The Great Lakes Commission (GLC) recently released its Green Infrastructure Policy Analysis: Addressing Barriers to Implementation, as part of the GLC’s Green Infrastructure Champions project, funded by the Fred A. and Barbara M. Erb Family Foundation. The brief provides a look at the opportunities for green infrastructure (GI) and recommendations for Michigan to further expand this practice.

As the policy brief explains, GI helps to manage stormwater runoff by decreasing the amount of water going into sewers and streams and improves water quality by trapping sediment and nutrients.

GI is a broad category that may include many different types of projects including rain gardens and green rooftops.

We’re taking a look at where Michigan stands with this practice and how funders and communities can move it forward.

Highlights of the policy brief:

• As people continue to move into cities, aging infrastructure and increased developments can lead to more surface level water flow after rain events.

• This can lead to localized flooding and push pollutants into our waterways, which directly affects our water quality.

• GI projects can restore natural stormwater management, especially in heavily developed urban areas.

• GLC states that communities’ capacity to develop GI is heavily influenced by local, state and federal policies and can create unintended barriers to implementation or lack incentives to develop GI projects.

• A major barrier to GI work is the lack of familiarity and knowledge about the practice and the impact it can have on communities.

• In Michigan, we have county drain commissioners who provide one component of watershed management. GI thrives in areas where the drain commissioner is particularly interested in advancing GI and lacks in counties where they aren’t as interested.

• Michigan lacks explicit language around GI in the permit requirements, limits water volume management performance standards to certain areas and has barriers to establishing stormwater utilities. If resolved, all would help to advance GI.

The brief identifies that increasing awareness of GI practices and boosting education about its performance, financing options and impact on communities would help to advance this work and lead to supportive policies.

The Fred A. and Barbara M. Erb Family Foundation has been working to raise awareness about GI. The foundation announced earlier this month that it has granted more than $700,000 to GI projects on residential lots and in urban farms in Detroit and in select mid-level municipalities throughout the Great Lakes Basin.

The foundation provides funding to the GLC to help accelerate GI work and policies throughout the Great Lakes Basin as well as funding the Great Lakes Green Infrastructure Champions Pilot Program and GLC’s stormwater technology sharing collaborative. 

GLC shares that with the foundation’s support they “will enable communities with green infrastructure experience to share successes and mentor emerging practitioners in communities that would like to utilize green infrastructure but lack the capacity to do so.”

On the local level in Detroit, the foundation supports Friends of the Rogue’s Rain Gardens to the Rescue Program, which educates people about GI and how they can help by creating their own rain gardens. In two years, the program has engaged nearly 400 people in the installation of rain gardens and installed 50 rain gardens in the metro Detroit area that treat more than 15,000 gallons of rain per rain event.

The foundation shared in their announcement, “Sustainability harmonizes economic, environmental, and social interests, and these projects are designed to achieve community development as well as water quality goals.”

Want more?

Read GLC’s full brief.

Check out Fred A. and Barbara M. Erb Family Foundation’s work.

Connect with the Green and Blue Network.