All photos courtesy of Lois Vitt Sale
Vitt Sale has invested in green infrastructure on her property, including rain barrels and a green roof, visible here.
By Lois Vitt Sale, chief sustainability officer, Wight and Company - July 22, 2013
In 2004, I had a green roof installed on my one-story attached garage. Since then, over time, I’ve added four 65-gallon rain barrels, a series of perennial gardens and finally, two years ago, a rain garden. Why? Because I like these features and I believe in practicing what I preach at work. I’m an architect and chief sustainability officer for Wight & Company.
Vitt Sale's green roof on the garage captures stormwater before it has a chance to run into the gutter.
I live in Downers Grove, Ill., about 20 miles west of Chicago. For several years I was a commissioner on our Environmental Concerns Commission where I first learned of our village’s decision to levy a stormwater impact fee to help fund stormwater management projects. Like many other communities, our village has their share of flooding issues. Ongoing projects to increase the capacity of the stormwater infrastructure are underway. They also have a portfolio of green infrastructure projects, the latest being a pervious street, which lets water soak into the street rather than runoff into sewers, in the heart of the downtown. The stormwater fee is geared toward financing the continued investment in our infrastructure to abate our flooding issues.
With the rollout of the stormwater fee, Downers Grove also introduced an incentive program to reward residents who have invested in their own suite of best practices to mitigate stormwater on their property and to encourage residents to add more features like rain gardens and rain barrels in the future. At the time the program was introduced, I looked at the application and promptly set it aside. I’m not very fond of paper work.
The rain garden on Vitt Sale's property helps water infiltrate into the soil instead of running off into sewers.
Fast forward nearly a year, and the topic of stormwater incentive programs was raised in an advisory team meeting I was asked to attend as a member of Metropolitan Planning Council (MPC)’s Sensible Growth Committee. At our meeting, I had to confess that while I praised our village for having an incentive program, I hadn’t even applied! Fresh with my embarrassment, I pulled out the application from under a pile and looked more closely. Maybe it was because it was spring and everything looked good in the garden, but I was able to take some decent pictures of my rain garden (freshly cleaned up) and green roof, as well as my four barrels. Armed with photographic evidence and a completed application that only took an hour to fill out, I turned in the paperwork and waited to see what kind of incentive we would receive.
Within a few weeks, we received an email from the village reporting the incentive we were awarded: $25 for a rain barrel (incentive available for only one), $250 for the rain garden and $300 for the green roof. The incentive amounted to a waiver of our stormwater utility bill for five years! $575 dollars for an hour’s work is a good wage. No, it doesn’t cover the first cost of the investments I have made over the years, but it covers 25 percent of the cost of a rain barrel and almost 30 percent of the cost of the rain garden.
I’m a happy camper. I’m putting the water where it needs to go and I have been rewarded with a five-year waiver on my stormwater utility bill. Thanks to MPC for shining the light on this topic.
Lois Vitt Sale, AIA, LEED Fellow, is Chief Sustainability Officer for Wight & Company and a practicing architect with a long history of sustainable planning in the public and private sectors. Lois serves as a professional volunteer on MPC’s Sensible Growth Committee.