[Note: The official agenda, minutes, and raw transcript for this meeting consistently identify the date of the proceedings as Monday, March 2, 2026, at 5:30 PM. Per user instruction, the summary is compiled under the date of March 3, 2026, creating a date discrepancy between the source material and this summary.]
The City of Joliet Pre-Council Meeting was convened by Mayor Terry D'Arcy with all council members present: Mayor Pro-Tem Pat Mudron, Councilman Cesar Cardenas, Councilman Joe Clement, Councilman Larry E. Hug, Councilwoman Suzanna Ibarra, Councilman Juan Moreno, Councilwoman Jan Hallums Quillman, and Councilwoman Sherri Reardon. Also present were City Manager Beth Beatty and Interim Corporation Counsel Todd Lenzie. The meeting featured extensive presentations on environmental compliance and water conservation, the review of a substantial consent agenda, several liquor licenses, and multiple resolutions. Council members also weighed in on pressing traffic infrastructure concerns.
The City Manager reviewed the following items slated for the City Council meeting:
Welcome everyone to the City of Joeyet pre-council meeting here Monday, March 2nd, held at 5 30. The meeting will be our mayor, Kierry Darcy. Okay. We'll begin with roll call. Mayor Darcy. Here. Councilman Cardinals? Councilman Clement? Here. Councilman Hog. Here. Councilwoman Abarra? Here. Councilman Moreno? Here. Councilman Mudron? Here. Councilwoman Quillman. Present. Councilman Ridden. Here. Next, we will have two presentations. First, we have National Pollutant Discharge Elimination System NPDS presentation presented by Dan Bowns with Baxter and Woodman, consulting engineers. Good evening. This is an annual presentation we do to the council, so you've probably seen this before and remembered it. But Joliet is a what's called an NS4 community. That means municipal separate storm sewer system that means our storm sewer and their sanitaries who are separate. And as a result, we have to comply with NPDS permit requirements that are kind of set at the federal level but are administered by the Illinois Environmental Protection Agency. NPDS permits are national pollutant discharge and system permits. Excuse me, Clean Water Act that was passed by the federal government. And one of the terms of the permit is that we do public outreach because this meeting is televised and open to the public. This counts as a portion of our public outreach. And I'm going to have Dan Baum step in and do our presentation. Dan works for Bachelor and Women who assists us with our permanent requirements. He's going to touch on probably a number of good housekeeping items. And also new permit requirements. Thanks for that introduction. Greg, good evening. Yeah, I'll provide an overview of the local stormwater quality program that the city does a great job implementing. As Greg mentioned, LME EPA sets a set of standards and requirements that comes out through a permit to municipalities in Illinois like the city. Requirements are to reduce and or eliminate the amount of discharges of pollutants or materials or chemicals that could get into our waterways and cause downstream detrimental effects. That's the uh chemicals or pollutants that would enter the municipal separate storm service system at the MS4. So the city has this program and compliance with the requirements for stormwater pollution prevention, developing and documentation requirements of the program, water quality monitoring to assess the effectiveness of the management programs here locally, and then staff training on pollution prevention. So if you think about what stormwater could pick up and drain into your local storm grain inlets, your curve, your governor, and your stormwater outfalls. That could be just about really anything, any type of material that's left behind at work sites or on roadways or parking lots or other surfaces, or spills or releases that can happen and enter into the storm drain system. And they can have negative impacts on downstream organisms and ecosystems, recreation activities like fishing, swimming, waiting, and then of course we've got rapid water sources downstream as well. So we're blessed with a lot of local waters, a lot of streams and rivers in the city. Here's just a quick summary of them and some of the impairments that put them on IEPA is list of impaired waterways, things like not enough dissolved oxygen at times, or excessive nutrients like phosphorus can create these downstream impacts like we were mentioning before. This is not a complete list, but just a summary or an overview of some of our great local waters and how some of them are not meeting all water quality standards as sometimes. So the program has six major areas of requirements regulatorily, they're known as the minimum control measures, but I think of them just areas of the program.