News

Pamlico-Tar Riverkeeper Katey Zimmerman paid a visit to Bath this week to participate in determining the best projects for a Resilient Coastal Communities Program grant.

The meeting was led by Mid-East Commission Planner Jamie Heath and was the fourth in a series with a goal of projects on, or in, the ground.

“The process sets up communities to be able to plan and address their coastal resiliency issues, like flooding,” Katey said. “In this meeting, we were talking about what projects would work for them, taking into account the responses to the survey.”

Responses from the community to a township-wide survey previously circulated by Mid-East Commission numbered 19.

“In general, it seems like flooding is an issue, but people who don’t live on the river or creeks don’t see it as an extreme concern,” Katey said. “But most of the meeting was spent talking about potential project ideas, and there are three categories of potential projects. We went through them to see which ones would appeal to people in the area.”

The categories are:

Planning Solutions such as stormwater actions plans and assessment tools to pinpoint where the largest flooding issues occur and determine how they can be addressed;

Green and Hybrid Solutions like living shorelines to reduce erosion or green stormwater infrastructure projects at Bath Elementary and Northside High schools;

Hard/Gray Infrastructure Solutions such as upgrading stormwater systems potentially with pipe replacements or adding culverts.

“One thing I thought sounded pretty cool was they’ve had all these sprayfields from their wastewater management system, but now that they’re hooking up to the City of Washington’s sewer system, there was talk about remediation of those sprayfields,” Katey said. “Some ideas for that included a constructed wetland or a natural area with trails.”

The goal in this phase of the four-phase process is to get the list down to 10 potential projects.

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