BANGOR, Maine — Bangor city officials and members of the Bangor Area Stormwater Group are hoping to capitalize on the popularity of this weekend’s Bangor Garden Show and promote stormwater awareness and conservation.
The stormwater group will give away a free rain barrel during each of its “Soak up the Rain in Maine” presentations at the Bangor Garden Show Friday and Saturday.
One 55-gallon barrel made of recycled plastic will be randomly given away at each of the shows, which are at 1 p.m. Friday and 11 a.m. Saturday. There will also be a raffle at the stormwater group garden show display.
“It’s our mission to better manage stormwater, and if we ever get to the point where we have sustainable funding for our efforts, we could supply a barrel for every Bangor homeowner,” said Wendy Warren, BASG environmental coordinator.
The rain barrels, which were assembled with help by Penobscot Job Corps Academy students, collect rainwater and keep it more of it from flowing into ditches and catch basins that drain, untreated, into streams and rivers. The barrels would help improve water quality and lessen stormwater drainage.
Due in large part to more restrictive and further-reaching federal and state stormwater regulations and mandates, the Bangor City Council will soon be considering instituting a stormwater fee which would be similar to water and sewer fees paid by residents. The fee would pay for improvements to stormwater drainage and management that Maine municipalities are required by law to make.
A storm water fee, huh? What’s next a fee for sunshine?
Yes its being approved at next council meeting
followed by the falling leaf and snowflake fee
If you pay taxes, you’ve been paying a stormwater fee since the Clean Water Act was adopted several decades ago.
They already have that. Have you noticed you pay more in taxes the more windows your house has?
only if Liberal Dems are in office
Sounds great if you have a garden to water. But if you don’t…what do you do when the barrel is full?
When it gets full, you just dump it out. It’s not storm water after its in the barrel. Kind of like that out of state demo debris that gets “processed” in-state and becomes local trash for our landfills.
Remember the Steve Martin standup routine? “Always carry a trash bag in your car. It doesn’t take up much room, and if it gets full you can just toss it out the window.”
Swat all the mosquitos that will hatch from it.
These are designed so that mosquitoes (and other bigs) cannot breed inside.
Good question. Water the lawn? Wash the car? Clean your windows? Wait for a dry spell and THEN dump it in the stormdrain?
Make lemonade.
Question on the storm water drainage. Would this act encourage people to dump water into neighborhoods, so it doesn’t cost them money in drainage, yet freely change the environment?
That would explain why an engineering firm would engineer a wetland instead of the designed playing field, yet look good by placing storm drains all around the field. We don’t need to worry about losing wetlands on that note.
It would be a lot easier to pour storm water run off into lakes, rivers, and the ocean if there weren’t houses and neighborhoods where the water would normally drain. Kind of hard to ask people if they mind a ditch in their yard for drainage on 1/10 of an acre lot and then lift the road to get to the creek, and people on the other side of the bay wonder why their pond is drying up over the past 100 years.