The FWEA Blog

The Integrated Water Resources Conference was held on January 26th at the Wyndham Resort in Orlando.  This is the second of several posts that will provide further discussion and comments prompted by the information each speaker provided.   Readers are encouraged to continue the conference dialogue via comments (below) that will be moderated and posted.  This post will focus on the presentation provided by Justin Gregory of Jones Edmunds & Associates.

Justin Gregory followed Dr. Pitt’s presentation with a presentation on Jones Edmunds’ experiences with implementing green stormwater infrastructure or low impact development (LID) stormwater practices in Florida.  His presentation focused on the following aspects of LID implementation:

• Regulatory – The Sarasota County LID manual was used as an example of how a regulatory framework can be established to promote LID in the state and provide the reasonable assurance that practices will meet state stormwater standards through average-annual performance-based design requirements.
• Monitoring – A swale monitoring study, which showed how effective swales could be as a green stormwater practices, was used as an example of how monitoring the performance of LID under Florida conditions is an important part of understanding how effective LID can be as a stormwater practice.  
• Design and installation – An example of how the successful design and installation of green stormwater practices in a retrofit situations can help achieve TMDL and BMAP goals was shown.   
• Paradigm changes – Finally, Justin summarized the importance of continuing to evaluate our stormwater management paradigms and gave some examples of current paradigms that may need to be changed.

A highlight of Justin’s presentation was his use of prezi, an alternative to Power Point, which encourages a less linear approach to presentations. A copy of Justin’s presentation can be viewed at the following link: http://prezi.com/fgpd2vzm5zds/implementing-lid-in-florida/?auth_key=dd238ec04b7abbdf717e187ff9a31c97ce56f84a

Many thanks to Justin Gregory and Jones Edmunds for their continuing support of FWEA and the IWRC.