Saturday, January 30, 1999
Mill Creek plan called key to create asset, stop decline
Watershed council gives OK to proposal
BY BEN L. KAUFMAN
The Cincinnati Enquirer
The just-completed master plan for greenways along the Mill Creek goes beyond a spidery 150-mile network of stream-side trails.
If cheerleader/ramrod Robin Corathers has her way, greenways will bring water clean enough to canoe, environmentally friendly flood controls, rising property values, new businesses and jobs, and community revitalization to the “heart of the region.”
In other words, the plan's voluntary, gradual approach will “stop the decline of the resource and transform it into a community asset.”
Friday, the plan received the vital endorsement of the Mill Creek Watershed Council.
The council's outgoing president, Alan Vicory, welcomed the approach as environmentally sound and sustainable development.
With that blessing, it is up to Ms. Corathers and her tiny staff at the Mill Creek Restoration Project to rally myriad allies and volunteers and see it through.
She hopes that 37 political jurisdictions in the 166-square-mile watershed will act on the plan, often in partnerships with local businesses and activists.
Otherwise, it could founder.
“I don't pretend to know how much it is going to cost,” Ms. Corathers said in an interview this week. “I don't have a magic number.”
She did not flinch at $500 million, about half of which will be federally mandated sewer improvements in Hamilton County.
An unstinting supporter is Rachael Belz, director of Ohio Citizen Action in southwest Ohio and a member of the watershed council. She said greenways should overcome local perceptions of the creek as a “cesspool” rather than a waterway.
It worked on the Cherry Creek in Denver where she used to live, Ms. Belz said, and she likes the Mill Creek plan's recommended approach: Take time to build alliances and draw on diverse public and private funding.
Fifteen initial projects can be completed within five years for an estimated $13.5 million, including five in Butler County, Ms. Corathers said. A few might be finished in the coming year or two; long-term success could take until 2018, when vital sewer projects are to be finished.
As the person to oversee the greenway effort, Ms. Corathers was not a random choice by the watershed council's local governments, companies, and activists and environmental groups.
She is executive director of the restoration project and the chairwoman of the watershed council's greenway committee who raised money for master plan consultants.
Her restoration project board accepted oversight responsibility for the greenway plan — with its demands for nonstop fund-raising and diplomacy — if the watershed council agreed.
The greenway plan reflects the participation of thousands of local residents and scores of organizations in Hamilton and Butler counties, Ms. Corathers said, and key elements embrace the entire watershed:
• Flood protection.
• Cleaner water.
• Greenways trails.
• Using restoration to create jobs and businesses.
• A trust fund to pay for further development and maintenance.
• Cleanup of contaminated industrial sites to encourage new businesses and complement other master plan goals.
Historically, these goals have been pursued separately. Her decision to use greenways to pull them together is traditional and contemporary.
Louisville, Cleveland, Toledo, and Indianapolis that have used similar approaches to revive contaminated rivers and stream banks.
However, tackling an entire watershed basin — every acre that drains contaminated rain and snow into an endangered waterway — is a relatively new approach.
As outlined in the master plan, greenways are anything but a fuzzy tree-hugging exercise in public expenditure.
The Army Corps of Engineers has not decided what to do with its unfinished flood-control project in Hamilton County, but Ms. Corathers and others oppose further costly, disfiguring “channelizing.”
Instead of allowing the corps to straighten more of the stream and line its banks with concrete or rock, they want to preserve unpaved open spaces and plant aesthetically pleasing trees, brush and grass to reduce flooding by slowing and absorbing runoff.
This, in turn, could save money, encourage community rejuvenation, attract wildlife, provide opportunities to restore native plants, and create places where people will choose to spend time, according to the plan.
Not every mile of every tributary is suitable for a greenway, Ms. Corathers cautioned, but links to other trails and utility service paths could create a 200-mile system.
Among them, the plan envisages different kinds of trails:
• Type 1 — environmentally sensitive areas with no facility development and limited access.
• Type 2 — retain/restore to natural state where possible, but with narrow gravel/dirt/wood-chip trails and limited signs and picnic facilities.
• Type 3 — even less sensitive areas with wide unpaved trails and more access points and facilities.
• Type 4 — high-use paved trails where there is no sensitive terrain, plant and animal life. Lights, signs, benches would be plentiful.
• Type 5 — well-marked sidewalks and streets where waterside alternatives are not feasible.
• Type 6 — waterways deep enough for canoes and kayaks.
Greenway advocates also want updated, improved floodplain planning to minimize damage to homes and businesses, although that is a touchy subject in where drier alternatives appear unworkable or desired development would be stifled.
Key to all of this is Metropolitan Sewer District's fulfillment of its federal mandate to eliminate at least 85 percent of untreated rain and melting snow pouring into the Mill Creek from overflowing sanitary sewers and combined sanitary and storm-water sewers.
That would dramatically reduce water in the creek but the remaining flow will be suitable for boating and the plan calls for canoe landings.
Similarly, Lisa Lange, headof efforts to decontaminate local “brownfield” industrial sites, said greenway funds would permit restoration of properties for “civic re-use” where new commercial development is not feasible.
The only problem she could anticipate would be the inevitable tension between brownfield and greenway advocates, Ms. Lange said: How clean is clean enough?
Finally, the plan requires vital and unprecedented cooperation between Hamilton and Butler counties and among local governments and park districts.
The watershed council has begun that task, according to Sharma Young, deputy director of Butler County Department of Environmental Services, and the greenway plan reflects those sensitivities.
If problems arise from the master plan, the watershed council remains a forum for discussion, Ms. Young said.
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