Hey, Eileen. You could take the time to be here. I want to start out this morning by re-reading our COVID-19 statement. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic and state of emergency, this meeting is being held via live video teleconference pursuant to 2020 Senate Bill 150 and in accordance with the KRS 61.826 because it is not feasible to offer a primary physical location for the meeting. And we hope to add to that yet, and maybe we'll all get back together soon. So again, appreciate you all being here. First order of business is to approve the minutes from the last meeting. I think that was all emailed out to everyone, all 41 pages of it, I believe. So if there are any questions, comments, or corrections to those minutes, if you'd bring those up to our attention right now. Seeing none, we just need a motion to approve in a second. So moved. Thank you, Councilmember. Second. And thank you. Is that Eileen? Yep. All right. Did you guys get that, Jennifer? Yes. Thanks. All right. Looks like the first item on our agenda today is a residential permeable driveway retrofit from the homeowner and contractor's perspective with Eileen Burke, Watershed-at-Large member and Scott Pfeiffer, Scott Pfeiffer and company. Thank you. Everyone can see my screen share, I'm hoping? Yes. Looks good. If not, I've gone sideways. All right. Great. So Jennifer actually invited me here today to discuss a recent driveway replacement project at my own home. Some of you might already know me, I'm Eileen Burke, and I've represented Kentucky American Water for many years on this committee, and once the watershed seats were expanded to include work locations, I've been on the Kentucky River watershed seat. A little background about me, I have a degree in environmental science from the University of Southern Maine, and my entire career has been within water resources, from stormwater, greywater, fisheries, to stream assessments. And for the past seven years now, I've been an environmental compliance and water quality specialist for drinking water and wastewater at Kentucky American Water. And joining me today is Scott Pfeiffer. He is landscape designer and business owner of Scott Pfeiffer and company. And Scott, you want to introduce yourself? Hello. Good morning. Scott Pfeiffer. I've got a residential landscape design install maintenance company here in Lexington. My background's landscape horticulture with a concentration in design. My degree is from Southern Illinois University Carbondale. I've been a contractor here in Lexington for about 10 years. So we specialize a lot in residential hardscape and outdoor room concepts. Thanks, Scott. So my dilemma began with this pre-existing gravel driveway. I've actually hated it since the beginning. I've lived in this home for going on three years now, and it's rather unsightly. And it was just a constant maintenance challenge. To keep weeds at bay, you have to delicately graze the surface to knock the weeds down, hoping you don't send any rocks flying. Or you can see it's a little brown here. I would spray it down with herbicide-free ammoniated soaps. It would kill the growth, but after a couple of months, I'd have to spray it again. Other homeowners might not pursue more ecological-friendly options and just use strong herbicides. There's a reason why gravel parking is prohibited in new driveways. It's just a nightmare. To give you a sense of place, I'm in the residential Mentelle neighborhood, just a mile outside of downtown. It was built at the turn of the 20th century, so lots of small lots, small houses in my neighborhood, and it's actually situated in the town branch watershed within the infill and redevelopment zone. There's a couple of replacement options that I could go with. The cheapest and easiest would just be to replenish the gravel. It would give it a bit of a temporary facelift. The fresh gravel might smother the weeds for a little while, but they would still eventually come back up. And it would have to be redone every three to five years, and you'd still have the maintenance challenges. I could, of course, go with your typical concrete driveway. I would certainly lose any of the benefits of a pervious surface, and I really found the material just completely incongruous with my lot size. The frontage is only 37 feet wide, and my house itself is 24 feet wide, so a 10-foot-wide concrete slab in my front yard wouldn't dwarf my already tiny house. So, to be honest, I really wasn't interested in your standard concrete driveway. I could go all-in with pervious surfaces and just remove and reseed the gravel a lot. I'd certainly lose the parking. It's not a terrible option, however, my street is really narrow, and cars have been hit and bumped into parking before, and sure, I have a 98 Honda Civic with its fair of dings, but I don't want to keep that car forever. It might go on forever, who knows? So I did still want to keep some sort of off-street parking. And really, the only option that would allow for water infiltration, low maintenance, off-street parking, and would blend in with the landscaping would be some sort of alternative permeable surface. And for me, the inspiration came from the Henry Clay Estate. It's just a short walk from my home, and I had never seen a parking lot like this until moving to Kentucky. I was just charmed by this expanse right here. It's just beautiful, to be quite honest, and it makes me happy every time I see it. And so I knew this was what I had in mind when I wanted to upgrade my driveway. I later came to learn that these guys are called grass pavers. They're also known as turf stone, and they're essentially a concrete block with open gridwork on a gravel base and then backfilled with soil. Scott, you want to chime in with any other info on these guys? Yeah, so the grass paver is just an option in the permeable pavement systems. Permeable pavement systems have become very popular as of late to try to reduce, again, impervious surface, primarily on larger commercial sites. About every new school in the state of Kentucky has thousands of square feet of permeable surfaces. You can see the Henry Clay Estate, I guess I would consider that a commercial site, has permeable pavers installed. So we see it quite a bit on commercial sites, and so I'd like to see that a little bit more on residential sites. So, excuse me, so we had a pretty straightforward plan was to replace the gravel driveway that's situated in front of my lot with those grass pavers. Any additional comments on the plan here? I know it's pretty up front, but before we could begin, I quickly learned that driveways require permits. To the surprise of fellow homeowners and some professionals, it's not just a new driveway that requires a permit, but also reconstructing or altering any driveway. Well, I'm personally comfortable with submitting and writing KPDS permits applications, but I actually found this part of the project rather daunting as a relatively new homeowner. The permeable pavers themselves for the infield portion, the portion between the sidewalk and my home was promptly approved, however, the apron was denied and the project itself stalled out or the permitting process stalled out, and what I began to feel was purgatory of the easement. So I learned that driveway aprons are the portion between the street side of the sidewalk and the curb line, and in my neighborhood, the sidewalk is actually set very far back. It's at 12 feet in from the curb line, which accounted for 37% of the total project. And so 37% would be undermined by concrete and defeating the entire intent of my driveway retrofit. So I was really crestfallen by this prospect, so I knew I wanted to obtain a variance, but really didn't know how to go about obtaining one. I learned that an easement is within the domain of traffic engineering, and frankly, I didn't get anywhere with obtaining a variance until I actually emailed Jennifer, which is how we got invited to give a presentation today. And eventually, I was ultimately approved after I agreed to accept the responsibility for any apron repairs if construction within the easement occurred. So with that, we had a building permit in hand and could finally begin installation. And Scott, that's all you. Still, there you go. Sorry about that. There we go. Yeah. So I'll just kind of go through just a broad view of what permeable pavement systems are, how they're installed, how they differ from traditional systems. So really what we're trying to do is to create a void space underneath the surface of the entire system. So traditionally, that's accomplished with open-graded free-draining aggregates. On a commercial site, you would start with a number two, which is a little bit larger than the gravel picture, and then you would cap that with fives and sevens, and then you would choke that off with a number nine, and then your permeable pavement sits on top. And so what we're doing is trying to create, essentially, a little bit of a cistern underneath the existing footprint so that when it rains, that water can be, not absorbed, but held by the system and then slowly leached out into the soil over time. So a traditional system cross-section is about 14 to 16 inches deep. So with a pore space of about 40%, depending on the aggregates that you're using, you're getting about half a cubic foot of storage for every square foot of permeable system put in. So you can see here in the picture, we've cut the site 14, 16 inches. We have started to backfill with an open-graded 57 stone, and you'll notice the underlayment on the base and up the sides of the system, which is very important to prevent contamination and mixing of soil particles and gravel over time to ensure that the system and storage stays clean of particulates. There we are compacting the open-graded aggregate. Open-graded aggregates are nice because they compact very easily without losing that pore space or storage. The goal is 95% broctor compaction, so we're using just a run-of-the-mill smaller 3,000-pound plate compactor. A lot of contractors joke you can consolidate 57s just by walking on it, but we're not really getting much aggregate drop, we just want to make sure that we have a suitable base for the stones to be laid on. There are the turf stone going down, so they're about 2 by 3, so about 6 square feet per paver. Those go down over top of, well first you have your 57s in your void, and then you'll spread out some number 9s traditionally, which are a little bit smaller, so we can get a nice level grade, and then I think you can see in that picture there's some rebar sitting there, so again, any, I would call a pavement, you know, concrete pavement system, whether it's a paver or a large format like these grass pavers, the weak point is at the edge of the system, so they're very similar systems to asphalt, so asphalt's a great system until you're driving over the edge or a car's turning near the edge, so edge restraint is very important in these systems. Some of these cross sections and tech specs might have compacted soil as an appropriate edge restraint, and I would disagree with that, so we'll go through and we want about a 6 inch concrete curb reinforced with rebar tied into the ground, so there are the pavers going down, and then that's what we have after the fact, so we can hide that concrete edge restraint below grade, fill soil over the top, and then that was seeded, trying to remember exactly when, maybe February, mid-February, which sounds crazy, but in our world, that's the perfect time to actually seed if you're going to seed in the spring, so the seed's down and it's ready to go and waiting for 55 degrees soil temperature, which came pretty early this year, which is when you're going to get seedling germination, and the goal is to get seed up, germinated, mature, as mature as possible before the summer hits and 80-85 degree temperatures hit, which is when cool season grasses in this area go dormant and start utilizing their sugar reserves, so that came a little bit early this year here in May, and so luckily we've cooled off a little bit, plants like it, the grass likes it, but then I think Lane might have a later picture. Yeah, so I had never been so excited to watch grass grow before in my life. It was really fun watching it come in, and my partner certainly teased me going out every morning and staring at the ground, but we had, this was that late snow a little bit, was it early May that we got that or late April that we got that dusting of snow? And here it is just last week, I was hoping my perennials out front would cooperate and be in full bloom, and that is the final product right there, and I'm just overjoyed with it, ticked all my boxes with what I wanted from a driveway. It's beautiful, low maintenance, hasn't gotten tall enough that I need to take a mower over it yet, and I only have a real push mower, and it's really fun having my neighbors ask me about it, even last night I had dinner delivered and the delivery guy said, I love whatever this is, and it's a great conversation starter with folks, so I'm very pleased and I couldn't be more happy working with Scott on this project. And I guess, you know, I will, I guess maybe express some frustrations from my end, you know, if it weren't for Eileen and her diligence on this, and the time she invested to get this project pushed through, it wouldn't have happened. From a contractor's point of view, our time is very limited as far as getting permits pushed through and getting permits accepted, and to be honest, we just don't have time or the desire to, you know, kind of fight that battle every time we want a permeable pavement system installed on a residential site, so I would like to see that as part of a best management practice for residential settings. I'm often confused and miffed why it's so appropriate for every commercial setting in site, in town, around the state, schools, businesses, you know, not only are they approved for these locations, these businesses and schools, not schools, but businesses and large commercial sites are getting grants to install these permeable pavers, they're getting credits towards their water quality management fee that everybody here in town pays in order to deal with our stormwater capacity issues, so I think it would be a great incentive to work up some sort of even credit to incentivize homeowners to look at and pursue, you know, in all cases, spending 50 to 100% more to install something that's going to help with stormwater runoff issues in an expanding city that already has issues with excessive stormwater runoff. A lot of municipalities, larger growing cities, one of our vendors or one of our suppliers is big into Nashville, you know, in Nashville and a lot of surrounding areas down there, new construction is required to contain first inch of rainfall on site for 24 hours. I'm not saying that that's something that has to be mandated here, but if a homeowner is willing to pay a little bit more money to help combat the issue, it'd be nice not to have to jump through so many hoops, and to be honest, if this system wasn't capped with soil and seeded with grass, and it had a traditional free draining aggregate fill for the jointing material, it never would have been approved, because technically that's considered gravel in a driveway, and that doesn't fit within the constraints of the verbiage for residential driveway permitting, so that's one of the reasons I was excited to join Eileen here and talk about these systems, and, you know, if residents all over Lexington are willing to install these baby cisterns, and, you know, driveways can be, you know, 300, 1,000 square feet, and if we can get, you know, 150, 500 cubic feet of first flush storage located all over town, I think it could help tremendously with the stormwater issues that we're facing. Yeah, thank you, Scott. These old gravel driveways like mine are widespread throughout these old neighborhoods, and just promoting their existence in general as a viable replacement option instead of just dumping more old gravel on top of it, or putting a giant concrete driveway on a small lot, you know, it fits in with the nature of these neighborhoods, and is a beautiful option, and has all the benefits of the stormwater management that Scott discussed. And also, earlier this year, I saw that the Rethink Parking initiative, the draft proposal was released, and I was surprised to see there was only one single mention of the word permeable in that whole entire draft proposal. I think that's a real missed opportunity to give more attention and support for permeable materials in there, and like Scott said, incentivizing with that water quality management fee. I also, learning about driveway aprons, wish there was a max length, but talking to folks, everyone's like, oh, the apron's just like that two foot wide portion right at the edge. I was like, no, it's defined as the entire section between the curb line and the sidewalk. And that 12 foot setback of the sidewalk is not unusual in old neighborhoods, the people that will be doing these driveway retrofits. So, looking at that definition and reworking it would be helpful. And the whole process of pursuing a variance was just veiled in mystery, and if I wasn't so stubborn with my vision, and knowing Jennifer to help push this along, I don't know if it would have gotten done. I was starting, I was at the point where I was starting to think of how to do some sort of combo that would get that portion approved, with it just being a concrete ribbon drive, just in the easement, but eventually, it was approved, but your average citizen shouldn't know an LFUCG employee to email. There should be a set process to move the permitting along. And I'd love to see more promotion of permeable driveways, you know, just someone should walk in by the front of my house and seeing it and asking about it. It's great advertisement, but it could also be more widespread, and I'm certainly a big advocate for them now. I guess I could speak to the one complaint, I think, that is expressed with these traditional, more traditional permeable pavement systems is the issues of jointing material on aggregate migration, so that jointing material on aggregate can kind of move. Heavy rain, sometimes that can move, might wash into the street, wash into the storm system might be the one complaint, but in today's day and age, they have multiple different joint stabilizing applications that can be applied to stabilize the joint infill and also allow for water infiltration through the system, so I think that is kind of a mute point when you pursue other options to mitigate that. All right, and then my final recommendation is just Scott Pfeiffer and his business. It is great to work with, and I was really happy having him as my contractor, and with that, if anyone has any questions. We do have a few questions in the chat. The first one was about the geotextile that was used and whether or not it's permeable. Yeah, that's correct. It will allow water infiltration through that geotextile. All right, and then you can completely opt to not share this if you don't want to, but people are wondering about the cost of doing your driveway this way. Sure. I know there are economies of scale, and working on a small lot, it's going to be more expensive per square foot, but it was ultimately $8,000 for that driveway, but not going out in a pandemic and traveling and not having anywhere else to spend my money, I thought I would reinvest it in my home. Well, it turned out great for sure, and maybe Scott, you can answer this. If Eileen's driveway had originally been a regular concrete or asphalt driveway, how much additional cost would have been involved to bust that up and remove it? Well, that cost itself is kind of a sunk cost because no matter what driveway you're putting back, you're always going to have to demo the existing driveway, so the demo and haul-out of the first 5 to 6 inches of driveway is equal no matter what system that you're replacing with. The added costs in this system are we have to go another 9 to 12 inches of excavation in order to adequately support enough free draining zone to hold, to capture that water. So, then you're also putting traditionally a manually set pavement system back in. On large scale setups like schools and municipalities and businesses, they're using mechanically set systems, so again, you're going to get a little bit closer to poured concrete or asphalt, but again, traditionally you're going to be spending 40-50% to 100% more than some traditional impervious systems. Alright, and then, would these grass pavers be applicable on a steeper driveway? Yes, Eileen's apron is relatively steep, I don't know the exact pitch, but yes, the system is applicable to steeper grades. There are some considerations that may need to be taken for structural edge restraints and those sort of things, but yes. There was a question about the applicability of this on historic properties or designated districts, and I'm not sure if that's something that Eileen knows about, but obviously it was challenging enough just in sort of a regular older neighborhood, but one with a historical designation, yeah, that could possibly bring additional complications to the process. Thankfully, my neighborhood has a historical overlay, but I could see it being a better option than a concrete driveway because it does maintain the natural landscape, so I think you could easily make a case for it. And while the system that we put at Eileen's is not ADA compliant, there are permeable systems that are ADA compliant that have a smaller joint void so that they will comply with some of those code restrictions, and that's why you see them in schools and other settings of those nature. All right, there are some additional questions in the chat, but in the interest of time and the other presenters who are slated to talk today, Eileen and Scott, if you don't mind maybe taking a look at the chat and then responding. It would probably be best if you don't mind responding to all or replying to all, and we can make sure and capture that in the meeting minutes. All right, well, thank you for having us. Thanks, it was a great presentation. And you're getting some applause from someone that has a camera on, and a virtual one, too. All right, our next presentation is by Richard Walker, and it's a follow-up to our last two meetings where we started talking about trees as a stormwater BMP, and we started out back in December with Dr. Chris Sass talking about the Urban Forest Initiative that's based at UK but involves a lot of collaborators and organizations throughout central Kentucky. And then at our March meeting, we had a presenter from the Center for Watershed Protection who really took a deep dive into how you can quantify trees and account for their benefits in terms of both water quality and water quantity. And today, Richard is going to talk about how our current stormwater manual addresses or accounts for trees. It's not necessarily as complicated as some of the models that were shared at our March meeting, but I'll turn it over to Richard and let him take us through that presentation. Thanks, Jennifer. I'm ready to do that, but I'm trying to figure out how to share my screen. Where do I do that? Toward the bottom of the window. Do you see a green share screen? Oh, there it is. Yeah, right there in front of me. All right. Okay, does everybody see that? Yes, it looks good. And just real quickly, sorry to interrupt, if you haven't already typed your name and organization into the chat box today, please do that. I know a lot of people saw that request at the beginning of Eileen's presentation, but please take a moment to do that for us. Okay, so good morning, everyone. I'm sitting here thinking about how long we've been doing these type of Zoom meetings now for over a year, and we've got 57 participants. It is still strange for me to talk to 57 people and not see them. I cannot get used to that, so I'll do the best I can. So, as Jennifer said, I'm going to be talking about how trees are accounted for in the stormwater manual. Basically, I'll be talking about hydrology, green infrastructure, and riparian buffers. And I want to start with a graphic that was shared with us by the Center for Watershed Protection when they did their presentation at the last meeting, which I thought was very well done. And this shows what's going on during a storm event, what trees can do, and the things that I'm going to be talking about and how the stormwater manual addresses those or deals with those is those things I have circled in red. Interception by the leaf canopy, evaporation and transpiration, and more importantly, which you will see is infiltration and how that affects the runoff volume. Now, it should be said that quantifying all of these things on the screen are very difficult to do. The U.S. Department of Agriculture has been doing this since the 1950s when they put out their handbooks and manuals on hydrology, and they've been doing a lot of research since then, but it is a difficult thing to quantify. Within the manual itself, the hydrology chapter in chapter 5, green infrastructure in chapters 1 and 10, and then riparian buffers in chapter 9, those are the locations where we talk about trees. So first, let's talk about hydrology. So within the manual, there is a table of curve numbers, and curve numbers are used in the hydrologic models to determine how much of the rainfall actually runs off, and I've circled a couple of there on the screen for reference. So parking lots, driveways, hard surfaces typically have a curve number of 98, which means that just about everything that hits the surface will run off. Curve numbers range from a low of around 30 to a maximum number of 100. And then if you look toward the bottom of that table, you see woods at 55. You'll also notice that brushy areas are even lower than that, at 48. So that's kind of the range of curve numbers, and that has a big impact on the calculations that are done to estimate runoff. As I mentioned, the USDA, the Department of Agriculture, they've been researching this for a long time. They started in the mid-50s, most of their work was about agricultural type practices and land use, but in 1986, they put out a document entitled Urban Hydrology for Small Watersheds, and I'm showing this graphic. This is not in the manual because there are engineering hydrologic models that take all of this into account. There's a lot of complicated equations that you can see on the screen, but this is a good picture of curve numbers and how that affects runoff volume. So just as an example, I mentioned earlier a curve number of 98 for a parking lot, and you'll see that for a rainfall of 4.7 inches, which is the 100-year event that we use in the manual, the six-hour event, that generates a runoff of 4.5 inches. So just about everything that lands on a parking lot runs off. You contrast that with the curve number 55, representing forest, and only 0.8 inches runs off, so a big difference. So the way this is accounted for in the manual is for the pre-development condition, existing trees are accounted for in that curve number that I was just showing you. In post-development, new trees are typically not accounted for because they would be too small to affect the hydrology. That's a conservative assumption, which we think is important regarding flooding impacts. So that's how they are handled. So now I want to switch to green infrastructure and how trees are accounted for in that, and I should say as we go through this, what we're really focused on here is the soil conditions, how much water can be stored in the soil itself. So I pulled out the section of the stormwater manual that contains the runoff reduction criteria, which is basically to capture that 0.8 inches of runoff and infiltrate it into the ground where possible. That's the goal of this requirement. Table 1-7 shows the various green infrastructure practices that can be used, and I've highlighted those with the red arrows, things related to green space, trees, bioretention, those things that have soil properties, soil impacts on the runoff volume. I've also put this table in to show which of these practices can be used in various types of development, in new development. So with regard to green infrastructure, there are two factors that we're dealing with. The first one is how does the vegetation, the trees, that soil interaction, how does that affect the storage capacity of the soil and how much water can be stored in it? And then how much water can be stored in the soil during a rainfall event? The graphic on the right there is kind of a complicated figure showing properties of soils. Things regarding field capacity and porosity, that gets deep into soil science, but we use some of these parameters in the calculations that I'll show you here in a minute. So at the beginning, I talked about infiltration, evapotranspiration, and leaf interception, and those things do affect the runoff volume. So I've tried to, from a qualitative standpoint, kind of summarize how that affects runoff volume. So infiltration within the models that we use, within the manual itself, that is a significant effect. The trees, vegetation has a significant effect on infiltration. The equation we use for that, you see it at the bottom. We take the green space area times the soil depth, and we multiply that by the soil void ratio, and I'm going to show you more on that here in a minute. The effect of evapotranspiration is pretty minor. Mainly that's because that process occurs over several days. So during the rainfall event itself, there's not much of an effect. So we don't account for that. Again, that's a conservative assumption. And the leaf interception is pretty negligible during a rainfall event, less than 1%. And then in addition to that, there are months where we have no leaves on the trees, so there would be no effect at all. So in the big picture point of view, that's kind of how these things are accounted for in the manual. So back to the graphic that I showed earlier, the area that is circled in red, that's kind of a typical soil condition in Fayette County. And the way we come up with the void ratio, which is used in the calculation, is we take porosity and we subtract from that the field capacity and come up with the soil void ratio. So the average there is about 0.18. The maximum is about 0.25. So real quickly, just in terms of what is field capacity? So field capacity is the amount of water that's held in the soil after the rainfall event has ended and water is drained away. There's still water that's held to the soil particles themselves. And then porosity is the soil volume taken up by spaces between the soil particles. So that's pretty confusing, pretty complicated. It's deep into the soil science, but the graphic does kind of show the properties of those soils, sand versus clay on the right. So these are used in the manual itself to do the calculations. So within the manual, I'm showing three types of ways that green infrastructure is used to reduce runoff volume. And I'm showing the void ratio and the soil depth that is used in that previous table to calculate that. So item one, there is developed green space that's impacted during construction, which is very common. It assumes no trees. The second category is green space that was protected during construction. So we don't have any compaction of soil. And to account for that and for what vegetation and trees can do, we've assumed a deeper depth of infiltration. Which basically means item two provides twice as much infiltration as condition one. And then condition three, if we create a riparian buffer, we've increased the void ratio and we've increased the soil depth. So that gives 2.8 times more infiltration than condition one. So let's take an example. Let's take 3,000 or 2,000 square feet of green space on a development site. We're going to direct runoff to it from a parking lot. So how much volume is available in the soil to capture that runoff volume and store it temporarily? It drains out slowly after the rainfall event passes. So for condition one, it would create 360 cubic feet. Condition two, 720, and then condition three, 1,000. So in terms of how you calculate that, you're taking 2,000 times 0.18 in condition one and then times one foot. That gives you 360 cubic feet. So that's how we do that. And then finally, in chapter nine, we have information on the riparian buffer restoration. We have the riparian species list and we have information on how the buffer zone width should be constructed. And that's how we deal with trees in that section. So that's the end of the slides. Any questions? Richard, there's a couple of them in the chat. The first is, are individual trees usually considered for pre-development conditions? Wooded areas are, but not multiple large trees or tree groves. I would say typically individual trees are not accounted for in that curve number calculation that I mentioned earlier. Typically, if there are large areas of trees, those would be accounted for, but not individual trees. All right. And then there's a request to look back at the hydrology study that was completed for the Greenleaf Hotel redevelopment on Nicholson Road, just to see how it was considered when that redevelopment project occurred. Yeah, if somebody knows where that is, sure we can. Amanda Gumbert wants to know, when developed green space is impacted by development, is that assuming that topsoil has been removed? Well, that's always an issue in new development. And I think it varies on the site. You know, to get good grass growing, you know, in a subdivision and yard, you need some good topsoil. So, you know, I think in most cases, topsoil is brought back in. And then over time, as we get turf grass put down and you get that interaction of the root system, I think over time it breaks it back up. But in the beginning, compaction is sometimes a problem. Yeah, I was just looking in terms of your slide 16, where you gave an example. And I think the term was that the developed green space, and you were talking about if runoff is directed to that area, and that calculation of storage based on pore space, that's going to be extraordinarily variable. And I understand that getting into the weeds of the soil science is in void space, and I don't want to belabor that. It's just, I'm curious about what those blanketed statements mean, you know, in terms of the field capacity of those soils. And whether or not, I would look at it as assuming that the topsoil has been removed. And then what you bring back, it's not necessarily the same functionality, right, as what left the site. But anyway, I was just kind of curious about that, but we can discuss that at length another time. Well, if you recall the graphic that I used, you know, those are typical soil parameters. And that is soil without the impact of vegetation, grass, trees, brush, that kind of thing. So I think they're fairly conservative in terms of that void ratio. Now, you know, the depth of infiltration, I mean, that's an assumption that we've made based on the soils in the area. So I would say this, I think that, I think we are conservative on the side of, we want to make sure that we estimate conservatively the amount of runoff or flooding impacts. And then secondly, when it comes to the green infrastructure and providing that runoff volume credit, those are, I think those are fairly generous and they provide an incentive for developers to put in green space and trees and that kind of thing. Thank you. All right, there's a recommendation to incorporate a post-construction soil specification into the stormwater manual. Okay, that's something we can look at. And then a request to discuss accountability for removal and or replanting after a development is complete. Well, the city does have a tree ordinance or tree protection ordinance that requires a specific level of tree canopy at the end of development. If there are existing trees on site, that can be used to meet that requirement. And whether there are existing trees on site or not, at the end, the developer has to plant additional trees if necessary to bring it up to that level. And I think that's, you know, something we can also discuss at a future meeting and maybe get a better understanding of what the requirements are and then maybe issues in actually getting all of that implemented. There's a question about whether we have options to differentiate between evergreens or mixed evergreen deciduous instead of strictly deciduous trees. Well, in the current in the things that I've just gone over, there is no distinction among trees. That can really complicate things, I believe. There probably is, I'm sure there's a difference in them. But the manual itself doesn't take that into account. And if someone wants to convert a developed green space to a created green space, basically to improve the void ratio from 0.18 to 0.25, is there a process or what mechanism will you undertake to do that? Well, that would take, that would that would involve a couple of things. Is there a process or what mechanism will you undertake to do that? Well, that would take, that would involve a process of reconditioning the soil in some way to break up the compaction that has occurred. And there's various ways to do that. I think landscaping companies can have, they've got the equipment and they've done that in other, on their projects. So it's that kind of a process. It depends on the level of, each site would be different. In the extreme case, you would disk it up, till it up, you know, and start over. But there might be some intermediate things that could be done to break it up. Looks like we have one final question. Are tests or samples required to be provided to demonstrate that actual site conditions meet the assumed values? I think it depends on the site. We, there are tests that can be done. They are highly variable. In some cases, those are provided as part of the development submittal. When that's not available, then we sometimes rely on the Fayette County Soil Survey, which has some of that, which has the soil properties in it. Okay, one more. Can you provide examples of local case studies where methods have changed the void ratio? So I guess where work has been done that has resulted in a changed void ratio. Yeah, I'm sure there have been some. I don't know of any. I know that there is an incentive grant. An incentive grant being used to break up or recondition soils in Veterans Park to promote infiltration. So that might be one. That's the one that I know of that's being done. It's not completed yet. All right. Well, thank you, Richard. That was good. And next we're going to hear about the year's worth of monitoring data and results and sampling that was done in the East Hickman watershed as part of our permit required watershed focused monitoring program. And Third Rock has three folks who are going to share those results with us. Mack Hall, Corey Bloyd, and Bert Brimley. I can see your screen, but we're not hearing you yet. How about that? Can you hear me now? Yes. Sorry about that. My button hit itself for me. Thank you, Jennifer. Hi, everybody. We've had the opportunity and privilege to work with Lexington and Tetra Tech on their watershed focused monitoring program. Each year, we do a different watershed focused monitoring program. I have Corey Bloyd and Bert Brimley. And we've had the opportunity and privilege to work with Lexington and Tetra Tech on their watershed focused monitoring program. Each year, we do a different watershed as described in the permit. And today we're going to be talking about the East Hickman Creek watershed and recap the program and some of the results we had with it. So in today's presentation, we are going to be covering why LFUCG monitors, where they monitor, when they monitor, what do they look for when they monitor, and how do we monitor. And again, if you have any questions, just put those in the chat and save them for the end. That seems to really work for these Zoom and virtual type meetings. So the monitoring goals for this watershed focused monitoring program is to characterize the pollutant loads in the streams, the tributaries, and the major outfalls in each individual watershed. To characterize rank, stream habitat, and the hydrogeomorphic function of the streams. To enhance the illicit discharge identification in each of these sub-watersheds. And one aspect we really like is getting to engage volunteers and the scientific community in the data collection efforts. And through all of this, we can use it to lay the foundation for watershed based plans and TMDL implementation. So these are the watersheds that the urban service boundary in Lexington intersects with. You can see that there are several of them. And today we are going to be looking at the East Hickman Creek watershed, which is this one right here. I've said before that we do several of these watersheds, and we have in the past. And this is the monitoring schedule as detailed from the permit. We've had the opportunity to work on the Cane Run, South Elkhorn Creek, and West Hickman Creek. Today we will be talking about the East Hickman Creek watershed. And we are in the process of going through monitoring and analyzing some of the data for the Town Branch watershed. We will be beginning some of the early stages of screening with North Elkhorn Creek later in the year. So the monitoring elements and what we really aim to look for in this watershed focus monitoring program are five elements. And we break them up and we have different methodologies for analyzing them and monitoring them. Going through each of these, we look for the water quality at in-stream sites and major outfalls. We also look to look at the stream quality at the outfalls. We also look to look at the stream corridor habitats, the substrates, and the macroinvertebrate presence in stream sections in the watershed. Furthermore, we do a more detailed stream biology and macroinvertebrate study. And that's done by trained professionals here at Third Rock over the same watershed sites. And so it's more detailed than in step two there, just looking for a presence of macroinvertebrates. After that, we look at neighborhood sources and potential generators for pollutions and upland areas upstream of some of these stream sites and major outfalls. And then finally from all of this, we look for microbial sources and use optical brighteners to trace potential illicit discharges. Getting into some of the steps for the water quality monitoring, we break it up into two phases, with the first phase looking at four dry weather events for all major outfalls. And what we define a dry weather event as is 72 hours without rainfall. And so the reason we do that is if there is water flowing in these outfalls, it's most likely not contributed by rainfall. And so it's from something else, whether it's groundwater or a pipe break or something along those lines. Two events historically are done by trained volunteers, but the East Hickman watershed, that was during COVID. And so we had to hand that off to LFU CG staff only. And so East Hickman was a little bit of an anomaly with. was a little bit of an anomaly with dealing with COVID, and so all the events were done by LFUCG staff for phase one and for phase two when we get into that later. There are 11 in-stream sites which are distributed across the watershed to target major tributaries and gather all sub-watersheds within the East Hickman Creek watershed, and there are also 63 major outfalls. So after phase one is done, what we look for are flowing outfalls, and that's not just if an outfall was for flowing during one of the events, but we look for 50% of the time if it was flowing, and those outfalls are moved into phase one, or phase two, excuse me. During phase one, there were 146 water samples collected at in-stream sites and major outfalls, and if during any time in the field or after lab analysis, there was a parameter that was above the action limit, an illicit discharge investigation was then initiated to see if the source of this high parameter could be found. And here is an overview of all the phase one water quality sites. In red, you can see the major outfalls spread out through the watershed, and in blue, you can see the stream sites, and they are spread out to try and capture all the different sub-watersheds in the East Hickman watershed. After phase one is done, we move into phase two monitoring, and that's 10 events scheduled every other week, no matter the weather, whether it's rain or shine or a deluge, it's just regularly scheduled to kind of get a different view at the water quality. These are done by LFUCG's staff, like I said, again, from May through September in 2020. All 11 in-stream sites were done again, but only 27 major outfalls continued on into phase two sampling, because they were flowing 50% or more during phase one. 319 samples were collected, and to break up those parameters a little bit more, there were in-situ parameters measured in the field, and what that means is just measured with a kit or with a meter of some sort, and we measured flow, conductivity, dissolved oxygen, water temperature, pH, and chlorine. There were grab samples taken from those sites and taken to the lab to analyze for ammonia, nitrate, total suspended solids, total phosphorus, detergent, fluoride, and E. coli. These are the phase two sites. As you can see, there are about half of them as compared to phase one, which was great for data collection and great for analysis, because we only had half as much, and if anybody was involved in the West Tickman Creek Watershed Focus Monitoring Program, there were several more sites, and that was a greater effort from volunteers and staff to have to collect all those and analyze it, so East Tickman Creek was pretty much a breeze compared to that. So what do we do with all this water quality data that is collected by volunteers and staff? Well, what we did is based off of some Kentucky Division of Water recommendations for analyzing data, we created this water quality health grade, and essentially this report card or scorecard with some color codes, and based off of the distribution benchmark and exceedances for all these parameters that have been sampled in phase one and phase two, we created this spread or this rating and grading curve to apply to each of these sites and their percent exceedance or the amount of times that for that parameter at that outfall or in-stream site, that parameter exceeded the benchmark. And so this is just a sample of some of the outfalls that we analyzed during phase two and phase one results, and what you can see is when we apply that color code and that grading scale to each of these sites for each of the parameters, you can quickly see the problem areas, if you want to use that word, for each of these outfalls and how well they're doing, both in good things such as temperature, chlorine, you can see they're all A plus for all those, not a single exceedance during any of them, but once you look at conductivity and E. coli, you can really start to see that some of those are graded differently depending on how often they exceeded the benchmark. And from taking this, each outfall's grade, and we can look at the drainage area for those outfalls, we can apply this color code and get an idea of the areas that could be contributing to some of these exceeded parameters. But going through this, we can see chlorine was not an issue whatsoever in East Hickman Creek, and as you can see as we start going through these results and the grades for each of these little sub-drainage areas for both major outfalls and for stream sites, as you can see here, East Hickman Creek was a very healthy watershed, and it's been one of the healthy ones compared to the grades or this grading system that we've done so far. And so there aren't a lot of problem areas whatsoever, as you can see here with chlorine, there were no significant exceedances of benchmarks in both stream sites and major outfalls. Again, going on to fluoride, and let me back up, one reason we aim to sample chlorine and fluoride, they really go hand in hand because they can be, they can point to possible clean water breakage or drinking water breakage lines or some kind of runoff from irrigation of some sort, and so that's why we look at chlorine and fluoride and really compare them. But again, very healthy with only one area here, that 20502, with some influence from fluoride and chlorine or from fluoride, and so there could be some clean water line breakage there which could be in that little sub watershed, but when we go on to the stream side, we see that once that reaches the stream, if it does and doesn't evaporate into the air, it's diluted and there weren't any exceedances for fluoride in each of these stream sides. Detergents is also something that was analyzed in this process, and detergents is the reason we analyzed those or looked for exceedances in those, is they are associated with gray water, with laundry water and sewage. Also, it could be from a car wash or any other thing where or any other thing where soaps and detergents are run off into streams or major outfalls, and so again though, very similar to chlorine and fluoride, there aren't any issues. There is some exceedances in one of the major outfalls over here. Again, that could be from a gray water line or just from a car wash or something along that line, but once it reaches stream, whether through dilution or settling in the soils, there were no issues with exceedances in any of the stream sides. So again, what we're seeing is just a very healthy watershed in the streams for these parameters. Ammonia, the reason we look at ammonia is it could be a sign for sewage or it could just be a byproduct from nitrification and fertilizers. There are a couple sources of ammonia and why that may be showing up in water, but again, second verse, same as the first, we're looking at healthy drainage areas for the major outfalls with this outfall scoring a B, so there may be some influences from fertilizer or there could be some influences from sewage, but that's most likely from fertilizer because the East Hickman Creek watershed primarily is suburban and some rural areas, and so it's most likely attributed to manicured lawns and that kind of thing. Going on and looking at the streams for ammonia, this is where we do kind of see an anomaly. Typically, some of these stream sides capture, they kind of line up the major outfalls and they capture those small drainage areas, but if I back up to the outfall here, this is the area where that East Hickman site 12 has scored a B, but everything here is scoring an A in that area, and then with one B here, but going to this, you can see our East Hickman 10, you can see that it scored a B. Again, still a passing grade with very little influences from ammonia, but sometimes in those major outfall drainage areas, it doesn't encompass all the area of East Hickman 10 or all the areas of those stream sites, so there could be some non-point source discharge or some point source discharge that is spread out through that watershed that isn't necessarily captured in those major outfall drainage areas, but again, we're seeing very healthy for this parameter in this watershed. So again, I mentioned that this watershed is more rural and suburban and there's a lot of manicured lawns, and so when we get into nitrate, which is also associated with fertilizers, we can see that this is when some of the other colors are starting to shine in this grading program or this grading method. We do see some S's, some D's, some C's, and not everything is that blue or green for an A or a B. Again, this is most likely contributed to fertilizers in that area. Nitrate is one of the key ingredients in fertilizers and used and mixed in for soils, and we can see that in this East Hickman 10 drainage area and in the southern part here, we do get some nitrate influence in these major outfalls. And moving on into the streams, only right here in this B for this East Hickman site 3. Again though, once it reaches the stream, whether through dilution or nitrification processes, it's not a significant parameter or exceedance in that area. Phosphorus was clean across the board. Again, we're seeing that East Hickman Creek was a very clean watershed for these parameters, and across the board, not very many exceedances whatsoever for phosphorus and at the outfalls and these stream sites, so very good job on that. Total suspended solids we look at for a couple reasons, primarily for sediment erosion. Sediments and water is considered a pollutant, and it could also be a sign of poor landscape management or stream erosion, so that's why we look at total suspended solids. It can also look at and pick up anything suspended in the water, so alligators and other things that are suspended in the water, so algae, plankton, stuff of that matter. It doesn't have to be sediment, so it does cover a couple other areas that maybe these total suspended solids could be coming from. But very similar to the previous parameters we've been talking about today, there are very little influence from total suspended solids, and this does kind of reflect past watersheds we've looked at. Total suspended solids isn't that big of a issue in these watersheds because pretty much sediment is managed well, and there's not a lot of erosion or reasons for total suspended solids to be in the major outfalls or in the streams as we can see here. So no sediment, no algae or plankton or anything like that was picked up in these sampling. So once we start getting into E. coli, we do start to see more of these colors showing. This is for the primary contact recreation benchmark, which is 240 most probable number per 100 milliliters, and that primary contact recreation, that is a water quality benchmark set aside by KDAL to set a benchmark for direct exposure to water through activities such as swimming, wading where your skin is in contact with the water for an extended amount of time. I typically don't play in outfalls, but it's a helpful benchmark to use for water quality analysis. So you can see here that several of the areas and major outfalls scored F's, D's, C's, and keep in mind this is all E. coli. This isn't E. coli from specific sources, so this could be sewage or human source, but it could also be bird, dog waste, pretty much anything, any living creature that excretes waste, it could be getting into this water source. So while we do use it to look for areas of possible sewer overflows or sewage line breaks, it could be coming from anywhere for both major outfalls and streams. So one thing that this color grading really starts to show is this watershed focused monitoring program can lay the foundation for a watershed-based plan where BMPs are implemented. And so by comparing these drainage areas with these grades and the color codes, we can see areas that need more attention or should be prioritized for BMP implementation. And this is just for the primary contact recreation. There is also a secondary contact recreation benchmark of which it's, instead of 240, it's 676 most probable number per 100 milliliters. And so it's a less stringent goal to meet and it has a little bit more leeway with hitting that benchmark. And secondary contact recreation is more for fishing or boating where you will come in contact with the water but not for an extended amount of time. And so you can see here that some of the outfalls did better while compared to the secondary contact recreation goal. And so for prioritizing BMPs, the areas that scored A's and B's and even C's don't need as much attention as compared to the areas that scored a D or an F. And then taking this and looking at the stream sites, you can see more B's and C's as opposed to D's and F's in the primary contact recreation. So you can use, for example, this East Tateman 12 site here scored an F for both the primary contact and the secondary contact recreation. And so if a BMP needs to be implemented, that sub watershed should be a targeted first. Mack? Yes. Before you leave the E. coli, do you recall how many of last summer's 10 events were during rain or right after a rain event? I don't have that information in front of me at this moment, but you do bring up a good point. After rain or after any kind of runoff through rain, any kind of runoff through rain, it does kind of spike the E. coli and some of the parameters. So the weather could affect those readings, but I don't have that in front of me. All right. Thanks. All right. And at this moment, I'm going to hand it over to Bert Remley, who's going to be talking about the stream corridor characterization and biology part of the watershed-based plan. Thanks, Mack. So part of the goal of the stream corridor characterizations was to kind of evaluate or characterize the entire watershed. To do this, the watershed is divided up into half-mile reaches. And then within each of those reaches, a minimum of 100 meters is surveyed by a field crew. And another goal is to get students and volunteers involved in the watershed. And for this, BCTC students performed all the characterizations for headwater segments. Students were trained by Jean Watts at BCTC. In the future, I believe the students are going to be trained by Wes Morris, who's replaced Jean after she retired last year. We really appreciate the efforts of the instructors and the students, because it's a very large undertaking to evaluate an entire watershed. They do a really good job. For the East Sickman watershed, there were approximately 29 half-mile reaches, of which only 21 were successfully evaluated last year. And part of that was due to access issues. Some of the sites were located in horse farms. It's hard to get ahold of people. Or the stream is impounded, and therefore it's not a stream anymore. And or, last year, COVID, as Mack mentioned, was a huge issue to get around. So that complicated things as well. The wadeable sites were evaluated by Third Rock personnel. And so at each site, three things were evaluated. Habitat, substrates, and then macroinvertebrates, presence and absence. Habitat was evaluated by completion of the rapid bioassessment protocol, high gradient habitat sheet. And field crews would visually assess the parameters of the stream, such as in-stream cover, channel alterization, bank stability, sediment deposition, and pairing zone width. And these parameters were then scored and tallied to compare to a regional, the regional bluegrass bioregion scoring and given a rating of four fair good. Substrates, the percent composition of each substrate type was estimated in riffle run pool habitats recorded on the field data sheet. Substrate categories included clay, silt, sand, gravel, cobble, boulder, bedrock. For the macroinvertebrates, field crews would sample macroinvertebrates using Kentucky Watershed Watch protocols with a dip net. They would sample multiple habitats, including riffles, undercut banks, leak packs, sediments, etc. These collections were then sorted in a pan. All organics were counted and identified to order. And then these counts in conjunction with the tolerance value were used to calculate a biological index rating of very poor, poor, fair, good, or excellent. So, as you can see, here's the stream habitat results. Each segment is a little bit different in that half of the watershed is located, or more or less, is located outside the urban surface boundary. So, you see all the colors are pretty much on the north, excuse me, or west side of that boundary. And sites, sorry, SCC1 through 4 are wadeable sites and all other sites are headwater, which means wadeable site is greater than five square miles drainage, so anything less is a headwater. None of the sites rated good for habitat, and actually all were poor except for two of the wadeable sites at SCC1 and SCC3 scored fair. In general, bank stability issues and a reduced repairing zone, which are common conditions in urban streams, contributed to these poor habitat results. This is the substrate composition results, which is interesting. Above the Jackson Park Reservoir, most of the sediments were fine substrates like silt, sand, and gravel, whereas downstream of the reservoir, you started to see larger, more coarse substrate materials like boulder and cobble, and actually some of the stream sites were dominated by bedrock. These are the McInverbert results from the stream corridor characterizations. All four of the wadeable sites scored fair, and majority of the headwater sites were poor. They did have some fairs, but no good ratings for McInverberts. They did have some fairs, but no good ratings for McInverberts. For the stream biology, we evaluated the McInverbert community at five sites within the watershed using more intensive surveying methods from KDAL. We had two wadeable sites and three headwater sites. We had two headwater sites, and I'll show this on a map on the next slide, were located for major trips to the Jackson Park Reservoir, and we had a wadeable site directly underneath the reservoir, and then another headwater site catching one of the major trips coming out the urban surface boundary, and then we had our long-term monitoring site, which is located on the main stem of East Hickman, right where it leaves the urban surface boundary. The KDAL protocols involved with this sampling involved a riffle, semi-quantitative riffle kick sample, and a multi-habitat sample. After the samples were identified, a macro biosystem index rating was calculated for the bluegrass ecoregion. This involves seven metrics, taxa richness and EPT richness, which are details of species diversity, and increasing in these numbers, taxa richness and EPT richness. EPT, by the way, stands for mayflies, stoneflies, and caddisflies. They're generally a pollution intolerant group. As those numbers increase, that's associated with better habitat and water quality. MHVI on the table, it stands for the Modified Hilson Orthobiotic Index. That's an indicator of organic pollution, and an increasing number can indicate an impairment from organic pollution. So, the smaller the number there, the better. Then, abundances of the pollution-tolerant mayflies, caddisflies, and stoneflies and mayflies can indicate that those numbers would increase with improving conditions. So, as you can see, those two categories were very low for all the streams involved. Midges and worms are generally a pollution-tolerant group, so they would increase with impairment. Then, percent clingers are organisms that require clinging silt-free substrates to exist. So, their presence or absence can indicate whether your substrates are suffering from siltation or embeddedness. So, as you can see from the results here, only one site, the long-term monitoring site, DH1, scored fair. All others scored poor. You can see that the species diversity, taxa richness, and EPT genus level richness is much higher at this stream site than the others. It also had a greater abundance of clingers compared to the other sites. All the other sites, like I said, EPT, even just presence-absence was almost absent at these other sites. So, here's the sites I was talking about. These two sites are the trips to the Jacobson Park Reservoir. They were also historical long-term monitoring sites. This is a wadeable site located just downstream of the reservoir. This catches the Long Road Tributary. It comes into the main stem, and this is our long-term monitoring site. With that, I'll turn it back over to Matt. Thank you, Bert. I have one more thing to share with you all about what we do with the watershed focus monitoring program. After we look at some of these areas for the different parameters that we sample and look for, we use it to look at neighborhoods. The reason we do this is to see if there are any indicators of pollution based off of neighborhood activities in those areas. In these areas, we also, in drainages, we look for potential generators, which are sites, businesses that don't have a permit, a discharge permit, that could be contributing to some of these water quality results and exceedances of parameters. So, this is all just based off of the water quality results. These are the results from that upland visual assessment where we go in and we look for things such as well-manicured lawns or non-point source irrigation, things that could be contributing to fluoride, nitrate, phosphorus, ammonia, anything like that, not picking up dog waste, broken driveways, or organic matter in the runoff drains or anything of that. Very much of what we are expecting, there were only moderate pollution severities, with one being a high in this neighborhood here. Typically, what constitutes it as moderate is one of the other cracked driveways, lawn clippings in the drains, or dog waste, and each of those neighborhoods had one or the other, but in this neighborhood in particular, there were all three of those, so that spurred it into a high pollution severity. So, those are some easy things that could be corrected in that neighborhood, but this is all based off of a visual assessment, and so it just could be a potential of that being causing either E. coli, nitrate, or ammonia. This is all just an idea of what's going on, and then the potential generators are called out here with these squares, and we looked at five sites here that are named. None of them were confirmed or even severe hot spots, which means that once we went and inspected them, or not, it's not an inspection, but went and observed their site, we saw that none of them were without a doubt contributing to pollution, but there were some things that with few of them that could be contributing to maybe some runoff, some sediments, something along those lines, washing fleet vehicles. Those are just a few things that could be contributing, but they were only potential. None of them were confirmed, and so that's good news for that. Again, very healthy activities in both the neighborhoods and industries and businesses or commercial areas that are not permitted, and with that, I'm going to turn it over to Corey Bloyd, who is going to be talking about the IDDE section of this plan. So good morning, everyone. Mike and Bert just described the various other components of this program and how it starts with a lot of sites spread all across the watershed. The results from all that sampling is then narrowed down to 12 sites used to perform more thorough discharge prevention investigations. We use optical brightener surveys and microbial source tracking to help us identify some illicit discharges. Optical brighteners are dyes that are added to most laundry detergents to increase the brightness of the fabrics. We know that laundry affluence predominantly associated with sanitary wastewater, so the presence of optical brighteners in the stormwater network can indicate an illicit discharge. This method is a simple and inexpensive way to detect wastewater discharges without actually being present during the discharge event. We use the cotton absorption method for this project. This involves deploying unbleached cotton pads in the stormwater network for a period of three days during dry weather. The pads were then retrieved after three days and analyzed under UV light in the lab to determine the presence or absence of optical brightener. So if you take a look at the photo there, this is an example of what a positive optical brightener hit looks like. The picture depicts the positive and negative controls that we use. The positive control cloud on the left was exposed to diluted laundry detergent at a rate comparable to typical laundry discharge. The negative control is just a negative or an unbleached pad rather. As you can see, the positive control actually glows under the UV light. 11 locations were chosen for optical brightener analysis within the East Sigmund watersheds being potential areas with illicit discharges based upon water quality results. We primarily used E. coli, ammonia, detergents, and field observations selection criteria. We also use microbial source tracking for discharge prevention investigations. Microbial source tracking or MST is a set of techniques used to determine the sources of fecal indicator bacteria in the environment. This science is based on the premise that different sources shed different bacteria from the GI tract and the respective feces. The lab is then able to determine what the source of the bacteria in the water is by comparing it to known host-specific biomarkers. Numerous different markers are available for MST analysis. For this watershed, we looked at human, bird, dog, and sewage. We chose the sample locations based upon the water quality results. Basically, this is pretty expensive so only the worst offenders were chosen. Samples were collected from 12 locations including 11 outfalls in one stream. The samples collected during the phase 2 sampling that Mike described previously and then sent on to Source Molecular. It's a specialized lab for further analysis. So now we're going to take a look at some exhibits to detail the results. First map, we're going to look next to the optical brightener. This exhibit details the monitoring locations with the white circle indicating a negative result, red circle indicating a positive. As you can see on the map, two sites were positive suggesting that illicit discharge of wash water is entering the stormwater system during our sampling period. However, both of these positive hits were weak and not suggestive of a significant influence. The next few maps you're going to look at detail the MST results with the first for the human. Once again, white circles are negative, red circles are positive. We ran the human marker for each of the 12 sampling locations. Seven of those 12 samples were positive meaning that fresh human waste was present during the sampling event. The majority of the human results were detected at low concentrations. Only one stream site, EH12, had a moderate level indicating significant input. So what does all this mean? Well, it means that low level human influence is present throughout the watershed but not at levels suggesting a significant input. It's also worth mentioning that this method of MST analysis using the bacteria's DNA means that the bacteria was relatively fresh at the date of the sample collection. The bacteria does not persist in the environment very long. So let's take a look at this sewage marker results. So we ran a sewage specific biomarker that was used in an effort to isolate pipe derived bacteria from the other host specific sources. The host specific sources we ran human, dog, bird. This sewage marker identifies contamination that originates from specific bacteria growing inside the sanitary sewer pipes. As you can see, the sewage marker was detected to some degree at all sites. This data suggests that a connection does exist between the sanitary and storm sewer systems throughout the East Hickman watershed. So five locations were also chosen for the dog marker. We chose these locations based mostly upon E. coli and then also just field observations. Four of the five locations exhibited positive results. However, all were low concentration or positive but not at a quantifiable level. So lastly, let's look at the bird results. We ran the bird biomarker for four sites. As you can see, the bird marker was detected to some degree at each of the four samples although most were not quantifiable or at very low levels. One point I'd like to make about the bird marker is that it's present in a variety of birds including gull, goose, chicken, pigeon, ducks, basically all bird species. So just because you have a bird hit, it does not necessarily mean that the problem is attributed to geese. So with that, I guess we can open up the floor for questions. Jennifer, I'm not sure if any came in or you guys have any? Yes, there's been a couple. Let's see, let me scroll back up. So back to Burt's part on the stream corridor characterization and the amount of finds that were found to be upstream of the reservoir. Do you all think that's potentially due to contributions from past construction site runoff? Yeah, I don't know if I could speak to that necessarily. It could be if the sites were in, how close they were into the reservoir. It could be like the water's backing up and causing some of the sediments to fall out maybe. I'd hate to conjecture on that to be honest with you. That's fair. And then, will the actual data tables be released to the public? I think I can answer that. Yes, they'll be in the technical memorandums that are prepared for each facet of the watershed focused monitoring program. And then, let's see, there's a request to compare data from the late 90s prior to all the construction that happened in the expansion area, the baseline data that was collected by Commonwealth Technology, which was a predecessor to both Third Rock and Tetra Tech, and comparing that to the watershed focused monitoring results from this year. I was involved back in the late 90s, and site selection is probably not completely lined up, but I'm sure there is some overlap of some sites being the same from 20 years ago to what was sampled this past year. So yeah, that's a possibility that that comparison could be made. Yeah, that'd be interesting to take a look at. Steve Evans thinks that prior to us really ramping up, the city ramping up its construction site inspection program that finds from construction activities could have probably made their way to the reservoir. All right. I don't see any other questions. Anybody else have one? Okay, here we go. What would you recommend as the top three most important and effective efforts that will get the watershed to meet our water quality standards? That is a great question. I don't know if I can really categorize them or rank them based off of importance or effectiveness. One thing for nitrates, ammonia, things like that is maybe changing the amount of application of fertilizer. That's really most likely one of the biggest contributors to some of these exceedances we've seen. Another thing could be, which Lexington does already, is just continuing to look for illicit discharges and continuing those investigations for infrastructure breaks and things along that nature. When things get old, they break and that goes the same with sewage and water lines. I would say those are two of the big things I can think of off the top of my head. TSS wasn't an issue, but with everything, stream restoration and increasing riparian buffer zones are great for infiltration of some of those parameters into the stream and runoff. Not only does it look better, but it does serve a purpose with that. Those are just three things off the top of my head which could benefit this watershed and every watershed. Ken Cook recommended a fourth component, and that's the completion of the sanitary sewers remedial measure projects. I certainly second that. Thank you all very much. That was very informative. We will also share this same presentation at an event that will be sponsored by the Hickman Creek Conservancy at some point this summer or early fall. This presentation will be made available again in the future. Thank you, everybody. So next we have Ken Cook who's with Friends of Wolf Run. He is going to talk us through some issues that he's seen with the claysmill widening project and some other projects in the Wolf Run watershed. And he's promised to keep this brief, so Ken, take it away. Basically, we think that erosion and sediment control is very important, particularly because of the sediment impacts on streams. You can go to the next slide now. We have a Get the Dirt Out campaign where we train volunteers to monitor erosion and sediment control. No, not that slide. Back one, please. Thank you. In Lexington, I do think that we do have a very robust erosion sediment control program in terms of the standards that have been developed and published in the stormwater design manuals, the amount of training and information that's available to residential and commercial construction, and to actually what we see on the ground. And I think that's primarily because of a very robust inspection program that's sponsored by the Division of Water Quality in terms of Gabe Hensley's group and other folks and the diligence of the Building Industry Association in training its members and other commercial organizations stepping up to do the right thing. Now you can go to the next slide with the but, Jennifer. But we had an occasion last, about a week ago, to look at a LFUCG, I think it's an LFUCG capital project, the widening of Clay's Mill Road in terms of the erosion sediment control practices that we observed at that time. We had spoil piles with no toe protection, we had extensive dirt on pavement, we had no inlet protection, and lots of areas of exposed soil. Next slide please. And we've observed this at other LFUCG projects in the past where we would see standards that any commercial or residential development probably would be tagged for, but we had difficulty in terms of achieving compliance with the contractors on LFUCG capital projects. Next slide please. And for, you know, some, just the basic standards, these are some LFUCG capital projects that we had photographed in the past. Tree protection was an issue in a lot of them, we had construction entrance issues, perimeter control. What you're seeing here is just some examples of capital projects. I've got the Town Bridge Trail project, lower right, we have some sanitary sewers, remedial measure plans projects on the lower right, on the lower left. I do think that if we complain about it, and we do get the attention of upper management within LFUCG, these issues can be addressed. So if I get Director Burton's attention, or if I get Director Martin's attention, we can get some remedial measures to protect some of this. But next slide please, Jennifer. Hold on, I'm going to reload that. Okay, very good. So just to discuss while she's loading the illustrations, we've looked at some of these LFUCG projects, and in terms of the quality and the control on these things. And I would attribute this issue to two different components. And the issue number one, let's go on down to the slide six please. Can you see it? I can see it, that's fine, just leave it like that. Basically, the first is LFUCG, I believe, has a capital project self-inspection policy, where the engineer in charge of the particular capital project does their own inspection. There's usually three levels of inspection that occur. The contractor is supposed to have a certified inspection, then there's generally a third-party inspector that inspects the construction standards, and then the engineer, he or herself, is supposed to do it. But there's no outside entity looking at it that I would say has the trained eye that our division of water quality inspectors have, or that somebody from like Tetra Tech, or if you got Barry Tonning out on the site, or something along that line. So I think we need to examine our self-inspection policy. The second thing is a misinterpretation, in my opinion, of the self-exemptions from the post-construction rules. We find this encoded in our stormwater quality manual in section 132 and section 133, where water quality and water quantity components do not apply to LFUCG capital projects, and the same thing with stormwater capital projects. I have had opportunity to discuss with some contracting engineers, and they said, well, LFUCG is exempt, is the answer that I have received, and we immediately had to correct them that the exemption for post-construction controls does not include chapter 11 erosion sediment controls, because Lexington capital projects are still subject to the KYR 10 stormwater erosion sediment control programs that the state has. So this is what I would like to request, is that we have a discussion at a future meeting. Go to the next slide, please, Jennifer. And this applies directly to our PPMO, pollution prevention for municipal operations, and there is a section in our permit that addresses this. Next slide, please, or is that it on that? So this is a video, if you can run it. This was an LFUCG capital project. This condition for this silt fence probably lasted about a week before it was fixed on complaint, and so I do think that we need to get some fresh eyes on LFUCG capital projects, and we need to look at their erosion sediment control compliance standards. That's what I'd like to request the group discuss at another meeting. I understand that LFUCG has a report on that, and I understand that LFUCG has a response to my request. Did I do it under four minutes? I don't know. I wasn't timing you. I was too busy worrying about the technology, but Doug Burton, are you on here and available? Yeah, so I can address the Clay's Mill. In short, we, and by the, I mean we, I mean the collective we, which is ATS, the contractor, our inspector, which in this case is KYTC, and engineering screwed up. We were in such a hurry to get the road closed and all the logistics associated with that so we can get this section of roadway done during the summer months that the ESC wasn't done properly, and we've made corrections to that, and we'll continue to have oversight over that in a tighter eye in the future. So I think that was the exception to the rule on most of our projects, but again, sometimes we get a foot on the gas to get projects done quickly, and we're not infallible, and we made a mistake here. They fixed it. I noticed that they did a lot of mulching. They put some inlet protection out, and they did some tow protection around the spoil piles. So yes, it was addressed, and it's interesting that Kentucky Transportation Cabinet is, are URAL's ESC inspectors? No, they are the site inspectors, period. Oh, period, okay, and that would include the erosion sediment control provisions? Correct. They have the same training that our inspectors have. They actually sat through training that Jennifer puts on, so they have the same training as everyone else has. Okay. All right, Charlie, are you still with us? I am still here. Ken, I'm curious, is that you know, last year we had a similar conversation, and we had acknowledged that, and you know, in December of last year, I sent you a fairly a 10-page response to various things that you were concerned about on DE, and in part of that, we talked about having a third party for erosion and sediment control, and we also talked about tree protection, and kind of outlined the changes that we were making in those areas, particularly with erosion and sediment control. We do have a third party now that is actually a former member of Gabe's group, who's basically my secret shopper, and who's visiting the site once a week on Bob Peterson and my behalf, and then also with the tree protection thing, by bringing John Saylor and his group in to be more proactive about it, and so I was a little surprised to see this, because I thought that you and I had already kind of scaled that wall a little bit six months ago. Well, I think in the sanitary sewer D&E, you have addressed these issues, but if you look at the Clay's Mill Road project, for example, and if you look at the Town Branch Trail project, for example, the ESC and those capital projects is what I would say below community standards that we enforce on commercial and residential construction projects, so the overall project is not fixed. The fact that I had in my archives some photographs from the sanitary sewer remedial measures B and C was just, sorry about that, but it was the condition on the field and it was very difficult to get that addressed at that time, but for sanitary sewers remedial measures, yes, I think you have addressed that for your newer sections. Okay, well, that's fair. Like I said, you know as well as I do, it's an ongoing battle, and like I said, I appreciate you and your group as far as helping us being another set of eyes out there on that. Director Burton and I will work together to try to see how water quality can further support their capital projects in order to be able to make the same kind of improvements that we seem to have made on the the RMP projects. Right, and I want to take just a few minutes to refute some of the comments that Ken made on his last three slides. Our stormwater manual is not just about the post-construction program element, but it also covers the construction site stormwater runoff control program element, and those are both program elements of our MS-4 permit, and the stormwater manual spells out the requirements for new development and redevelopment and also capital projects as it pertains to both of those program elements. So the first assertion is that LFU CG capital project self-inspection protocols aren't working. I would like to share with the group that we have significant permitting inspection and enforcement procedures, we call them the PI procedures, for not only how our compliance and monitoring ESD inspectors do their jobs, but also on DWQ capital projects and DOE capital projects. These two snapshots at the bottom are just the first page of each of those capital project PI procedures, and they talk about who's involved, the permitting procedures, the contractor's responsibility, and then the inspection procedures that are to be done by LFU CG's representative, which we call the resident project representative or RPR. So it's very detailed, it's very spelled out, and it's very similar to what our compliance and monitoring inspectors are doing when they go to any construction site that's a part of a new development or redevelopment project. And then it also spells out the enforcement procedures that we will take against the contractor if they fail to adequately address erosion and sediment control. And then our self-inspection, we adequately train all of the folks who are allowed to do compliance inspections. We have individualized training for the compliance and monitoring group, we have a separate training just for the DOE capital projects staff and consultants, and then we have a third round of training for division of water quality capital projects staff and consultants each year. This occurs in the fall, typically in October, it's a very busy month for us in terms of making sure that everyone's trained, and the important aspect to this is an inspector's inspections do not count for our MS-4 permit requirements and documentation if they have not received the annual training. So these folks are seeing the same messaging year after year after year. We go through the pie procedures, we go through the fundamentals of various erosion and sediment control BMPs, how they should be placed, what to look for on an ESC plan or in a SWIP, so it's a very thorough training session. And then the second assertion that the self-exemption that LFU-CEG is exempting itself from its own rules the two parts of the manual that were referenced regarding roadway capital projects and stormwater capital projects, that pertains just to the post-construction stormwater requirements, and that is truly because of the nature of those types of projects. And in fact, if you look at the sections 1.6 and 1.7, that those two sections are 1.6 and 1.7 that those two sections refer to, those cover the stormwater quantity and quality requirements for new development projects. And if you take a further look, on the left is that page about that has the snippet about the roadway capital projects and stormwater capital projects, but at the bottom in section 1.3.6 in regard to construction projects, it says that all construction projects, and that includes LFU-CEG capital projects, are subject to Chapter 11 on erosion and sediment control. So the post-construction is a different animal than the construction site stormwater runoff control, and as far as LFU-CEG is concerned, any construction project in Fayette County is required to have erosion and sediment control on that construction site. And then concerning the education of contractors, we have updated our specifications that are included in all construction contracts, but we also discuss the importance of erosion and sediment control with all potential contractors for a project at the pre-bid meeting. We discuss this again with the contractor who is awarded the contract at the pre-construction meeting, and then if it's needed, we will certainly discuss and hammer on appropriate erosion and sediment control during construction progress meetings throughout the course of construction. So I just wanted to clear up some of those assertions that were made and hope that's been helpful, and Kim, I see you've got your hand raised. I do. I'll be brief. We're at 11 o'clock. Basically, first is I do think that the policies and the programs you all have in writing are adequate in terms of the training, the inspection, and the requirements, but when it comes to what happens on the ground, I would encourage you to just walk the town branch trail project that's going on between Forbes Road and the Lexington Center and tell me that that is compliant with KYR 10 and with what we have in Chapter 11. And then, of course, the Clay's Mill Road project, which triggered my reaction here. We had to complain about that to get that. So yes, in writing and what we have in published is good, but when it gets to the field, it's the self-inspection on the day of the construction. And the second on the post-construction stuff, I think it's a misinterpretation of those provisions that make some engineers and some inspectors think that they are exempt. And so that's the component on that. So thank you very much for the opportunity to bring this up. I do think we will discuss it further if we have an opportunity. Okay. Sounds good. Todd, are you still with us? Yes, ma'am. All right. You want to wrap things up for us? Sure. Appreciate everybody's presentations today. And Ken, thanks for keeping that brief as you promised that you would do. And it's an important topic. And like you said, maybe we'll have an opportunity to talk about it later. Are there any other potential topics for the next meeting that anyone would want to throw out for consideration before we wrap up today? Hearing none, well, wait a minute. Could I just take the opportunity to invite folks? We are conducting a tour of stream restoration projects and greenway restoration projects this afternoon from 1.30 to 4.30 in the Wolf Run Watershed and working with Friends of Wolf Run on that project. We still have about five slots left. If folks would like to join us, we'll be meeting at 1.30 in front of Don Wilson Music on Southland Drive. So we arranged really nice weather for you. And hopefully folks can come out and enjoy a day away from a computer screen. Very good. Anything else topic-wise or anything else that anyone would like to share before we wrap up? I've got just a couple of announcements. The Class B infrastructure grant applications are due on Friday, July 31st. On Thursday, July 8th, the Water Quality Fees Board will be meeting in person at 9 a.m. and they will be selecting the Class A and Class B education grant recipients for fiscal year 2022. Our next meeting on September the 3rd, I think it is, will also be in person. And then the Kentucky Stormwater Association is holding its annual convention in Lexington on July 14th through the 16th at the Marriott City Center downtown. Early bird registration ends a week from today and Don Blevins is going to be the keynote speaker at that convention talking about the Water Quality Management Fee and how it came to be and how it has supported the stormwater program in Lexington. And then the agenda is chock full of great projects that have been done in Lexington. So a lot of local consultants and city staff will be very involved in that convention and it's going to be a great showcase for the good work that we've been doing here in Lexington. All right, thank you. Anything else? Hearing none, just need a motion for adjournment and we'll be on our way to a beautiful weekend hopefully. Surely somebody can so move to adjourn. Thank you all, have a great weekend. Thanks for participating. Thanks everyone. Thank you.