By Page H. Gifford
Correspondent
Mitigating flood damage and managing watersheds has been difficult to overcome in recent years. With stronger storms delivering more rain, there is nowhere for all this water to go. Newer subdivisions have been using retention ponds and incorporating drainage into their infrastructure, including sidewalks, where the runoff is channeled to prevent property damage. Subdivisions built earlier, including Sycamore Square and Nahor Village, set the design standard for controlling water run-off. But these are not perfect solutions either.
Lake Monticello and its property owners have been battling water run-off and destruction for decades. Once the Lake was built out, the problems worsened with parts of the roads and driveways even being washed away. Retention ponds were an option that the Lake had taken advantage of in areas like The Acres. The way houses were built and situated, one on a hill and another in a bowl, sometimes contributed to the problem. This causes disputes with neighbors.
Property owners have asked the Lake for help and relief, but since it is private property, there is little the Lake can do. These ongoing struggles between LMOA and its members continue, with property owners citing LMOA’s infrastructure as the source of the problem.
Lake Monticello Facilities and Operations (F&O) and the Facilities and Lake Operations Committee (FLOC) are examining the watershed in the community. But one way for residents to manage waters issues on their properties is to take advantage of the Virginia Conservation Assistance Program.
The Virginia Conservation Assistance Program (VCAP) is an urban cost-share program that provides financial incentives and technical and educational assistance to property owners installing eligible Best Management Practices (BMPs) in Virginia’s participating Soil and Water Conservation Districts (SWCDs).
BMPs can be installed in areas of a property owner’s yard where problems like erosion, poor drainage, or poor vegetation occur.
One property owner’s issue with run-off is a larger problem for Virginia. According to the EPA, Nonpoint Source Pollution is the leading cause of water quality problems. Rainfall or snow melt from suburban lawns, golf courses, and paved surfaces picks up and carries away natural and human-made pollutants, depositing them into lakes, rivers, wetlands, coastal waters, and ground waters.
Roads, parking lots, sidewalks, homes, and offices replaced natural landscapes. Rainfall that once soaked into vegetated ground now becomes storm-water runoff, which flows directly into local waterways.
As more natural landscapes are converted to impermeable surfaces or managed turf, storm-water moves across them, carrying pollutants such as sediment and nutrients to vulnerable streams and rivers. Those storm drains built into the streets, to lessen property damage, do not provide any sort of water filtration.
Virginia’s Watershed Implementation Plan (WIP) for the Chesapeake Bay identifies that urban/suburban runoff is contributing pollution indirectly, and efforts to retroactively address storm-water runoff from existing impervious surfaces are a priority. For more information about how residents, not only in Fluvanna County subdivisions but throughout the county, can help, visit https://www.epa.gov/nps/basic-information-about-nonpoint-source-nps-pollution.
VCAP is an opportunity to help property owners do their part to improve water quality. They can help restore problem areas, control and minimize erosion, and re-vegetate bare slopes, conserve water within the landscape, improve riparian buffer areas, promote wildlife habitats, stabilize drainage directions, and treat stormwater runoff.
Eligible practices can include conservation landscaping, rain gardens, constructed wetlands, permeable pavement, and removing impermeable surfaces, and more about these options and others can be found at https://vaswcd.org/vcap/#.
For more information and details about the program, visit https://vaswcd.org/vcap/.
