Hampton flood protection approved
City closes $12 million environmental bond for three projects
HAMPTON — Three projects that will give Hampton the ability to capture, store, redirect and filtrate some 8 million gallons of stormwater that otherwise would flood city neighborhoods are now funded.
The city closed on a $12 million environmental impact bond, marking the first time a financing tool of this kind will be used in Virginia, officials from the Chesapeake Bay Foundation, Hampton and its partners announced during a Thursday virtual press conference.
Hampton is among a few local governments nationally to use this type of funding to mitigate flooding caused by climate change. Elsewhere, the financing tool was used in 2016 in Washington, and Buffalo, N.Y., expects to close on its bond next month, officials said.
In Hampton, the projects are in the design phase, with a ground-breaking date set for next fall and a construction timeline to extend two to three years, Hampton’s environmental & sustainability manager David Imburgia
said.
They will use the natural landscape with other enhancements, such as bioswales, rain gardens, constructed wetlands or green roofs, for example, to slow, store, redirect and filtrate storm water within the flooding-prone Newmarket Creek watershed — which includes the city’s central business district and Langley Air Force Base.
“We’re really trying to start in the upper parts of the watershed and start flowing water where it falls, as rainfall and working through the different parts of our watershed within our project areas to capture that water and stored in ways that create community assets and reduce how much is ending up downstream ... in sort of the neighborhoods that are traditionally flooded,” Imburgia said.
The pilot projects are:
■ Big Bethel Blueway: This project will store and slow water through the redesign of existing waterways to reduce flooding upstream and downstream in Newmarket Creek. The project will expand the main drainage channel, install several weirs, adds new vegetation on the channel bank that will filter and slow storm water.
■ North Armistead Avenue road raising and green infrastructure: This project calls for raising the roadway to eliminate chronic flooding on a major thoroughfare and evacuation route and improve routes to Joint Base Langley-Eustis and other economic centers within Hampton. The project also adds plants and green infrastructure at the road’s median and shoulders.
■ Lake Hampton: This aims to transform a detention pond into a designed stormwater park with addition storage capacity. It calls for raising the dam height and install smaller detention basins with wetlands plants to slow and clean runoff from North Armistead before it flows into the lake.
“These three pilot projects represent only a starting point,” said Mayor Donnie Tuck. “(They) represent environmentally sensitive approaches to slowing and storing water. They also create neighborhood assets with multiple public benefits designed to enhance our quality of life.”
Tuck said using the bond will allow the city to monitor and measure results that can be replicated elsewhere.
In 2019, the Hampton City Council approved the $12 million bond appropriation in its fiscal 2020 capital improvement plan. The bond will be paid off with fees drawn from the city’s residential stormwater fund. The account collects $9.83 a month from residents, and has gone up steadily by $1 annually in past few years to cover the bond’s costs.
The Resilient Hampton campaign evolved out of a series of sessions, called “Dutch Dialogues,” it had with Norfolk city officials in 2015.
Landscape architects and experts from the Netherlands and other U.S. communities surrounded by water met with them to craft solutions that would manage the threat of sea level rise, flooding and stormwater runoff pollution. The same experts met with the community over two years, including hosting charettes to gather ideas and public input to design the projects.