Good afternoon, Mayor and Council.

Today's work session is just an update on our assessments, and we will kick it off with Wayne Males, who will talk about stormwater capital improvements program.

Thank you, ma'am.

Mayor, Council members, thank you very much for the opportunity to come talk about stormwater today.

We're excited about this.

I am Wayne Miles on the Stormwater Manager and Engineering Services.

I'll be assisted by Barbara Barenta, who is our division manager over planning and asset management.

And when I assisted by that means Barbara is going to give the bulk of the presentation.

Stormwater is on the minds of our community right now, and rightly so.

We are developing community.

And we work hard every day to mitigate the impacts of those development.

We are seeing seeing statistically the changes in rainfall that support we are seeing climate change right now.

And we are working hard to be more resilient in terms of green storm or infrastructure in terms of floodplain buffer mitigation and management.

And we all last fall were starkly reminded in the Southeast of the potential impacts of larger tropical storms.

And um we are working every hard every day to get ready for those impacts.

And we are helping our community be smarter themselves about how to prepare and what to do when when those impacts are forecast and when they are seeing storm impacts.

Many of these major capital projects are developed through watershed planning process, which looks at collecting data like survey or streamlocks, analyzing that data through hydraulic modeling or water quality modeling to define projects.

And we have studied all of our watersheds, and we're in the process of renewing those studies and updating our stormwater needs.

One of the big changes we've made is including community engagement throughout this process.

And this is really important to us.

We're making decisions and how to spend millions of dollars, and we want to make sure the community is involved, and we want equitable community engagement.

So we want to make sure that the people we're talking to are representative of the area that we're studying.

So to do this, we reach out to our department of community engagement, we incorporate best practices from the community engagement playbook, engage stakeholders, hold online surveys, public meetings, and then we track the demographics to confirm that the input is representative.

Okay, so that's kind of the process and how a lot of these major projects are developed.

And now we'll look at two examples.

One is the Camp Pond Dam project, and this is an 11 million dollar project in West Raleigh.

The city has a road over the crest of the dam, and this road is a one-way in, one-way out access for about 40 homes.

Under that road is the dam spillway, which is eroding, is corroded and in fact impacting the dam embankment.

So this project will maintain access for the community and address a notice of deficiency for North Carolina dam safety.

And then we'll look at one more example, and this is the one that Wayne is going to talk more about at the end of the presentation.

But again, this is a one-way in, one-way out access point, Rose Lane for this community, and it floods a couple times a year, preventing people from entering or leaving that community.

So this project is intended to provide safe access.

All right, so switching to the second category in our CIP, which is water quality.

And there's two parts there's stream and wetland restoration and GSI.

So we'll talk about stream and wetland restoration first.

So stream and wetland restoration improves water quality and natural habitat.

So wetlands are like nature's filters.

They remove the pollutants and sediment from the water.

Stream restoration also provides water quality benefits, and it connects the stream to the floodplain.

So that allows water to spread out during rain events and slow down and protects downstream areas from flooding.

This is an example of a project that we did in partnership with the parks department.

So Wooten Meadow Park, where we had a wetland and stream restoration.

And all the pictures on the right are show the people are enjoying the space.

They're taking pictures of all these critters they find at the park and posting them online.

So how do we find these projects?

Stormwater has partnered with USGS to look at the condition of the stream citywide using LIDAR data.

So this is helping us to identify erosion hotspots.

This project is wrapping up this spring.

They've shown that over 40% of Raleigh streams have moderate to severe erosion.

So again, additional opportunities for stream restoration.

To date, most of our projects have been in city property.

So here's an example of an upcoming project.

Again, a partnership with parks.

This is a 1.9 million dollar project in Southeast Raleigh.

It's utilizing a million dollars in grant funding, and we'll restore streams and wetlands in the park.

Next project is Upper Durant wetland conversion.

This is a 9.4 million dollar project up in North Raleigh, converting Upper Durant Lake, which has a failing dam infrastructure into a stormwater habitat wetland.

Okay, so this is the second part of the water quality, which is green stormwater infrastructure or GSI.

So GSI is a nature-based solution.

So traditionally, stormwater include included having pipes and gutters and moving that water away as fast as possible from buildings and roads.