COLUMN: Sustainable Stillwater urges residents to adopt storm drains | Local News

Have you adopted your next storm drain? Find your home town on a map here: Adopt-a-drain.org. Sweep up and remove dirt before it falls in. Be a good citizen of Stillwater – and as a taxpayer you can save yourself some money!

The city of Stillwater receives a budget of more than half a million dollars a year ($ 587,000 last online year 2017) to keep its storm sewers running. As taxpayers, we ask: How can we have great St. Croix River, great city lakes, and lower taxes?

Since rainwater systems require regular maintenance, the answer is that less maintenance is required. This is how we as citizens can step in with a few simple steps:

1. Manage the properties so that sediments and pollutants do not get into the rainwater system.

2. Use deeply rooted plants in landscaping to reduce the volume of rainwater runoff and let the plants hold the soil in place with no additional chemicals.

3. Adopt the closest storm drain to reduce sand, dirt, and litter. Register with Adopt-a Drain.org.

5. Keep curbs and driveways free of sand, dirt, plant debris, general litter, and chemicals. Reduce unnatural processes in built environments such as cities: sediments and winter road sand collect on our streets, take up space in our rainwater ponds and need to be removed.

Regularly sweeping small areas with a broom is cheaper than vacuuming wet dirt from a rainwater pond. Chemical products such as road salt, fertilizers, weed killers and vehicle fluids are part of modern life, but they are very expensive to remove from rainwater.

Minimize chemical pollution in rainwater runoff. Use commercially available car washes – they treat the wash water before it goes down the drain.

Biological items such as clippings, leaves, pine cones and needles usually decompose to enrich the soil, but they become trash on our driveways, sidewalks, and roads and are washed into water. Keep these surfaces swept. Waste: reduce, reuse and recycle. While rainwater treatment is inevitable, there is little everyone can do to bear the cost and lessen the damage to nature.

The St. Croix River is still our friend despite decades of “abuse” by street runoff. The river and the small streams and ponds that lead there greet us every morning and throughout the day, gushing and gurgling to delight us as we walk across the bridges and paths. Each of us can do something to protect it, and we could save money too.

Join Sustainable Stillwater MN, a 501c3 non-profit that works to improve the quality of life and our natural environment. Sign up for our newsletter at https: // tinyurl.com/JoinSSMN

Louise Watson, Sustainable Stillwater MN is a 501c3 nonprofit committed to making Stillwater greener, more sustainable and more resilient.