Tackling Barriers to Green Infrastructure

WHAT YOU’LL LEARN

• How to use the "Tackling Barriers to Green Infrastructure Guide" to structure a community-audit process and focus on key areas for advancing the use of green infrastructure
• How engineering standards in stormwater regulations, differential costs, and engineering "habits" interact with zoning to affect stormwater design
• Strategies to develop community champions for green infrastructure

MORE SESSION DETAILS

Planners "got the memo" on the multiple potential benefits of green infrastructure — so why is it still challenging to move from conventional design of commercial parking lots, public-works projects, and landscapes into resilient, stormwater-absorbing, heat-reducing green infrastructure design? This deep-dive session will bring planners into the "deep jungle" of professional practices and attitudes, cost considerations, process issues, and code language that can stymie the adoption of resilient practices, and offer tested, grounded solutions (not just photos of parking lots with plants) to move ahead. This session will introduce participants to, and then use as its basis, Wisconsin Sea Grant's "Tackling Barriers to Green Infrastructure," a web- and print-based guide to bringing communities through a "deep dive" on people, codes, and process around green infrastructure. Participants will use the guide in facilitated teams with sample codes and scenarios — or can bring their own as examples. Developed through five years of in-depth work with Milwaukee-area communities with very different development patterns, zoning ordinances, and approaches to stormwater management, the guide helps citizens, planners, and municipal staff work through technical and engineering issues, craft effective code language, and work with people who are barriers - but could be champions.