Join Experts on Local Stormwater Management, Chesapeake Bay Efforts at CA Speaker’s Forum

How can local residents, Columbia Association (CA) and the Howard County Government work to effectively slow the flow of damaging rainwater runoff? And what should people know about the stormwater utility fee that the county government will be enacting?

Those topics will be discussed by experts at "Sustainable Stormwater Management," the latest in CA's Community Building Speakers Series. The forum, which is being co-hosted by CA’s Watershed Advisory Committee, which will be held on Thursday, Feb. 21, from 7 to 9 p.m. at Slayton House in the Wilde Lake Village Center. Light refreshments will be served. A meet and greet will begin at 6:30 p.m.

“The development of our county has decreased the landscape’s ability to store and infiltrate rainwater into the ground,” said John McCoy, CA Watershed Manager. “This has created more runoff during storms, which has created a number of issues of concern, including increased flooding; the destruction of our streams and what lives in and around them; and the movement of sediment into our lakes and ponds, and subsequently our rivers and then the Chesapeake Bay.

“The impact is not just to the environment, but also to the economy,” McCoy said. “It costs money to repair infrastructure damaged by eroding streams, to dredge sediment out of our lakes and ponds, and to stabilize stream banks that threaten homes.”

Registration for the forum is not required but is encouraged, via watershed-speakers-forum.eventbrite.com

Along with McCoy, the forum presenters are Jim Caldwell, Howard County Stormwater Manager; Ned Tillman, an award-winning author on Chesapeake Bay restoration; and Donald Tsusaki, who is program manager for the Alliance for the Chesapeake Bay and also works with that organization’s Restoring the Environment and Developing Youth (READY) program.

For more information, contact John McCoy at John.McCoy@ColumbiaAssociation.org. For directions to Slayton House, call 410-730-3987.