Thousands of dollars in rebates are available for commercial businesses, owners of apartment complexes and other large-scale property owners who want to help reduce the amount of pollutant-laden stormwater runoff reaching two Wilmington watersheds.
The city in January launched a green infrastructure cost-share rebate program, one intended to further boost ongoing efforts to cut down on the amount of runoff that flows from rooftops and other impervious surfaces during rainfall and into creeks and waterways directly downstream.
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This new program specifically targets Bradley Creek and Hewletts Creeks watersheds, which collectively span a little more than 21 square miles and include connections to two Atlantic Intracoastal Waterway drainage areas.
Local government programs like New Hanover County Soil & Water Conservation District’s that focus on helping residents install nature-based features like rain gardens and cisterns, and host rain barrel sales, have become increasingly popular, said Anna Reh-Gingerich, watershed coordinator of Wilmington Stormwater Service’s Heal Our Waterways Program.
“We have waitlists and people are seeking out site visits, which is awesome, but we’re also trying to reach those commercial properties, those high-density developments and HOA (homeowners associations) properties to make sure that everybody has access to these resources too,” she said.
The cost-share program offers rebates up to $10,000 for eligible projects where property owners go above and beyond what the state mandates them to manage runoff from their properties.
“This is for going above that so that we can actually reduce the total volume of stormwater runoff rather than just maintain the status quo,” Reh-Gingerich said.
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For example, a commercial business owner who replaces an existing parking lot of impervious pavement with a pervious surface or installs a pervious parking lot as part of a new development, would qualify, depending on the size of the project.
That’s just one of many options from which property owners can choose. Properties with room for larger-scale projects might consider installing a rain garden that includes native plants or constructing a wetland.
Install a cistern above or below the ground to capture stormwater runoff and use the water to irrigate greenspace. Remove an old concrete pad, slab or patio to create more greenspace, “because you’re removing impervious surface, which creates stormwater runoff,” Reh-Gingerich said.
There is also the option of installing a green roof, which has vegetation on it that helps soak in rain. A stormwater runoff mitigation method not common in the area, but one Reh-Gingerich said is included as an option in the city’s stormwater manual.
“It is cost-share so we do want property owners to invest in the projects that they’re putting in, but we want to offer a little bit of additional funding to help them make it happen,” Reh-Gingerich said.
The city has a brochure detailing the cost-share breakdown.
Reh-Gingerich estimates that the annually funded program will help fund about two projects each year.
These projects help implement further the Bradley and Hewletts Creeks Watershed Restoration Plan the Wilmington City Council adopted in 2012.
The plan was created by the city in the mid-2000s in partnership with Wrightsville Beach, the University of North Carolina Wilmington’s Center for Marine Science, Withers & Ravenel Engineers, and the North Carolina Coastal Federation, which publishes Coastal Review, in response to heavily degraded water quality in the creeks.
Bradley Creek’s water quality has been impaired since the mid-1940s, according to the plan. Much of shellfish harvesting has been closed for decades in Hewletts Creek, the watershed of which by 2021 had about 25% impervious surface coverage and a population of about 20,000, according to a North Carolina Department of Environmental Quality report.
But efforts to reduce pollution in the watershed by reducing the amount of runoff going into the creek have been paying off, according to that report.
A North Carolina Division of Marine Fisheries Sanitary Survey from 2016 until 2021 noted that while shellfish harvesting in Hewletts Creek is prohibited, “significant strides have been made in reducing fecal coliform impacts,” the report states.
“Fecal counts at sampled sites have gone from tens of thousands of colony-forming units (CFU) per 100 milliliters (mL) in pre-2006 to the hundreds or tens of CFU/100 mL in the 2016-2021 sampling period, with some sites meeting the state coastal standard of 14 CFU/100 mL fairly consistently,” according to that report.
Quarterly sampling at four tidal sites on the creek coordinated by Dr. Michael Mallin, a professor at UNCW’s Center for Marine Science, substantiate water quality improvements in the creek. That sampling has occurred since 2007.
“It’s important to continue to do what we can on land because we all live downstream of each other and we’re all connected by the way that water flows,” Reh-Gingerich said. “So, what we can do to improve our stormwater footprint, the more that we can help protect these resources for years to come.”
UNCW, the largest landowner in the Bradley Creek watershed, has partnered with the Coastal Federation to install nearly half a dozen rain gardens and retrofit a number of parking lots since 2019.
Mad Mole Brewing has tapped the university as a resource for interns to help figure out how to reduce stormwater runoff coming from the property off Boathouse Road near Bradley Creek.
The business received funds through an U.S. Environmental Protection Agency Section 319 Nonpoint Source Management Program grant awarded to UNCW to remove portions of impervious pavement from its parking lot and refill those areas with permeable pavers, explained Dano Ferons, Mad Mole’s operations manager.
“Our building has four downspouts in the back and two in the front and that runoff just goes straight out into Bradley’s Creek,” he said. “The goal is to get that first inch of rainfall from the roof into the permeable pavers up against the downspouts and then the rest of the parking lot could collect that first inch down at the end of the driveway.”
To capture that amount of runoff, they will have the parking slots at the two downspouts on the front of the building ripped up and replaced with the permeable pavers. A strip of pavers will be installed across an end of the parking lot to infiltrate rain water that flows across the lot.
The project, which is expected to be underway later this year, will cost about $10,000, Ferons said.
“But of that $10,000 we’re not responsible for any monetary valuation. Our entire contribution is going to be education, employee time and on-site resources,” he said.
Next on his list is figuring out how to best mitigate runoff coming from the downspouts on the back of the building, a project that would potentially be eligible for the city’s cost-share rebate program.
“We’ve got a curb back there in a private alley behind the building and [our intern] is going to see if we can knock out part of the curb and put a swale in,” Ferons said. “I’m not sure if we’ll be allowed to do that so the other option that we’re looking at is cutting the pipes and running them into rain barrels and then rigging up a pump system and making a rain garden out the back of the brewery in that same swale area. Then we would have a whole other area that we could put a rain barrel or potentially divert the downspout and use it for water around the grounds.”
