LOCAL LAWMAKERS ARE FINALLY placing innovative controls on the way developers can treat our environment.  At last Tuesday’s Board of Commissioners meeting, the Mattawoman Watershed Roundtable Group proposed a list of  zoning code alterations designed to reduce the pollution of our local waterways by changing the way developers create and landscape their parking lots and buildings.

Group representative Karen Wiggen, a Senior Planner of Environmental Programs for the county’s Planning and Growth Management Department, presented impressive but long overdue suggestions for creating greater quantities of large shade trees and healthier landscaping around parking lots and buildings.  The suggestions also deal with ways to break up and cool our ocean of asphalt. 

Karen Wiggen, Gary Hodge & Wayne Cooper

The Group wants the county to require that developers use pervious paving and bio-retentive landscaping in the area’s larger parking lots.  Pervious pavement allows rainwater to drain through the parking lot, filtering down and slowly replenishing our aquifers.  It means that rain carries less waste into storm drains and causes fewer instances of flooding. 

“Run-off is one of the most serious causes of pollution in our rivers and streams,” stated Commissioner Gary Hodge (D).  “This is a great start and hopefully it can be expanded further, perhaps to residential areas in the future.” 

top & bottom: mulch volcanoes,
middle: rotting trunk base

The Group also recommends that the county require landscapers to design with more attention to the needs of plants.  They want developers to use more native plants that grow easily in this area without costly and wasteful extra watering.  According to Wiggen, parking areas should also have more and wider landscaping areas to allow more shade trees to reach healthy maturity.

Wiggen explained that the “mulch volcanoes” we see at the base of most of the area’s professionally landscaped plants actually rot the trunks, killing expensive quantities of trees annually.  The Group recommends that landscapers place mulch level with the ground and also lower landscaping beds so rainwater soaks down to plant roots instead of running uselessly off into storm drains. 

“I’m all for the trees.  Why can’t we leave some of the existing trees, some of which are 100 years old?” Cooper asked.  “Why have we gotten away from that and are clearing 100%?” 

The commissioners voted to accept the Group’s recommendations and send them to the Planning Commission with two changes: stricter pervious paving requirements, and retention of more existing trees.

“The commissioners have been looking at insisting that all parking lots be pervious,” Board of Commissioners President Wayne Cooper (D) told Wiggen.  “I think the way we’ve been thinking is a little