Thu, Mar 18, 2021 12:00 PM - 1:00 PM EDT
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Speaker 1: Meghan Hazer
City Planner I, Watershed Planning + Partnerships
Baltimore City Department of Public Works
Meghan.Hazer@baltimorecity.gov
With experience in public and private sector design and a background in public health, Meghan leverages her interdisciplinary experience to embed health equity as a goal within watershed planning for the Baltimore City Department of Public Works. After working as a land planner at an engineering firm, she earned a Masters of Science and Masters of Public Health, focusing her research on built environment factors and health. She has previously worked as a public health consultant supporting teams seeking to leverage design to promote community health, and as project coordinator for Washington D.C.'s first consent decree mandated green infrastructure project.
Presentation Title/Abstract 1: Leveraging Watershed Planning in MS4 Communities to Address Equity
Watershed Assessments performed to satisfy the requirements of Municipal Separate Storm Sewer Systems (MS4) permits typically focus on an analysis of the physical conditions within watersheds to improve surface water quality. These assessments represent a critical step in the planning process, as the types of data included ultimately will be used to inform decisions that shape the built environment for years after.
Many densely populated urban areas with MS4 permits face not only degraded environmental quality, but associated risks to human health that are inequitably distributed due to the long-lasting impacts of social, political, and economic systems that have created adverse risks in particular for lower income communities and communities of color. The built environment is a known, critical factor affecting human health outcomes, and while public health practitioners can create recommendations regarding planning and design, they don’t have the ability to directly implement projects that modify the built environment through their work. Because of this, the field of public health has formally recognized the value of collaborating with design and planning professionals who have this ability in order to add an intentional consideration of health and equity to guide design and planning decisions.
The mandated nature of watershed restoration activities required within MS4 municipalities creates an opportunity to leverage existing planning processes aimed at improving water quality to also support human health and equity related goals. Many watershed restoration strategies, including removal of paved surfaces and installation of green stormwater infrastructure, can be deployed to improve water quality while also with creating conditions within watersheds that are supportive of human health through heat island mitigation, stress recovery, air quality improvements, and by creating environments that reduce barriers to physical activity and support outdoor social interaction.
The City of Baltimore piloted a unique approach into its latest watershed assessments, integrating data on health-supporting environmental factors relevant to watershed restoration activities and socio-economic and racial equity factors into a multitiered analysis alongside the physical characteristics of watersheds typically considered. This analysis was used to generate a series of prioritization maps, which will be used in the planning of future watershed restoration work to address the distributional dimension of the equity lens defined by the Planning Department of Baltimore City. Next steps include integrating additional dimensions of equity, including procedural, structural, and transgenerational, into the planning process going forward.
This presentation will describe an overview of the relationship between watershed planning, health, and equity, and detail the process for integrating this data to prioritize health and equity into the analysis of watershed conditions and opportunities to improve water quality. The work will be discussed within the context of the four dimensions of equity as defined by the Baltimore City Planning Department. Gaps and opportunities for future work will be identified.
Speaker 2: Amy Stevens
Manager, Planning, Outreach, Monitoring Section
Watershed Restoration Division
Montgomery County Department of Environmental Protection
Amy.Stevens@montgomerycountymd.gov
Presentation Title/Abstract 2: Watershed Restoration Suitability & Equity
The Department of Environmental Protection is dedicated to improving stream health and water quality. With a county as diverse as Montgomery, our department strives to foster strong partnerships with communities and continues to evaluate our processes to include equity in our watershed planning and design. Our focus is cleaner water and restoring ecosystems naturally for our entire community.
Assessing Suitability
DEP uses a suitability modeling exercise to prioritize areas where pursuing restoration projects best align with the Department’s goals, including equity and inclusion. This involved a high-level spatial analysis of the County and multiple data layers to determine areas with the highest suitability for restoration and locations where the department may pursue projects.
Stormwater management suitability and stream restoration suitability maps were created based on typical watershed planning and project selection criteria often used in stormwater retrofit and stream restoration project planning. The equity assessment map was created using census demographic data to ensure equity and inclusion is factored during the project selection process and throughout implementation. This map was developed to give the DEP the ability to cross reference area suitability scores with demographic index scores to target suitable areas for restoration in environmental justice areas of the County.
The resulting Stream Restoration Suitability, Stormwater Management Suitability, and Equity Assessment maps geographically target watershed restoration projects where they would have maximum impact by addressing a broad combination of programmatic goals. The County created a dedicated web page on DEP’s website to explain the purpose of the maps, how the maps were developed, how to use the maps, as well as link to the web mapping application. This web page ensures our partners and stakeholders have equal access to our planning tools to transparently see where restoration efforts are being focused.https://www.montgomerycountymd.gov/water/restoration/equity.html
