What's happening in the City of Surrey
In November 2007, the Capital Regional District hosted a full-day workshop titled Bio/Infiltration: Tools for Rainwater Management. Organized under the umbrella of the Stormwater, Harbours and Watersheds Program, the workshop emphasis was on municipal implementation, particularly funding, bylaws and other tools available to municipalities to work towards innovative rainwater management.
The workshop featured case studies from both sides of the Georgia Basin, thereby facilitating a sharing of experiences. To read the complete story, click on Rainwater Management in the Georgia Basin: Capital Regional District workshop celebrates on-the-ground successes.
What’s happening in Surrey
According to Remi Dube, Drainage Planning Manager, the City of Surrey has been quietly plugging away at finding an answer to one of today’s most important questions in urban rainwater management: ‘How can we accommodate forecasted growth while achieving community liveability, urban stream health and environmental protection outcomes at a watershed scale.’
Remi’s presentation highlighted the City’s key milestones in the field of rainwater/stormwater management from the East Clayton Sustainable Community Plan to the most recent watershed-based integrated plan for the Fergus Creek watershed. These plans were developed and implemented while the City experienced an average population growth of 2.5% per year including a peak year of 3.4% in 2006. Key components of how the City currently develops its plans as well as current design and implementation examples were discussed.
To download a copy of his presentation, click on this link to What's happening in Surrey.
Fergus Creek Integrated Plan:
The Fergus Plan is the pilot for going Beyond the Guidebook.There are two precedent-setting dimensions to the pilot:
- There will be no large-scale storage ponds. Rather, rainwater runoff volume will be managed through constructed facilities and the creation of contiguous large-scale greenways that have been integrated into the area’s land use plan.
- Because a science-based analytical methodology has been validated through the Fergus Creek process, other local governments can now explore the fundamental requirements both explicit and implicit in the DFO Guidelines for stream health and environmental protection.
The Fergus Creek watershed is a case study for both green field and retrofit scenarios. According to Remi Dubé, “Fergus is the first of the new generation of ISMPs that the City is undertaking. Our goal has been to develop an arr
ay of tools under the umbrella of the Fergus ISMP. Because we wished to avoid a cookie-cutter approach that is too often an outcome of this type of multi-year program, we challenged the consulting engineering community to demonstrate their innovation in providing us with a work plan that would actually facilitate changes in how land is developed and/or re-developed in Surrey.”
The Fergus Plan was featured as part of Showcasing Innovation in the City of Surrey in 2006. This was the second event in the pilot series for the Celebrating Green Infrastructure Program.
Posted August 2008
Originally posted on the Green Infrastructure Community-of-Interest in December 2007