Neenah allowed housing developer Leon Church to build an unconventional stormwater system at The Cottages at Woodside Green in 2007. Vande Hey said ponds tend to be the most cost-effective stormwater management tool for complying with state and federal water-quality standards, but green infrastructure like infiltration beds, rain gardens, biofilters, permeable pavement and grass ditches also can play an important role. ![]() Neenah estimates it will spend $4 million on stormwater projects in the next five years. The daunting news is that communities may need to double that percentage again in the next 20 to 30 years, at a significant cost, to ensure Wisconsin's waterways are fishable and swimmable.Īppleton spent $11.8 million on stormwater construction projects this year, and its 2015-19 capital improvements plan calls for spending another $43 million. "In some ways, we probably doubled what we were removing in a 20-year period." "Today, we're probably in the range of 20 percent to 40 percent," he said. Nick Vande Hey, a senior project engineer with McMahon of Neenah, estimates that in the late 1990s and early 2000s, communities were removing 5 percent to 20 percent of the sediment carried by stormwater. The proliferation of stormwater ponds has cost taxpayers and developers millions of dollars - Appleton alone values its ponds at more than $23 million - but they are working as intended. Today, dozens of stormwater ponds pock the urban landscape, storing the runoff to prevent flooding and to allow the pollutants to settle before the water continues downstream. Rainwater and melting snow flushed oil, fertilizer and debris from city streets, driveways and parking lots and carried the pollutants directly into streams, rivers and lakes. Twenty years ago, the Fox Cities were void of stormwater detention ponds.
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