Flint Creek Watershed Partnership

Citizens Act to Save Flint Creek Watershed

by Patrice Peltier

This spring, native woodland flowers bloomed along Flint Creek near the village of North Barrington — some for the first time in many years. Their welcome blossoms were one of several signs that the Flint Creek Watershed Partnership, a coalition of concerned citizen groups, is making an impact.

“Flint Creek is in terrible shape. It needs help,” was the assessment of Patsy Mortimer (Citizens for Conservation) in 2004 at a meeting called by the Barrington Area Development Council to address water quality concerns. It was the consensus of the meeting’s participants that it was time to take action.

In the spring of 2005, the Flint Creek Watershed Partnership was established. The partnership consolidates the efforts of conservation groups and municipalities to protect water resources and enhance water quality, reduce flooding, protect natural areas, promote open space and improve habitat in the Barrington area.

There’s a lot of work ahead. “Restoration is not something that happens quickly. It takes years,” cautions Mortimer, the partnership coordinator. But there is already plenty of progress to celebrate.

There are those native wildflowers returning to Flint Creek’s banks for starters, but there is more formal recognition of the group’s progress as well. In 2008, the partnership received the Chicago Wilderness Excellence in Conservation Award and the Indian Creek Watershed Leadership Award. In 2009, Citizens for Conservation conferred its William H. Miller Conservation Award on the partnership.

Citizens for Conservation knew that improving the water quality of Flint Creek required seeing the bigger picture, Mortimer explains. The Flint Creek watershed drains 36.5 square miles through portions of Lake, Cook and McHenry counties. Rainwater once pooled on the ground, collected by native plants to be filtered and funneled into the earth where it recharged the groundwater.

Development changed all that. Rainwater now rushes over roofs, paved surfaces, turfgrass and septic fields, picking up fertilizers, road salt, grease and oil, human and animal waste, then dumps it unfiltered into Flint Creek. “It’s not just about Flint Creek,” Mortimer continues. “You can’t improve water quality without addressing the source. We had to look at the watershed as a whole.”

The result was a 12-member watershed partnership comprised of the Barrington Area Council of Governments, Barrington Area Development Council, Barrington Hills Conservation Trust, Citizens for Conservation, the townships of Barrington and Cuba, and the villages of Barrington, Barrington Hills, Hawthorn Woods, Lake Barrington, Lake Zurich and North Barrington.

The partnership works because its members are so uniformly committed to its cause, says Nancy Schumm-Burgess, executive director of the Barrington Area Conservation Trust. “In other watersheds, it’s often the conservation groups who have to pull the municipalities in kicking and screaming. What’s really wonderful in the Flint Creek Watershed Partnership is that these are communities that are already conservation minded. The conservation groups started, and the municipalities immediately signed up for it.”

Mortimer agrees. “I feel very fortunate to work in a community where so many people care about the environment.”

The first order of business was to create a plan. In August 2006, the partnership applied for a grant under Section 319 of the Clean Water Act to create a watershed management plan. They thought that sometime in 2007 they’d learn whether they got the grant, and then they’d spend a couple of years developing the plan, Mortimer says. But things didn’t work out that way.

In November 2006, the Illinois Environmental Protection Agency called. There was some funding available. Could the partnership put together a watershed plan by September 2007? “Like an idiot, I said, 'Sure,'” Mortimer recalls. “Later, I was told there’s no way you can do a plan in nine months.” She was eventually able to negotiate an extension until December 31. “We literally went into zoom mode. It was a race,” Mortimer says. “No one else has done a watershed plan in a year. It really focuses your attention.”

“Typically it takes up to three years to do a plan like this, and that’s based largely on how fast the clients can go to keep up with the information we need and how many meetings are required to resolve issues,” acknowledges Steve Zimmerman, project manager and staff ecologist at Applied Ecological Services, Inc., the company hired to create the plan.

Applied Ecological Services had already completed two other watershed plans within a few miles of the Flint Creek Watershed. It helped that they knew the area—and the players. It also helped that the Flint Creek Watershed Partnership wanted to use these plans as a model for their own.

The biggest factor, though, was Mortimer, according to Zimmerman. She knew all the people to contact to get the necessary information and to develop project recommendations, he says.

“I couldn’t have completed the plan so quickly without her because she did a lot of the legwork,” Zimmerman says. Working with Mortimer and the Flint Creek Watershed Partnership was an especially pleasing project for Zimmerman because the client was a nonprofit. “I was working with citizens via Patsy,” he says.

The plan identifies 99 detention basins where replacing turfgrass with native plants will improve water quality and reduce flooding. It identifies 19 flood problem areas, 9 lakes and 24 stream miles in need of restoration to stem erosion, and nearly 100 sites where water can be captured to reduce flood problems, improve water quality and create wildlife habitat.

An open space plan identifies an interconnected network of open space and water resources that helps sustain the watershed. The groundwater recharge plan identifies open space and recharge areas that private and public stakeholders can use to protect groundwater areas. The document also sets out plans for monitoring water quality and providing information and education.

“Creating the plan was easy compared to implementing the plan,” Mortimer says. All the steps need federal, state or county funding, and funding is tight, she says. Grant money usually comes with a requirement for local matching money, and these days, that’s hard to come by, too. Still, some grant money is already coming through, and “the communities are committing — even without the grant funding — to seeing this through,” Schumm-Burgess notes. Neighbors, students and businesses have heeded the partnership’s call to action.

Over the last few years, the Walnut Grove Neighborhood Group has removed invasive plants and replaced them with natives along two sections, 300 feet, of Flint Creek. Nearby, Barrington High School students installed erosion control blankets along a portion of Flint Creek that flows through the school grounds. Over the winter, the students grew native plants from seed, which they’ll plant along their portion of the Flint Creek project this year. PepsiCo employees volunteered 80 hours this spring doing restoration work on the company’s 66 acres along Flint Creek.

Meanwhile, the partnership has applied for a grant from the Illinois Environmental Protection Agency to replace turfgrass with native plants and take other water quality steps in Lake Barrington and in Inverness. Members are eagerly waiting to hear whether they’ll receive grant money to create four to six demonstration rain gardens in the watershed and to offer a cost-sharing program for homeowners to purchase appropriate native plants.

“Our goal is 40 rain gardens by 2010,” Mortimer explains. “I’m really excited about this rain garden project because a rain garden is something every single person can do. The project also tells people how wonderful native plants are, and it gives some visibility to the fact that there is a plan. We can do something about water quality. You can do something about it,” she says with enthusiasm.

The village of North Barrington forged ahead last fall to address flooding issues by restoring 10 acres adjacent to Flint Creek as it flows through the village. The village hired Tallgrass Restoration, LLC to remove buckthorn and honeysuckle through the winter and early spring.

The large, mature buckthorn created such a dense canopy that the native plants had all but disappeared, explains Tim Moritz, project manager from Tallgrass Restoration. That left largely bare ground for stormwater to flow across unimpeded. That’s where those lovely native woodland flowers come into the picture.

“It’s really surprising the number of quality native plants coming in there already,” Moritz says. “This spring, our crews saw trout lily (Erythronium albidum), quite a few mayapples (Podophyllum peltatum), the occasional trillium (Trillium recurvatum), and cut-leaved toothwort (Dentaria laciniata).”

The Barrington Area Conservation Trust received funding from the Lake County Stormwater Management Commission to create a watershed best management practices manual. It also received a grant from the IEPA to host a series of watershed-related workshops. “No one person or organization can do this alone. It takes the commitment of a multitude of partners working together,” Schumm-Burgess says.

She believes that, ultimately, success depends upon getting not only municipalities and conservation groups working together but also on recruiting businesses and grassroots community support. “The goal is to create watershed protection as a way of life,” she says.

“You need your champions in the community, somebody who will encourage the grass roots efforts to keep going forward, to beat the drums. If we can inspire one champion in every neighborhood, that’s what we need,” she explains, adding, “Fortunately, these are communities where champions are abundant.”

Related Articles:

Water: The Quality Test, CW, Spring 2007

Water: Demand & Supply, CW, Winter 2007