EVANS CITY — Engineers from Herbert, Rowland & Grubic spoke to borough council and residents Monday on what the borough must do to comply with storm sewer regulations.

Evans City is seeking a Municipal Separate Storm Sewer Program permit for the first time, which brings with it six elements. The goal of the MS4 program is to minimize the impact of stormwater runoff and requires municipalities to follow six elements, known as minimum control measures (MCM).

Municipalities in urbanized areas are required to follow federal and state law on how to discharge stormwater into public bodies of water. In this case, those participating in MS4 must follow both the EPA and Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection guidelines.

According to HRG engineer Ben Gilberti, the six MCMs municipalities must follow are public education and outreach; public participation and involvement; illicit discharge detection and elimination; construction site runoff control; post-construction runoff control; and pollution prevention and good housekeeping. Those measures go toward the same goal: to ensure water going into public waters is free of pollutants.

Planting grass or other plants on otherwise bare areas near Breakneck Creek could, for example, stop sediment from entering the waterway, Gilberti said. It might seem small, but because Evans City doesn't have physical room to grow, the small projects will be what they can do, he added.

“One of the challenges in Evans City is you're kind of built out, and it's not like we have a big hunk of ground way down low somewhere in the watershed where we could put a giant basin,” Gilberti said.

The borough also could leverage state and federal funding available for mitigating damage from stormwater — and the funding also can be found in unexpected places, Gilberti said. While the Department of Conservation and Natural Resources mainly funds parks, many parks tend to be near streams.

“If your park — like most of them are — is near the stream, you can get a new piece of playground equipment and, as part of that, we're doing a riparian forest buffer,” he said.

A riparian buffer is a vegetated area near a stream.

Water study

Evans City became the sixth municipality to approve the expenditure of funds on an intergovernmental study on flooding and mitigating stormwater.

The borough joined Adams, Jackson and Lancaster townships as well as Seven Fields and Zelienople boroughs as participants in a study in nine municipalities that will look at release rates and find an average of three projects each municipality can complete that will help stem the tide of flooding in the southern tier of Butler County.

Harmony's borough council on Tuesday approved participation in the study.

Only two municipalities — Cranberry Township and Mars — have yet to approve their participation in the study, although it's on the agenda for Cranberry's meeting Thursday.

Of the $76,380 total project cost, Evans City's share is $5,400.