|
Mt. Juliet Pervious Concrete Parking System Communities all across Tennessee are designing new strategies to deal with a big problem – storm water runoff. The cities of Mt. Juliet and Lebanon and the county in which they are located - Wilson County - are experiencing rapid growth. These local governments are taking a pro-active and unified approach to their storm water issues by seeking to encourage businesses, developers and contractors to employ storm water practices that reduce total runoff, improve water quality for the community, and ease demands on public storm water infrastructure
The typical engineering practice employed to deal with storm water in has been a retention or detention pond. The intent of such ponds is to capture the surge of storm water immediately following a rain event and slow down the rate of release of the captured water such that the impact of the peak flow on downstream residents is minimized. Ponds can be effective in addressing these issues, but they do nothing to minimize the amount of storm water produced from impervious surfaces and they do little to address the quality of the water that eventually works its way into our streams, lakes and water supplies.
After learning about pervious concrete and the options it provides for storm water management, Mt. Juliet, Lebanon and Wilson County have adopted some innovative measures to encourage the use of pervious surfaces as part of their storm water management strategy. According to Storm Water Coordinator for Mt. Juliet, Mr. Gary Gaskin: “We want to partner with business and development interest to insure that they are successful in Mt. Juliet, and we want them to be engaged in helping our city have cleaner water. We like pervious concrete surfaces because they don’t produce stormwater runoff and projects that utilize pervious concrete correctly don’t burden our public stormwater conveyance systems.”
The first Mt. Juliet project to utilize pervious concrete is the About Face Center for Oral, Maxillofacial and Implant Surgery, located north of Interstate 40 on Highway 171. The contractor for the renovation project – J & K Construction – reports that the owner chose pervious concrete instead of the traditional asphalt pavement for a good reason: pervious concrete was the best financial option.
According to James Martin of J & K Construction, the installation of a traditional, impervious parking lot would have required the owner to pay a one-time user fee for stormwater produced on his property. But the greatest cost for the owner would have been the construction of a storm water inlet structure to catch the runoff and direct it into the county storm sewer system – the cost for this structure alone was estimated to be $14,000.
The savings from utilizing pervious concrete didn’t stop here. Mt. Juliet is now assessing an annual storm water fee based on the square footage of impervious surface for commercial projects. The rate for this fee is currently set at $.10 per square foot of impervious surface per year. Since pervious concrete eliminates runoff, Mt. Juliet does not consider pervious concrete surfaces to be subject to the annual fee. This saves About Face more than $500 per year in storm water fees.
Storm Water Coordinator Gary Gaskin of Mt. Juliet, and his counterpart in Lebanon, James Vaden, note another benefit for pervious concrete. Storm water-related fees for projects like About Face are generally waived when they use pervious concrete. Besides saving money, this speeds up approval time for the projects – another significant benefit for contractors and owners.
Pervious concrete is helping Mt. Juliet, Lebanon and Wilson County reduce storm water runoff by eliminating it at the source, and it is providing the About Face office with an attractive, all-weather parking surface for its customers while saving tax dollars every year. Just another example of a concrete providing a win-win solution for Tennessee communities!
|
