afternoon and welcome to the special public meeting of July 30th 2024 of the township of Washington Township Council adequate notice of this meeting has been given in accordance with the open public meeting act by the Township Clerk to at least two newspapers on July 22nd 2024 and this notice has been posted on the township bulletin board electronic Message Board WCTV and the township website please not please notify the municipal clerk of any disability requirements necessary to attend at the township Council meetings the fire exits are located through the double doors on your right and through the door on your left please silence all cell phones if you are unable to attend the council meeting in person and would like a topic to be addressed at a council meeting please send emails to the township of Washington uh Township of Washington contact all council members at once at twip of washington. us uh I'd ask you please rise for suit the flag please I pledge algi to the flag of the United States of America into the Republic for which it stands one nation under God indivisible with liberty and justice for all thank you uh roll call please sir councilman sear here Council woman valz here councilman Council vice president Casio here councilman Alman and council president desna okay uh let the record reflect also in attendance who is not attendance that's what we have no one's here just just the clerk wowski she's here approval of minutes there doesn't seem to be any no resolutions today no ordinances um now we'd like to open up the uh general public comment please limit your comments 5 minutes anyone from the audience motion oh motion second second okay I'm sorry second bye I'm hearing voices here you're all in favor you're all in favor we have anyone on the uh web we have attorney bailing hello ma'am how are you hi everyone hello other than that do you have any questions sioban I do not thank you okay seeing no hands and no one on the electric media I'd ask for a motion to close the public comment so mov second all in favor I I okay so today we have a presentation by Monclair State University and the PS Institute for sustainable studies so I'm going to hand it over to uh um Sarah if you'd like to start off a presentation we'd appreciate it just make sure you are with a microphone at some point um there is the handheld but these two microphones in front of you do work and they will move to an extent so you can whatever you need to do just make sure they're close enough that we pick it up and please please introduce yourself yes and is that turned on it should be a switch you have to push it in with a pen if you have a pen push with the pen yeah that sounds good thank you I just state your name as you speak let's go hello we are interns from PS Institute for sustainability studies green teams program that is in partnership with Montclair State University we are the Green Team serving the township of Washington next slide and state your name my name is Kayla Capistrano I am a rising Junior at rers University major in environmental engineering hi my name is mey Han I'm a rising Junior at hopshire University I'm double majoring in sustainability studies and music business with a double minor in geology and GIS my name is vinom De I'm a rising Junior double majoring in computer science and math at Case Western Reserve University my name is SE I'm a rising Junior at the College of New Jersey studying civil engineering with a minor environmental science and my name is Emily Pell I am a senior at Mont Clair State University and my major is geographic environmental and urban studies thank you slide and as you speak if you just state your name my name is Kayla capano so our goals for this summer were to help you guys with improving the storm water management creating a flood mitigation plan as well as increasing community outreach through educational materials next slide these are our four main deliverables or four main goals that we wanted to reach by the end of the summer so the first one is a hydrology assessment that's basically just how the water is moving throughout the town the second one is data collection and mapping so a visualization of how the water is moving in the town the third one is creating a flood mitigation plan that is specific to the township of Washington for you guys and the fourth one being Community out next slide so we started with our hydrology assessment uh next slide please so in our preliminary site visit councilman Tom Sears had brought us around uh throughout your Township and pointed out to us various areas that had been uh targeted as frequently flooding zones so actually in this slide up on the screen our first photo which would be on the right hand side is actually a photo of mapc Brook he pointed out to us this area in particular because it had been experiencing such severe erosion and actually that fence along uh the brook bank because the erosion has been so severe these people's property lines have been pushed back and again because of such severe flooding and erosion um next slide please so from this preliminary site visit we were able to collect those coordinate points um and be able to later map these out in our maps for visualization for you guys next slide please so as a part of our preliminary hydrology assessment we conducted a survey and we did that through qual Trix and we taed here at the fresh grocery Grocer in the plaza and we also asked our organization rep to post to post it online on Facebook so that we could distribute it to more people and our main goals with this were to gain Insight from you guys on your personal experiences with flooding and we also wanted to quantify the flooding damages so we could see how severe flooding is in this town we also wanted to hear any input that you guys had in terms of a flood mitigation plan so if you had any ideas in terms of strategies we wanted to hear that as we developed our mitigation plan and as a result we received 187 total responses 156 of them were from tabling and distributing on Facebook and 31 of them were from the members who responded in the Washington Lake Association Facebook page next slide so as a result one of the questions we asked was what is an estimate of the damage that were caused due to flooding so our range that we received from the community was approximately 936 th000 to 1.7 million and it might seem like a small number for a town but this is 150th of the population as this is coming from 187 survey respondents so it was clear to us that flooding is severe in terms of flooding damages next slide we also wanted to gain Insight on where flooding was occurring within people's houses so that we could directly address those as we create our flood mitigation plan next slide additionally we also wanted to take a look at where the sources of flooding were so we gained Insight we saw that most people are believe that sources are from the roads the lake and the brook and this is something we wanted to know as we developed our flood mitigation plan so that we could also tackle the problem at its root next slide so the next step in our project was to do some data collection and mapping uh next slide please so we collected data from more four main resources those were um the United States Geological Survey the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection um the United States Department of Agriculture and we also were able to utilize some data from bossell engineering next slide please so I know some of you may be wondering um what exactly is a watershed some people may not know so as you may be able to tell from uh the diagram a uh Watershed is essentially a uh depression on the Earth's surface which um run off from precipitation or melting snow it's essentially the roote that the water is going to take as it travels down towards its main body of water next slide please so as we were creating our Maps we were able to create a map actually of the Watershed for the township of Washington I know it's a little bit small on the screen for our people in person here but the bolded line is actually the boundaries of your Township so that's the township of Washington and then the majority green shape is the shape of your Watershed so surprisingly your watershed does actually extend a few townships above and maybe a Township or so below your actual boundaries for the township um and we also were able to plot the flood points which are the um pale yellow stars and most of all these um flood sites which we collected during our preliminary site visit do fall along the mcap sying brook we thought that was interesting as well and from this map we were able to um learn that about 16% of the total area of the Watershed was actually uh Forest Wetland Agriculture and uh water coverage but about 84% of the total area of the wed is urban and Barren land next slide please so um I believe a distinction between urban and baron land should be made essentially uh Urban Land is like land that has been developed so you have features of like parking lots you know developed areas for shopping centers shopping malls has features such as asphalt concrete um and it can also include uh artificial recreational areas like um Turf you know like turf fields um and baron lands are areas where plant life is sparse or very very minimal it can have like dry dirt or it maybe was previously developed but now it just lies there with some concrete left over next slide please so this map represents actually the assed in version of the map that we saw previously we're focusing now just Within your Township and what we have here is the storm water drainage system overlaid on top of your Watershed within the township boundaries what I would like to point out is that we have four main potential areas where runoff could be compounded what we found was these four areas highlighted in green on the map where essentially your drainage systems are actually originating out outside of your wed so when there's already a flooding occurring within your Township these Drainage Systems could potentially be bringing in excess water from outside of your wed and compounding the effect of flooding within the town um we were able to identify these areas as uh Jacob Road um sort of near Horizon Court for the second Point uh Katerina place and Lafayette Avenue and um with I also thought was interesting was that that fourth point on the screen the fourth Green Point is also um near a good amount of flood zones that were pointed out to us previously and it's also near um some designated Wetlands as well next slide please so our last map was again a map of our wed but instead we're looking at your impervious surfaces so I know some of you may be wondering what is an imperious surface essentially it's a area where water is not able to infiltrate very well so from this map we were able to tell that about 25 or a quar of the total area of your Watershed is actually impervious surfaces so that means that about a quarter of your Watershed the water is not able to infiltrate and it just runs off next slide please one of the things that we managed to successfully do was to calculate the runoff that's from the surrounding watered and contributes the most to flooding inside the township of Washington the goal of this is for us to be able to propose solutions that actually solve the problem in hand and have some sort of mathematical way of seeing whether the proposed strategies actually solve the problem in the town of Washington this graph over here shows precipitation data from January 1st 2022 up until the 2nd of July 2024 and what it basically shows is the precipitation of a Time shown in blue as well as the flow depth or the discharge the amount of discharge that you need to discharge the lake in order for it to accommodate the water the reason why this was done is to come up with a preliminary way to determine if the lake itself can be used as a potential flood mitigation strategy and help contain the water that's being contributed by the watered as you can see from the relative sizes of the graphs themselves the blue graph is significantly lower than the red graph and this just shows you that there's a disproportionate um amount of compensation that you need in order to contain that water so for an insignificant amount of rainfall you need to discharge the lake to a really huge depth in order to accommodate that water um that's contributing to to the flooding and the homark of this graph is just to show you that for every single inch of rainfall you'd need to discharge the lake to a depth of 11.51 ft and just to give you another perspective in a typical storm you'd have precipitation at 4 in which means that you need to discharge the lake to a depth of 46 M and feet and this just showed us that um for obvious reasons health reasons also considered it's not really something that can be used to take care of the flooding that's occuring in the town ship of washhington and just for another perspective 4 in of rainfor would equate to a cup of coffee and that 46 ft that you need to drain the lake would be approximately three Gira Stacks together vertically out next slide please using the survey data that we collected we also managed to do a risk analysis and this would help us find the most at risk areas in the township of Washington particularly looking at the streets where most of our respondents responded from and identified that they experienced flooding inside the township of Washington and what this graph shows every single bubble that's on the graph shows um a to a street in the township of Washington and the higher the bubble is on the chart the more at risk that particular street is and the larger the bubble is the more people who are affected with flooding and to summarize this graph the high risk areas were identified to be Berry house Berry Drive armest Drive Adams Place be Street and Cosmo Street and the really interesting part of this graph is it confirms some of the preliminary research that we conducted as well as places that we identified during our first site visit with councilman Tom next slide please so we didn't just want to end at finding a mathematical way of giving you the risk associated with flooding for each particular student but we wanted to better visualize the risk itself and when we're doing our primary research and secondary research using resources such as risk factor the township of Washington was identified to be a low flood risk area but as you can see from the pictures on the right that's definitely not the case and we found that the reason for this was because flooding was occurring at localized regions and when that data is generalized to the entire population of the township of Washington it will be classified as a lowrisk carrier but we wanted to do some diligent work and be able to pinpoint the exact locations where flooding occurs and this is just a heat map which shows the severity of um the flooding as well as a risk associated with the flooding at any particular Street in the township of Washington based on the data that we collected from the survey so the more red a point is the more at risk it is if you do have your phone or mobile device with you right now you can scan the QR code and it will take you to the map and then you can see whether your street is a higher risk area or not next slide please hi I'm Terell AJ so for our next deliverable we used our calculations our data and our Ser results to develop a flood mation plan so during our research process we first looked into the flooding each in the town through our our our hydrology assessment and we found that policy restrictions from the EPA and private waterways prented how the town could react to flooding next we look into structal mitigation strategies that town is recommended to implement like levies and dredging and we found that not only were these expensive but ineffective in reducing flooding it just re rejected more water into other townships so consequently we changed our Focus to Green mitigation strategies to help with water retention next slide our survey comments also supported green indication they also wanted to see more drainage management and Community awareness about flooding next slide please in our survey we had a question about different mitigation strategies in ordering to gauge what strategies how community support and we found that refor station and Rain Gardens had the most Community Support next slide please so we came up with these three different mitigation plans the first is a buffer zone around the brook as mentioned as mentioned before we had the brook is eroding and it's bringing debris into the township and so having a forested area or buffer zone around the can help strengthen the brook and reduce debb buildup therefore reducing flooding next strategy is the adopt the drain strategy um this strategy has been implemented Across the Nation including three towns in the in New Jersey allows residents to help the town maintain Brooks and clean the Brooks I mean maintain drains and clean the drains and it can help reduce debris build up which reduces flooding hi I'm m h so raise your hand if you don't like to mow your lawn same I don't either sorry Mom so as a group we came up with our third mitigation plan that we like to call love your lawn it's a proposal um essentially just like other green infrastructure and green mitigation plans it would be planting rain Gardens in your Lawns um according to our survey as Kayla already mentioned some of the most frequent flooded areas on people's properties were the front and backyards so this is a our third solution next SL please this also goes into our community outreach section of our deliverables next slide please so we created this step-by-step brochure that talks a little bit more about our love your lawn proposal um it has a great log of native plants that we carefully curated if you want you can scan the code and it has a more in-depth kind of table with all the information about these plants native plants are very important um they take up less water and they can soak up more so it's a great great way for green infrastructure um next slide please thank you um and then we also understand that another concern has been the loss of canopy in your community so we also pulled a few native trees that might also be of interest in your yard um yeah and most of them are medium to small size because we understand that not everyone wants a massive oak tree in their yard next slide please the second um Community kind of Outreach thing that we made was called a story map and it's an arc ezri product that essentially is a one big website one page that just goes all the way down we wanted to be as transparent with our project as possible so we will have that QR code next week which we can also send out that you can look at and learn a little bit more about the details and our process next slide please now after proposing all of these Solutions the main question that we had is how do we best optimize these proposed Solutions in order for them to solve the problem to a high degree but also with the lowest amount of cost incurred so we started with a problem statement how much water do we need to drain in order to mitigate the flooding in the township of Washington so just to give you perspective the volume of water from the Watershed which is shown on the right is approximately 54 million cubic feet of water and to give you perspective of how much water that is that's enough water to fill the entire Empire State Building almost twice so that just gives you an understanding of how much water needs to be drained in order for this not to be a recurent problem inside the township of Washington and with that problem in mind we did obviously come up with some solutions which I shall share on the next slide [Applause] so looking at the proposed Solutions we wanted to optimize in terms of cost but also in terms of the amount of water that is drained on the left you can see on the solution section we have adopted drain buffer zone and laone each Ed from with the increase in the cost the cheapest possible one was the adopted drain which cost 1 cent per cubic foot of water that is drained and the reason why this is not implemented throughout the entire Township is because there's a limited amount of drains in the Township from the data that we collected there's approximately 100 1,13 drains so that means there's a limit to how much water that you can drain in the township and this table shows that approximately 20 million cubic um feet of water can be drained and for the buffer zone 300 approximately 300,000 cubic feet and for the L loan approximately 9 million cubic ft all this was was done with a little bit of math optimized and then we found that the total drained water would be around 30 million cubic feet and that results in 56% reduction in the total water this contributing to flooding but it's also worth noting that for the L Alan even though the cost associated with that mitigation strategy is high that's because this data was used for the entire Township at large so assuming that everyone actually um partakes in this proposal um that we have the total estimated cost would be 91 million now I know what you're probably thinking 91 million is a lot of money and we do understand that but there is hope on the next slide so one of the opportunities that uh are there there is a program called Ira so it's the inflation reduction act Community change grants program they can have approximately ground sizes of about $2 billion and if you compare that to the 92 million that's pretty much a huge sum of money and in this particular case the proposals that we have is not just for single individuals to use this um Solutions and actually Implement them but we do understand that in order to solve flooding in the township of Washington it takes the direct involvement of every single person inside the community working together collaboratively to make sure that flooding is not a recurring issue in the township of Washington so with the collaborative efforts of people um with the adopted your drain program and people volunteering to take care of their drains as well as the grants that um exist this can actually be a problem that can be solved and we are optimistic that implementing these strategies will actually reduce flooding in the township of Washington and that is better Illustrated on the next slide so this just shows the empire of the solutions that we proposed showing before and after so on the left you can see after typical storm of 4 in of rainfall there's a a person carrying their dog which really presents a sad depiction of what could potentially happen in the event of flooding in the township of Washington this is actually from Vermont but with the implementation of the solutions that we propos leading to a 56% reduction in the amount of water in the Watershed for 4 in of rainfall 4 in of rainfall that would otherwise be a storm leading to plooding would now seem like a 1.76 in um day of precipitation and that's literally just a normal rain day and you could with the implementation of the solutions go outside and walk and not need to worry about any flooding in the township next slide please so as a group we also came up with three potential projects if you guys want them um for recommendations for moving forward so the first one would be pipe infrastructure during our hyd hydrological assessment we were walked around and saw that there was a lot of sewage pipes that were about to bust or the crack and stuff like that so this kind of project would deal a little bit more with that understand a little bit more of the piping and trying to make sure there's no contamination or even more flooding because of the blockage of raw sewage that might spill out the second one would be a little bit more with policy change and looking at like the Environmental Protection Agency and all their kind of policies and restrictions as well as land ordinances as trell mentioned um previously we talked about how that was a huge roadblock and barrier when we came up with these mitigation plans because we kept hitting roadblocks of oh we weren't allowed to do certain things such as the Environmental Protection Agency not allowing to remove invasive plants and planting natives along um very eroded waterways and then the third one we would love to see our love your La proposal come into action see people you know come into your community really help out get down in the dirt and Implement these rain Gardens next slide please and then lastly we'd love to extend our sincer gratitude and thanks to those who have helped us along the way um as found on this slide and then lastly next slide please we'd also like to thank our donors and funders for helping us with this project thank you so much for your time that was a wonderful presentation and I thank you and I know Mr Sears has been heavily involved and Miss bz and the mayor but that was uh that was fantastic as a teacher A++ with extra credit um fantastic and I think as a council that we can Implement some of those things and um a lot of new information I wasn't aware of and I appreciate always learning about those things and it was just fantastic and we do have a presentation for you and I'm going to let uh Mr Sears do it because he worked with you more than I did and I think he deserves to do so thank you but thank you so much really fantastic thank you you down sure come down too only three of us sir can you read the the sure okay this certificate is proudly presented too and it's going to be your names in here I'm going to put you them so Kayla Capistrano uh for their role in the mon monair State University PSEG Institute for sustainability studies the residents of the township of Washington appreciate your hard work and dedication to their Community this is proudly presented this 30th day of July 2024 mayor Peter Camari council president Michael desna Council vice president Steven Casio councilman Thomas Sears councilman Michael Omen and councilwoman Daisy VES each one of you we'll have one pi to I can tell you a story about Ro drink we'll skip that now I don't know I'd like to get a picture of with ins got take a picture thank you now we can get you all up here uh where do you want to go I can honestly say that was a great really really truly you guys did a lot of work how about we sh we'll take five wallet sizes the order form will be on the website sir [Music] you we have a motion to adjourn do we have anybody on anybody on the no one's on no one's online I would just like to make one final statement council president sure I would say um it's been a pleasure working with polies um every Zoom meeting was a a different uh event I can tell you that you know yes it was um from uh 97° and somebody wearing a heavy wool sweater to and know a drink that would nect the I don't I wouldn't even go there but anyway uh you guys put you actually did a lot of good work on this and it's a lot of great information and uh you should all be proud of yourselves really and I think you have a great future and whatever uh goal you're looking for so uh we're probably going to meet again but again thank you so much for the presentation today thank you thank you for having thank you so much for everything that all the information you brought to us today um I also wanted to thank councilman Sears for doing this and bringing this to our community um it takes a lot of work and dedication so congratulations to you as well you did a great job with our group here great job Council excellent excellent group yeah fantastic I I know we can Implement some of this stuff um the nice thing about it I think a lot is not cost prohibitive to do kind of easy sometimes we look for very difficult Solutions and the easy ones are out there we Overlook them but we need those to be uh brought to our attention so again I thank you very much Mr Seas Mr valz I'd like a motion to close today's meeting shall move second all in favor I I thank you very much thank you