Neighbors gather at the Bryant Community Center to hear Joan Nassauer, a University of Michigan professor, talk about water drainage issues. (Photo by the writer.)

On The Chronicle’s first trip to the Bryant Community Center in December 2008, elected officials, the heads of local nonprofits, city and county staff outnumbered residents at a meeting for the southeast Ann Arbor neighborhood. The reverse was true last Thursday evening, when a room full of neighbors filled every seat, gathering to discuss the challenges they share.

Bryant is one of the few clusters of affordable housing in Ann Arbor. It’s also been hit hard by the mortgage crisis – a foreclosed property in the neighborhood at 2 Faust Court, vacant and boarded up, has been targeted as one of the first acquisitions for the county’s new land bank.

The land bank actually dovetails with a widespread problem that affects nearly all residents, which was the focus of Thursday’s meeting: Inadequate drainage and the chronic pooling of water in crawl spaces, basements, yards and streets. Joan Nassauer, a University of Michigan professor of landscape architecture, has remediated sites with similar problems in Flint, Chicago, St. Paul and other areas. She was on hand Thursday to talk about what Bryant residents might do to address their drainage issues.

What a Land Bank Can Do

Nassauer began by noting that the land bank in Genesee County, where the city of Flint is located, is recognized nationally for its work, and includes more than 5,000 properties. Putting property into a land bank can be valuable because it buys time, she said. In fact, time and community care – having volunteers mow the lawns of foreclosed properties, for example – can be a positive substitute for market conditions. “You’ve gained value by using the time well,” Nassauer explained.

The house at 2 Faust Court in the Bryant neighborhood is a vacant, foreclosed property that's being considered for the county's new land bank. (Photo by the writer.)

Land banks are a way to take temporary ownership of tax- or mortgage-foreclosed properties, giving local officials more options to deal with blighted areas. Those options might include demolishing a structure, selling it for rehab to a nonprofit like Habitat for Humanity, or turning it into a community garden. Convinced of these benefits, the Washtenaw County Board of Commissioners authorized formation of a land bank at their July 8 meeting. [See previous Chronicle coverage.]

Property in a land bank might also be used to help remediate environmental problems. Other land banks, for example, have looked at how properties fit into a watershed – if low-lying land could be transformed into a rain garden to manage drainage and stormwater mitigation in an area, that might be the best use for it in a given neighborhood.

Resident Paul Cartman expressed concern about using foreclosed property for stormwater mitigation, saying he wouldn’t want to see affordable housing being sacrificed for that. In the case of 2 Faust Court, it’s not clear if that foreclosed property would even be suitable for addressing drainage problem – it’s on one of the higher elevations in the neighborhood. However, there are other possible options to deal with the neighborhood’s drainage problem, Nassauer said.

She outlined several other projects she’d been involved with in different cities, in which rain gardens and French drains had been used to manage water. While not exactly parallel to the situation at Bryant, they were potentially useful solutions that could be adapted for this neighborhood.

Why All the Water?

The Bryant neighborhood was originally a wetland – developers dealt with that by building drainage ditches (also known as swales) in many backyards. But over time, it’s likely that those ditches have been filled in and aren’t functioning as originally designed, Nassauer said. She asked residents attending Thursday’s meeting whether water problems have gotten worse in the last 5 to 10 years – her question was met with a chorus of “Yes!”

Mary Hinton described how she didn’t originally have a problem with water when she moved to the neighborhood about eight years ago, but over time the standing water got so bad that her driveway started sinking in. She called the city but said they weren’t responsive – until a garbage truck got stuck in front of her house.

To get a closer look at the neighborhood and its drainage issues, last week Nassauer took a walk around Bryant with county treasurer Catherine McClary, who has spearheaded the land bank project. McClary had attended the neighborhood’s December meeting, when the issue of drainage and flooding had been raised. [People attending that meeting also got a firsthand view of the problem – that morning, the roads in the neighborhood were covered with frozen water.] McClary knew that Nassauer had done work with the Genesee County land bank, and asked if the UM professor could lend her expertise locally as well.

On the walk-around, Nassauer was trying to get a sense of the area’s land contours. McClary had provided her with maps of the neighborhood’s soil composition and topography – based on those, Nassauer learned that the northeast corner had clay soil, which doesn’t absorb water well. In that area, you’d expect to find more flooding, she said. What surprised her was that there’s flooding throughout the neighborhood, not just in that section.

Nassauer said she learned from a resident at another neighborhood meeting held last week that when the area was first developed, soil from the northeast sector had been excavated and spread throughout other parts of Bryant, which accounts for the drainage problems. One solution is to punch holes through the clay so that the water can reach the sandy soil below, she said. “It’s like opening the stopper in a bathtub.”

She also noticed that the two streams flowing north out of the neighborhood, and eventually into the Huron River, go under I-94. It’s possible that the culverts carrying the water under I-94 are filled with sediment – if that’s the case, it could be contributing to the problem, she said.

Paul Cartman, a resident of the Bryant neighborhood. (Photo by the writer.)

Other Possible Fixes

Paul Cartman, one of the residents attending Thursday’s meeting, said he had talked to Mike Bergren, the city’s assistant field operations manager, and other city staff who’d told him that soil in the Bryant neighborhood was acidic, and had been eating away at the cast-iron water mains. He reported that the city was planning to replace the mains next summer, and said that while they were at it, they might be able to install edge drains along the roads, too.

Nassauer said that would be good news for the neighborhood, and that they should ask two questions of the city: 1) how would the city get the water in yards, basements and crawl spaces to flow toward the roads and into whatever drains might be installed, and 2) what can the city do to systematically deal with the condition of the backyard swales. It was her understanding that the city didn’t take responsibility for those, Nassauer said, but perhaps now was a good time to be looking at that issue.

Joan Doughty – executive director of the nonprofit Community Action Network (CAN), which has a city contract to manage Bryant Community Center and is facilitating improvements to the neighborhood – said that Jerry Hancock, the city’s stormwater and floodplain programs coordinator, had been at last week’s meeting and had spoken about the water main replacement as a possibility, not a certainty. However, she added that sometimes different departments within the city don’t communicate with each other, so it can be difficult to find out what’s really going on.

Her view was echoed by Susan Baskett, an Ann Arbor Public Schools trustee and Bryant resident, who said she’d had the same experience. She suggested enlisting city councilmembers from Ward 3 – Christopher Taylor and Leigh Greden – to be liaisons in getting information. Jean Carlberg, a former city councilmember for Ward 3, said it was certainly possible to get Jerry Hancock and  Mike Bergren to coordinate. She asked what it would take to get more information about the swales. Doughty said that the city had been ready to throw away old maps of the neighborhood that showed the original swales, but that one of the residents now had them.

Derrick Miller, director of the Bryant Community Center, said this issue highlighted the importance of the survey they were asking residents to complete. The results will be a key element in proving to the city that flooding is a problem. The four-question survey asks residents where and when flooding occurs, whether their homes have mold or mildew, or bubbling of painted areas, and whether anyone in their home has asthma, allergies or other respiratory issues.

To date, about 140 out of 263 households have completed the survey. CAN has tallied 125 of those surveys so far. Of those who answered the drainage-related question, 91% (90 households) experienced flooding in their yards and/or crawl spaces.

Forty-six survey respondents reported someone in their household suffered from asthma or other respiratory problems – that’s 41% of those who answered the question. That’s an incredibly high rate, Doughty noted, saying they plan to ask the county’s public health office to look into the situation.

Regarding the flood-related question, Cartman said that some people might not respond to the survey because of fear that by acknowledging the problem, they’d then be required to pay to fix it – something that not everyone can afford.

Getting feedback from the community about these issues will be an ongoing effort, Doughty said. ”This is a story that’s going to be continued over the next couple of months. We’ll continue this conversation.”

Joan Doughty, executive director of the Community Action Network (CAN), draws a winning raffle ticket from the basket held by Jerene Calhoun, a Bryant neighborhood resident who was leading Thursday's community meeting at Bryant Community Center. At left is Nadia Wong, a UM graduate student and intern with CAN. (Photo by the writer.)

Pat Cody looks a bit cold working on the drilling rig in the Pioneer High School field diagonally across from Michigan Stadium.

When Steve Bean filed a Stopped. Watched. item reporting a drilling rig putting holes in the Pioneer High School lawn, The Chronicle sprang into action. We figured we already knew what it was about: a project to improve the water quality of the Allen Creek watershed, which the Ann Arbor city council had approved at its Nov. 17 meeting. Just the same, the possibility of a giant drill in action is hard to resist.

Bean’s description was dead-on. When The Chronicle arrived on the scene, Pat Cody was leading a three-man crew drilling a total of eight holes to a depth of 40 feet. They were working on the fifth one. The point of these bores was to find out exactly what was down there in order to make decisions about optimal placement of the giant tanks that will eventually be buried underground at the site.

When The Chronicle made phone contact with Harry Sheehan, environmental manager with the Washtenaw County Drain Commissioner’s office, we reported to him that during the brief time we watched the drilling in action, it seemed like Cody’s team was coming up with sand, sand, sand. Sheehan said that was good news, because some previous test bores under the Pioneer parking lot had found clay, clay, clay.

Sheehan also gave us some additional detail on the Pioneer project, which he’d presented to the Ann Arbor Public Schools Board of Education at their regular meeting just two days prior on Dec. 3.

Why was sand good news? It has everything to do with what the tanks are for. Storm water that is currently carried via 42-inch and 54-inch underground pipes to Allen Creek (which is also an underground pipe, despite the nomenclature) will be diverted to holding tanks to be installed at the Pioneer location. And if the tanks can be located over a sand seam, the water diverted to the tanks for treatment can be allowed to infiltrate through the existing sand substrate – allowing nature’s own filters to do their work – with no additional engineering of the soil required.

Xs and red dots marked the spots where Cody and his team were drilling.

Treatment? What sort of treatment does the storm water need? The Huron River has too much phosphorus, and the project at Pioneer is part of an attempt to respond to a mandate from the state to reduce phosphorus loading in the Huron River by 50%. Part of the strategy is to remove phosphorus from the Allen Creek watershed, which feeds the Huron.

The phosphorus to be removed is in solid suspended form, and the amount of phosphorus correlates highly with the amount of total suspended solids (TSS). So the actual treatment process doesn’t target phosphorus per se, but rather all suspended solids. It’s a purely mechanical process that uses swirl concentrators, as opposed to a chemical reaction. When the water is spun, the suspended solids concentrate in the center of the swirl. When velocity is reduced to zero, additional settling out of solids occurs. All this solid matter will need to be sucked out periodically with a vacuum. The swirl concentrators will be located out of view, under the surface in a manhole.

Where the manholes and the tanks will be located has not yet been determined, but Sheehan presented two detailed options to the school board last Wednesday. Option 1 would put two tanks – one connected to the 42-inch pipe and the second connected to the 54-inch pipe – in the grassy field in the northeast corner of the Pioneer property, just southwest of Michigan Stadium. Option 2 would also include two tanks, one for each pipe, but would put the tank for the 54-inch pipe under the paved parking lot just to the south of the grassy field.

The sections of the bore that emerged while The Chronicle was watching were filled with sand, which was good news to Harry Sheehan.

Location is not the only difference between the two options. Because of the added cost involved in dealing with the unfavorable soil conditions under the parking lot, the 54-inch pipe on Option 2 would divert to a tank about half as big as on Option 1. Tank sizes for the 54-inch pipe on the two different options would be 196,000 cft on Option 1 versus 100,000 cft on Option 2. In terms of gallons, that’s around 1.4 million versus 0.7 million gallons.

Another difference between the two options is the possible construction schedule. On Option 1, the main constraint is the UM football season – the grassy area is used for RV parking and tailgating. So construction could begin after the last football game of the season in November 2009. For Option 2, construction on the parking area location could proceed only during summer months when school is not in session. Key dates coming up for the project:

• Jan. 20, 2009: Prepare draft plans and specifications in partnership with AAPS for review by the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality (MDEQ)
• March 27, 2009: Continue to work with AAPS to revise plans for final approval by MDEQ
• June 22, 2009: Loan closing ($4.4 million)

Additional Documentation

Light blue area is the portion of the Allen Creek watershed drained through the Pioneer High School location. It represents around 10% of the total watershed area. Click on the image for a much higher resolution file.

Option 1: underground storage tanks are rectangles with purple labels. Image links to a large .pdf file with high resolution.

Option 2: underground storage tanks are rectangles with purple labels. Image links to a large .pdf file with high resolution.