Verona's request to prepare the southwest side of the city for development took a big step forward Monday.
It's hard to say how much farther it has left to go, however.
A committee charged with evaluating stormwater standards all over Dane County has all but finished its work, setting the stage for Verona's application to finally get a vote at the Capital Area Regional Planning Commission as soon as next month. The commission's Environmental Resources Technical Advisory Committee held its final meeting Monday and will be forwarding its four-page recommendation to CARPC after all of its members have given it a final look.
ERTAC, which comprises a wide range of academic experts and as environmental specialists working and retired from the state and private industry, was given six months to evaluate the state standards and decide whether CARPC should ask for more from new development.
The good news for Verona is the proposed new standard, ready more than a month early, is essentially what the city had proposed in August, based on a consultant's two-year study of the area. The bad news is CARPC commissioners could still find it insufficient that close to the Sugar River and ask for extra provisions.
It could also be bad news for developers and municipalities all over in Dane County, because ERTAC recommends the much more stringent standard be applied everywhere and not just to new development areas. CARPC is expected to formally consider the policy change in April after a public hearing.
"The TAC also recommends that the Dane County Board also adopt this more stringent volume control standard, so that it is applied to all new development within Dane County and not only to new urban service areas," the report says.
Current state rules require that commercial developments keep 60 percent of pre-development runoff volume on the site, meaning 40 percent of the rainwater can pour back into the nearest stream or lake. The proposed standard raises that to 90 percent and recommends it be applied not just on relatively low land-use developments like business parks but also in residential developments, strip malls and almost any other construction that isn't redevelopment of an existing site.
There is a also an existing provision, typically referred to as a "cap," that such developments can fall short of that requirement if they devote 2 percent of their site to specifically engineered infiltration basins and ensure that a certain amount of that stormwater permeates the soil and returns to (or "recharges") the groundwater. An example of such an infiltration basin is the overflow channel in the Scenic Ridge subdivision next to the bypass.
After a legal fight with the county, the state Department of Natural Resources and CARPC's predecessor in 2005, Verona agreed to do a two-year, $90,000 study of the area southwest of the city (known as the Badger Mill Creek-Sugar River area because of the confluence of the two rivers) before proposing any new development there. The city completed that study in 2008 and submitted its request, known as an urban service area amendment, last year.
The study recommended that Verona impose much stricter standards than normal in that area - rather than keeping 60 percent of the runoff on site with a 2 percent cap, developers would need to engineer the site so it would retain 90 percent, with a 2 percent cap. But CARPC staff, noting the sensitivity of the Sugar River to added water volumes, argued in its staff report that the city should require 100 percent with no cap.
Rupiper said that because the standard would be watershed-wide, a particularly challenging site could be balanced with a much less challenging site or one that's developed solely for stormwater management. In other words, even if landowner Dean Health Systems builds a highly developed area full of parking lots and rooftops north of Valley Road, it could buy an area to the south and engineer it to control even more water than the site had been before it was developed.
That creates a tremendous amount of flexibility, CARPC environmental engineer Mike Rupiper said.
"As long as what you're ultimately sending collectively to the watershed is the same or meeting the standard, it doesn't matter if one area is a little bit more," Rupiper said.
After all, it's overall volume that has been one of the most important stated concerns all along, to control streambank erosion and keep from harming habitats.
"That's the goal," Rupiper said.
Still, the city decided in October not to go beyond what its consultant recommended and wait for ERTAC to essentially mediate the issue.
If there's consensus on the policy change, it wouldn't have to be formally adopted for Verona's request to be approved. City planning director Bruce Sylvester said ERTAC's proposed rules are "reasonable" and that he doesn't find the determination objectionable as long as it's a uniform standard.
"The rule should apply equally to everyone," he said.
