Comment 119171

By jorvay (registered) | Posted June 08, 2016 at 13:58:26

Though I generally agree with this article, I think for the sake of fairness it's important to fill in one blank that's missing here. When a Costco or Home Depot (to use the quoted examples) is proposed, the City does require that the design adhere to pretty strict storm water restrictions on both the quality of water and quantity. As a result, those developments tend to include on-site facilities that clean oils and polluting particulate matter from storm runoff (quality) and that hold water during storm events so that they can be released into the municipal storm sewer at a much lower rate, preventing the downstream system from being overwhelmed. As a result, the runoff from one of those sites is probably closer in character to an undeveloped field than to what you'd expect to see from a fully-paved/built site.

However, that says nothing of the need for developing an maintaining sprawling municipal storm infrastructure that serves an ever decreasing density of users. It's the same problem we have with roads, sanitary sewers, and watermains: low density development doesn't pay their fair share for maintaining linear infrastructure. I guess what I'm trying to say is that the problem is not that these developments are heavy users as much as it is than they are average-but-underpaying users.

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