After a year of planning, student environmental advocacy group Grassroots is working with UR Facilities this week to install a rain garden behind Southside Living Center. Facilities noted in an email that an external contractor will be working on the project, which involves excavating and landscaping a section of the field, until Sunday, Nov. 20.
Grassroots co-president and senior Brian Rinehart explained the concept of a rain garden, saying that the project will consist of a ditch filled with soil and sand and populated with hardy, water-resistant plants.
“With the plants there, and the high sand content in the soil, the water will sit there and then recharge the ground water instead of continuing to run off,” Rinehart explained. “It kind of keeps more water from running into the sewer systems.”
River Campus Operations and University Properties Projects Manager Christina Goodermote noted in an email that, in the first phase of the project, they “are conducting the site excavation and filling the garden bed with the required soil mixture. Then, in the spring, the students will complete the final plantings.”
Grassroots will work with a local nursery to select plants for the garden after the excavation is completed.
Rinehart said that an example of a rain garden on the River Campus can be found in the center of the Science and Engineering Quad.
The rain garden is the first landscaping project of its kind for Grassroots, and is funded by a grant from the New York State Pollution Prevention Institute, a state government agency with local headquarters at the Rochester Institute of Technology. After being awarded the grant last fall, Grassroots began working with Campus Planning and Facilities to find a site on campus for the project.
Rinehart said that the initial plan was for the construction to take place over the summer, but that “complications in dealing with Facilities and contractors” delayed the start of construction until now.
“I think this project was just very low priority for Facilities,” Rinehart said. “Summer right after graduation is obviously a very busy time for them. […] They weren’t particularly prompt.”
He added that it was difficult to get the project moving until Grassroots notified facilities that the grant would be rescinded if it was not used by the end of the year.
Grassroots had originally intended to collaborate with the Warner School. Had the project been completed during the summer, children from the Horizons program (a six-week “summer enrichment” program for K-8 students from Rochester schools) would have been able to follow the progress of the garden. However, since the project was not started over the summer, Grassroots and the Warner School were not able to work together on the garden. Rinehart said he is not aware of any plans for the garden to be used as an educational resource in the future.
Another hiccup occured in the first week of October 2015. The garden was originally supposed to be located past Hill Court, at the north end of campus. However, when Facilites surveyed the area, they “found a convergence of utilities running right through the middle of it underground, where [they] were supposed to be digging,” Goodermote said. The new site near Southside was selected as a replacement, being one of the few places on campus without underground utilities.
“It is important that we have this complete before the weather turns to snow,” Goodermote said.
The garden itself is scheduled to be planted by Grassroots in the spring semester, after the ground thaws.
Passanisi is a member
of the class of 2017.
