early Success with Source Control
Like many cities, the Cincinnati Recreation Commission (CRC) is making investments and enhancing community value by reinventing urban aquatic parks. The Commission is pressed to eliminate traditional swimming pools and construct facilities with lower operating costs, such as spray water parks. Since many of the CRC facilities are also located within the same watersheds where MSD needs to remove stormwater from the combined sewer system, MSD is seeking to collaborate with some of these planned public investments.
In the Denham Watershed, the CRC had planned to construct a spray park in the North Fairmount Community and MSD was looking for strategic stormwater source reduction projects. These dual goals gave rise to a collaboration that created a win-win-win for the CRC, MSD, and the community of North Fairmount.
The result is a spray park funded by CRC and scheduled to open in June 2011, for which MSD contributed buried infrastructure (a 60” separate storm sewer within the park footprint for future MSD stormwater separation work), porous concrete for the walkways around the park, and a 2-acre bio-infiltration basin to improve water quality. The addition of the bio-infiltration basin expands the park boundary and adds environmental education features, thereby enhancing the park’s value to the community. While the CRC project required MSD to accelerate its timeline for Project Groundwork in this area, doing so will reduce the negative impact of future construction on the same property.