Black Swamp Creek stream restoration in Brandywine is one of the largest turnkey projects in the state of Maryland. The Clean Water Partnership with Corvias and Prince George’s County is the first of its kind to design, build, finance, operate, and maintain urban stormwater infrastructure on private land. This partnership will meet municipal stormwater or MS4 regulatory requirements while engaging the local diverse business community.
The Clean Water Partnership is a unique collaboration between the Corvias Solutions and Prince George’s County. They were able to come into this partnership to create a mechanism for meeting the TMDL MS4 requirements, while also meeting certain county requirements in terms of participation in various other aspects for minority businesses.
In 2017, RES introduced the Clean Water Partnership to a novel and innovative approach to total maximum daily load crediting. Thinking beyond traditional stormwater best management practices, which mostly consist of building detention ponds, or concrete diversions located on city lands or easements. RES presented a groundbreaking opportunity, to obtain impervious acre treatment credits through stream restoration on private lands by way of a new green, self-sustaining kind of best management practice.
This change in thinking about best management practices ultimately reshaped the regulatory methodology used across the entire state of Maryland, and paved the way for stream restoration permitting on private lands. The approach of working with private landowners to restore streams on large contiguous parcels, streamlined implementation of this innovative type of restoration at an impressive scale. And because RES is already skilled in developing long-term relationships with landowners, they were able to secure the right land that would deliver the biggest impact for the project and all of the partners, the landowners, the community, the surrounding watershed, and ultimately the Chesapeake Bay.
