you have private things that are impervious. So we split it out. Actually we didn't, George Hilton did. We asked George to do this because he had the coverage as well. The darker, you know, you have the black are the roads. Obviously you can see the road network. The red areas, those are the public impervious. So basically where we're at now. I think that's right around here, and then the rest is private. That's all the pink area. So you have your Lowe's, your shopping centers and things like that, but you also have your residential areas. That's actually 67% of the impervious surfaces is private. So when you think of runoff and you think of who's going to be, you know, the DPW they've got to handle all this runoff from the roads. A lot of that's private. So that's, you know, why we're here. So I'll focus in on it a little bit just on this area here, just to give you kind of a better idea of what I'm talking about. You have all these pink areas. Those are all homes and driveways and things like that. That makes up some of that 67%, and so what percentage of that goes to the roads, we just kind of came up with a ballpark, what if 30% of that does. So if you think about your house, if you're on any kind of a hill, your driveway's going to go down to the road. Where does your runoff from your house go? Does it go to your driveway and then go down to the road? Does it fall off the back of the house, the side of the house or do you live on the bottom of a hill? So if we took a ballpark of 30% and that goes down to the public roads, it's about a 66% increase, bringing up the total to about 1200 acres within the watershed now that the Town DPW has to deal with as far as stormwater goes. So what can the homeowner do? We obviously, we focus on lake friendly living to minimize runoff, but we can change that to watershed friendly living. We actually have a guide here, and I can pass this around, you can just quick look at it. This is actually being updated. It should be updated by, we're hoping by May, along with a new raingarden brochure, how to make a raingarden, but what we'd like to do is you want to minimize runoff, eliminate pollutants, capture and infiltrate. That's basically what Nick was talking about as well. Some of the things that you can do as a homeowner, rain barrels. Rain barrels are excellent. You can do porous or permeable pavers. Also there's porous asphalt that's been used on Beach Road in Lake George and off of West Brook parking lot and some other areas, too. We did work with an engineer to develop I guess a formula to use on driveways, but the problem with that on private driveways is it costs quite a bit of money for a plant to just shut everything down and create this porous mix. So what you really need to do is kind of get a group of homeowners that want to do it at the same time so that somebody can go in and do about four or five driveways, and we haven't really been able to coordinate that yet. MR. HUNSINGER-Can you buy the rain barrels just about anywhere? MR. RATH-Yes, actually these right here we got a grant from the Lake Champlain basin program. These are from Home Depot. They're 58 gallon raingarden, or rain barrels. They hook right into your drain. Once they fill up and then everything just runs through, and that came with a cheaper plastic spigot. We ended up buying brass spigots just so that it would last a little bit longer and it wouldn't just break and people would be like, oh, these are junk. It's a really nice rain barrel. It fits in well with these houses, and one of the folks that got it, they like to put their granddaughter to work so she waters all the plants around the house and they run a hose to it and the bring it right out to the garden, and like I said it fits in really well, and they're easy to do, and Jim, he wanted us to mention this. He did it at his house, he just took old garbage cans and he hooked them up with PVC and he daisy chained them, a whole bunch of them together, and you can, you know, string them right along the edge of the house, put in like five or six. They do fill up fast, and we've even done some things with sisterns. We're trying to get some sisterns to put in at some of the local schools to see if they would do that, handle stormwater. MR. TRAVER-So Home Depot has these kits, you say. Do you recall what they charge? 6 (Queensbury Planning Board Informational Presentation 02/24/2017) MR. RATH-Yes, these, we got six rain barrels and they were about $1,000, that includes, with the upgraded spigots. So about a little under $200 apiece. I think it was like $158, something like that, and we also, obviously living near the lake we talk about buffers. Buffers are really good for a lake, but why couldn't you just do that on your house, too that's, you know, buffering a road? Let me actually back up a little bit. So if you think about it, if you've got your front lawn and it goes right down to a road and you have grass all the way to it, it's going to rain. You're going to capture some of that stormwater's going to get into the grass and infiltrate, but a lot of that's still going to just run right off into the road. So if you put in a buffer, that's going to help capture it, and it actually could add to the value of the house, and all sorts of things, and just a couple of photos that we've done as far as buffers go. Here's a spot in rainbow beach that we had some stormwater issues coming off the road, going this way into the lake, so we put in a buffer there. That's it going in planted and after a couple of months of growth what it looked like, and basically essentially slows down the stormwater, doesn't allow it to go directly into the lake, and as I mentioned, we're also redoing our, we're going to have a new brochure for basically how to build a raingarden, and we'd like to use a lot of native plants in ours that we put in. Again, as Nick mentioned, they're more hardy. They're used to this climate, and both being, when they're feet are soaking wet for a couple of days, as the water comes in, and it'll also be able to withstand dry periods so that they're a little bit drought resistant. This is a raingarden in Silver Bay. There's a lot of rain that comes in, or runoff that comes down the hill and it just kind of pooled here. So it was a natural spot to put in a raingarden, and it just looks nice when it's done, and it's also keeping stormwater from running out into their walking areas and flowing down into the lake or into the road wherever it may be, and here's just another raingarden up at, this is the Ticonderoga beach house, and just kind of a little bit of how it was built, going down a couple of inches, putting in some new material. We have found that the DEC recommends a mix, a soil mix, and then also the University of New Hampshire has put out a mix that they recommend, and the New Hampshire one actually has a little bit more sand in it, and it's about 85 to 90% sand, with some compost, and that seems to work really well. We have that in our garden out front of our building and it allows the water to permeate through it and it also keeps the plants, enough moisture in there for the plants to survive. So it works really well. If you have too much compost in there, then things plug up and it really does more, it doesn't drain well and it basically becomes a pond, but again, this is up in Ti. Planting here a little bit of a buffer around that and to create some more of a depression and then so planted in May. That's what it looks like in June, and in August it's a completed garden and it looks like it's been there for a number of years. So just some simple things you can do at home. Like I said, rain barrels, raingardens, do around the house, and it does help, and as I mentioned a bunch of that is of private areas that are, could be contributing to stormwater. So that's that, and we'll have these available, the updated versions. They'll be on line and available at our office as well, we can send you can e-mail. MRS. MOORE-Thank you. MR. TRAVER-Good. Thank you. MRS. MOORE-Okay. Any questions? I know you're an applicant, but do you have any questions for them? No? Okay. All right. Well thank you both again for being here. MR. RATH-Thanks for having us. MRS. MOORE-That's it. 7