Lloyd Street School in Milwaukee gets rain garden

Daily Reporter (Milwaukee), May 31, 2005 by Sean Ryan

Milwaukee is using a $100,000 Environmental Protection Agency grant to build a rain garden at Lloyd Street School to keep water out of city sewers.

We're looking to encourage, enhance and promote across the Midwest ways to handle water, said spokesman John Perreconi in the EPA Region 5 office in Chicago. These don't have to be a huge engineered solution here. We're talking about converting hard surfaces to porous surfaces.

The city applied for the federal grant and offered it to the Milwaukee Public Schools system to construct the rain garden. The money will carve an oval-shaped grass and flower garden in Lloyd Street School's paved playground.

The playground's asphalt will be contoured so water will flow into the garden, where it will be absorbed into the earth instead of running into the combined sewer system. MPS will use $25,000 of the grant to educate students about the environment and benefits of the rain garden project.

It's a third of an acre large, Perreconi said. We're hoping that location and amount of open space will allow water to flow into the garden area so it can soak into the earth slowly.

Roseann St. Aubin, MPS spokeswoman, said the School Board and administration were excited about the program and supported the city's effort to keep rainwater out of the sewers. However, its ability to pursue future environmental projects is tempered by budget restraints, which is why city and EPA involvement was important.

It was something that the city reached out and got for us, St. Aubin said. This was an incredibly creative way to get things done.

Summer project

The rain garden will be constructed over summer break; the Milwaukee Public Works Department will oversee contracting for the project.

Lloyd Street School fits into a national EPA effort to help municipalities pursue pilot programs aimed at improving the local environment, Perreconi said. This year, the local EPA office distributed $500,000 to Midwest's six biggest cities: Chicago, Cleveland, Detroit, Indianapolis, Milwaukee and Minneapolis.

Chicago is using its grant to retrofit its diesel buses and trucks to get better gas mileage. Minneapolis will build parking lots out of porous concrete, which absorbs rain, plant trees downtown and install solar power panels on a municipal building roof.

Perreconi said it was great that Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett was making runoff-reduction a city priority. He said the EPA was hoping the rain-garden project would encourage others in Milwaukee to build them.

That's great, because it sets the tone, he said. If you do it at one place you can do it someplace else.