CASE STUDIES - Low Impact Development and Sustainable Stormwater Management - page 207

APPENDIX B
CASE STUDIES
B.1 THE TRANSITION FROM RESEARCH TO PRACTICE
Over a period of 34 years, Cahill Associates (or Resource Management Asso-
ciates) has participated in and conducted a number of studies and/or design
projects, frequently in partnership with consultants in other fields (especially
landscape architecture and green roof design) that offer a chronology of the evo-
lution of the body of practice that we have come to call low-impact development
and sustainable stormwater management. These studies and designs illustrate how
the initial concerns of water quality impacts resulting from runoff-transported pol-
lutants (especially sediment) have gradually widened to include other aspects of
the land development process: social, environmental, and economic. Professional
practitioners now include engineers, planners, architects, landscape architects,
economists, developers, financiers, and government regulators, with very differ-
ent perspectives on the subject of LID.
In the late 1960s and early 1970s, the neglected water quality issue was sed-
iment pollution, unregulated in all federal, state, and local regulatory processes
and permits. The national agency that had addressed this issue for decades in
agriculture [the U.S. Soil Conservation Service (the SCS), now the NRCS] urged
other regulators to adopt requirements for control of soil erosion from land devel-
opment. The solution proposed was based on the traditional farm pond of the
1930s, which had helped to stem the soil loss from much of the nation's cultivated
lands. The sediment running from every land development site was considered
to be just a variation of the problem, and the farm pond was changed to include