Low Impact Development
How the Issue Affects Water Quality
 According to a 2001 EPA report entitled Our Built and Natural Environment, “Water quality [in many rivers and streams] is degraded to a point where those water bodies can no longer support basic uses such as fishing and swimming, and cannot be relied upon as sources of clean drinking water.” Increasing impervious cover – such as pavvement, rooftops, and other surfaces designed to shed water rapidly – is a major cause of water quality degradation. Here’s why:
- Impervious cover causes contaminants such as motor oil, heavy metals, fertilizers, and pet waste to wash directly into streams, resulting in more frequent water quality problems such as algae blooms and bacterial contamination.
- Impervious cover also increases the volume and rate of storm water runoff, leading to larger and more frequent incidents of local flooding.
- Increased flooding leads to physical degradation of streams as floodwaters erode stream banks.
- All of these impacts lead to increased costs for water treatment, accumulation of pollutants in our lakes and rivers, and adverse effects on aquatic life in regions where impervious cover is on the rise.
Low Impact Development – commonly known as LID – refers to practices that reduce the impact of both the development process and the developed landscape on the environment, particularly on rivers and streams, and thereby minimize the impacts of impervious surfaces within a watershed. LID practices include narrower streets, smaller parking lots, rain gardens, bioswales, pervious pavement, and a range of other techniques. To learn more about low-impact development strategies, click here.
How We are Addressing it in the Upstate
Upstate Forever and the Saluda-Reedy Watershed Consortium are actively engaged in finding LID options that will work for our region. In our conversations with developers over the last couple of years, we have found that many developers are interested in using LID techniques, but are deterred by local regulations that make implementing LID difficult or impossible. Our goal in this project area is to change local regulations governing development so as to make LID just as easy to do as conventional development.
 To this end, we have conducted an audit late in 2005 of all development standards governing the amount of pavement used in new developments in Pickens and Greenville counties, from minimum residential street widths to the formulas that determine the required number of parking spaces in commercial developments. [The report is available as a small, web-based file (2 MB) and as a larger, printable document (12 MB)]
We then spent a number of months meeting with community leaders to discuss the findings of the audit as well as assess the prospects for updating the relevant ordinances. Based on the feedback we received, we then convened a roundtable in Greenville County that brought together local government officials and developers with the goal of building consensus on desired changes to pavement-related standards. The first roundtable meeting was in early November 2006, and the group decided to schedule five meetings starting in January 2007 to go through the issues raised in the audit. Click here for more information about the roundtable process.
We are engaged in a parallel process in Pickens County, where a variety of local government officials have expressed strong interest in the audit. We presented the audit findings and the roundtable concept to the Pickens County Planning Commission in October 2006, and they requested that we present it to county council and to a number of additional community leaders as well. We hope to initiate a roundtable process in Pickens County early in 2007 with the support of the planning commission and the council itself.
Despite regulations that can make utilizing LID difficult in parts of the Upstate, there are examples of LID practices being implemented right here in the Upstate. Click here to read more about these examples on our newly developed LID Fact Sheets.
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