Sometimes, the little things are the most revealing.
Like how the City of Charleston is on a high horse about ending a $10,000-a-year sustainability program to encourage homeowners to develop rain gardens. Really?
“The intent of this program is admirable, but using public funds for private gain is something governments should try to avoid if possible,” said Logan McVey, the Cogswell Administration’s chief policy officer in a written statement to The Post and Courier. “Making improvements to private properties with little oversight is not a good use of the city’s finite resources.”
Really, a pox on rain gardens? Pure poppycock. Short-sighted hogwash during an era in which developers often try to snatch public money to complete expensive private developments. And quite a statement from a city that just agreed to pay $2.75 million to settle a dispute over a 0.157-acre parcel of land so a big new home by a park wouldn’t block views of nearby wealthy homeowners.
So we say wow — just wow — about the bombast over rain gardens, which come to life in small, low-lying areas of yards that people fill with native flowers, grasses and plants. The intent of these gardens in a city where most permeable land is privately owned is to get residents involved in positive actions to help to create places on their land that absorb deluges of water so it doesn’t flow into other people’s yards or add to flooding of streets and ditches during storms.
Rain gardens are anything but a private gain, as the city now claims. They’re important community tools people can use to help reduce flooding. We thought the city learned about the need to employ multiple strategies during its Dutch Dialogues process, including incentivizing residents to mitigate flooding as a way to reduce stress on the public water control system.
As senior editor Herb Frazier reported from Holland in February, Amsterdam uses all sorts of small- and home-level strategies like rain gardens to reduce water in low areas to make a larger impact: “Water that spills over riverbanks is impounded in low-lying areas that also double as parks and playgrounds. A new city ordinance requires developers to install rainwater storage on the roofs of new buildings to hold water that can be used to flush toilets or sprinkle plants.”
In 2023, Charleston budgeted $5,000 for rain gardens. Charleston County matched the investment. Residents snatched up 50 mini-grants of $200 each, an indication people were eager to take part in a public initiative to make things better. The program was so successful before being axed by the new administration that the previous administration and council upped the ante in its 2024 sustainability budget to $7,500, which the county reportedly was going to match. (With the county’s budget still not settled, its $7,500 match likely will be repurposed — hopefully earmarked for water sustainability efforts.)
The late Yale University President A. Whitney Griswold once noted the “only sure weapon against bad ideas is better ideas.” A better idea now? Involve more people by expanding the rain garden program, not pillorying it, to reduce water in floods by taking advantage of low-lying private areas.
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