4MR Watershed

Watershed Advocacy in Hazelwood and Four Mile Run

Posted on February 28, 2023 by interviews 0
Map of Sylvan Ave. with pins showing streams and ponds

Q&A with Annie Quinn, director of the Mon Water Project

Water issues can mean flooded streets, backed-up sewers, and even landslides. A new organization based in Greenfield has the mission of helping people with all of those. Junction Coalition spoke with Annie Quinn, director of the Mon Water Project (MWP) about water issues in The Run and Hazelwood. Ms. Quinn’s answers have been edited for length and clarity.

JC: Why did you decide to start the Mon Water Project?
AQ: I had been working for four years in watershed science. As I was attending meetings [about the Four Mile Run stormwater project] and hearing PWSA explaining the project to residents, I felt a responsibility. I wanted to help move the conversation forward. The Mon Water Project is an opportunity to serve the community in a way that helps us all with problems around water—and in Pittsburgh, we have a lot of those.

What is watershed science?
The concept of water management within a watershed—how does water move within a system? It’s an area of study that may have been called “freshwater biology” before.

How can the MWP help Hazelwood?
The [water/sewer] lines in Hazelwood are as old as the neighborhood. Hazelwood has been a neighborhood of disinvestment resulting from systemic racism, and the result of the “squeaky wheel” system: More privileged residents in other neighborhoods would call and have their pipes replaced over the years.

I want the MWP to raise voices in Hazelwood, find out about their water issues, and get resources for them. We may not know all the water issues Hazelwood residents face. I see the MWP as a chance to unite us and get good solutions for us all.

What have you done in Hazelwood so far?
Nonprofits often come into a neighborhood thinking they will be the solution to problems. I want to join existing organizations and become the neighborhood’s “Department of Water.” I’ve joined the [Hazelwood Initiative’s] environmental committee. As time goes on, I’m hoping to meet with PWSA and Grounded Strategies and build upon their relationships with residents. I’m also hoping to meet people at events and educational programs. And I would love to get out in the river on a boat so residents can see the outfall into the river. There are a lot of pathways for me to partner with everyone, and I’m looking forward to meeting residents of all the neighborhoods and working with them.

Could water issues affect the planned Sylvan Avenue Trail?
The city is going to have to be careful designing any trail through that area. The number-one issue in trail development is erosion and water damage. There are six streams that are ephemeral—which means they may not be there every day or even every season, but they are a systemic source of water. Any design will have to keep in mind that if not careful about width, ponding, and providing underground transport for water, the trail could become unusable. A pipe could direct water to flow down a steep cliff—and that could eliminate roots on the hillside and contribute to landslides. So for any design, you’d have to know how water works under and around the trail—and where is it safe for the water to go?

What have you learned so far about water issues in The Run?
When PWSA said they’re going back to the drawing board [with the stormwater project], they’re going way back… [PWSA has] a stormwater strategic plan—this is new. Before, they were doing stormwater projects more piecemeal and operating with a different metric… [In the new plan], out of all the watersheds in Pittsburgh, Four Mile Run is ranked 5 out of 19. So the good news is that PWSA plans to keep us in the top five for the city. The bad news is that this pushes the timeline [for fixing flooding in The Run]. It’s possible that Four Mile Run is looking at a delay in the promises PWSA made. The process is looking like several layers of plans, then another design and then a project—which can be very frustrating because the solutions are far in the future. We’ll have to figure out together what we do next.

How do you describe PWSA’s Four Mile Run watershed plan?
I don’t know, and I don’t think the PWSA knows either. That is the problem, and an opportunity for us to push back and get answers on that. It’s important that our next big conversation with PWSA should be answering questions like, how much additional flow will the project capture? What level of storm is that? Have you evaluated what level of service has allowed this type of flooding in the past? What level of service does this project get up to? There is an opportunity through modeling to predict how the system acts before, during, and after the project. At the MWP, we can analyze data. As a nonprofit, we can use PWSA data and study it from different angles to get some good answers and partner with PWSA to get grants. I’m thinking about how we can take our advocacy to the next level.

How does removal of the work in Junction Hollow affect flood control?
The green infrastructure that was proposed in the park…was designed with underdrains so some water goes to groundwater, but a lot is stored and released slowly. [PWSA] said at the [latest] meeting that the new direction [removing the green infrastructure piece] was managing the same amount of water. Slow release would allow them to account for that—the size of the pipes is accounting for holding water back and releasing it slowly… How can we do more storage and slow releasing above ground? How can we avoid feeding a stream into a pipe? The original plan still included water going back into a pipe.

How can the MWP help increase the plan’s effectiveness?
The MWP can be more nimble, flexible, and fluid—like water!— in that we are not a government agency with bureaucracy, with politics. We are a grassroots community organization that can apply for grants the city can’t apply for. Nonprofits often can handle problems quicker, or at least bring a distinct perspective. A unified voice for people throughout the watershed. We’re allowed to dream big and do big, innovative projects.

How can people get involved?
I am a fiscally sponsored nonprofit of another nonprofit—New Sun Rising. My first job is to get a list of leaders to help decide where the MWP goes next. If you are interested, you don’t have to be a professional—just someone in the community who wants to be actively engaged in a leadership role.

Another way to get involved is to sign up for the newsletter to stay up to date as we grow. Right now, that looks quiet. I want to meet the people who are already here.

Visit Monwaterproject.org or email annie@monwaterproject.org for more information.

Notes

About the image: This map shows six springs and ponding along the portion of Sylvan Avenue closed by the city due to landslides. Sylvan Avenue was part of the now-canceled Mon-Oakland Connector shuttle road route between Oakland universities and the Hazelwood Green development. A bike and pedestrian trail has been proposed along the same route. Courtesy of the Mon Water Project

This interview originally appeared in The Homepage.

Right-to-Know Request Documents Provide Answers

Posted on February 10, 2020 by Special Reports 0
bad governance and good governance

And Some Answers Raise More Questions

Since 2018, residents of Four Mile Run (The Run) have filed several Right To Know requests with the City of Pittsburgh regarding the proposed Mon-Oakland Connector (MOC) project. City government eventually gave residents documents that were inadequate in fulfilling the RTK requests. Missing information includes up-to-date engineering documents and large portions of City departments’ correspondence with all private partners in the project. In the city’s response to the requests, they stated that they are not required to share any information, but would do so selectively. Furthermore, they added, “We are prohibited from forwarding records that reflect the attorney-client privilege or the attorney work product privilege.”

But a section of the PA office of Open Records Right–to-Know Law states:

Section 708 of the RTKL places the burden of proof on the public body to demonstrate that a record is exempt. In pertinent part, Section 708(a) states: “The burden of proving that a record of a Commonwealth agency or local agency is exempt from public access shall be on the Commonwealth agency or local agency receiving a request by a preponderance of the evidence.” Preponderance of the evidence has been defined as “such proof as leads the fact-finder … to find that the existence of a contested fact is more probable than its nonexistence.”

The City’s position raises the question: Who is the attorney and who is the client in this case? This is the very same claim that city government made while conducting its infamous secret Amazon deal. The details of that plan, now available after Amazon turned down the bid, reveal the reasons for the secrecy. Pittsburgh promised the world’s richest man one of the most generous corporate welfare giveaways of land and taxpayer money of any city in the U.S. Those promises included the MOC.

At the suggestion of the City of Pittsburgh, residents also filed RTK requests with the Pittsburgh Water and Sewer Authority (PWSA), the agency tasked with constructing the Four Mile Run Watershed Plan. The scope of this crucial and technically challenging project was to include fixing The Run’s worsening chronic flooding. But the City is forcing the merger of the MOC with PWSA’s plan. PWSA failed to respond to a resident appeal and the Office of Open Records in Harrisburg ordered PWSA to hand over all documents requested. Those documents contained crucial information including:

A portion of Mayor’s office meeting document listing who attended and Mayor Chief of Staff Dan Gillman’s remarks about the MOC project.

There is more evidence of non-transparency and duplicity by city government regarding the MOC project. Throughout the process, residents have demanded they be informed of what DOMI was planning and when DOMI would be filing grant proposals or other requests for funding. DOMI has refused to do so. They applied for a 1 million dollar grant for the MOC through the Southwestern PA Commission in 2018—while DOMI was holding a series of public meetings about the project. The money was approved, but DOMI failed to notify residents beforehand and afterward. Only dogged research and policing of the project by opponents flushed out the information.

Residents more recently received another document: a 2018 request from DOMI to the City Budget office for funding. That document is mostly blank, but DOMI was nonetheless given 9 million dollars of taxpayer money. One section of the document DOMI did fill out was the section reading: Please identify the source of external funding and how the project adheres to the funding source’s rules and regulations. “Demonstrated support of the public” was a question within that section. DOMI’s response: Depends on which community!

 A section of the City Budget form shows DOMI’s response to whether the project has community support. 

What else are city officials hiding and why? Why are they so determined to bulldoze through two vibrant neighborhoods and Schenley Park when they admit their proposed shuttle road is not a transportation solution and does not serve the affected communities? University expansion through a slow-motion land grab could be the answer.

Opponents of the MOC recognize this issue as much bigger than any individual neighborhood. Our growing coalition of residents, park protectors, neighborhood organizations and other concerned citizens is committed to protecting Pittsburgh’s communities from erasure.

(This article was previously published on February 1, 2020 in the Hazelwood Homepage)

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