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Nyle Zikmund, City Administrator Don Peterson, Public Works Director January 25, 2019 Page 2 Rule C was in effect at the time and so the City was required to obtain permits. Said permits were conditioned on entering into corresponding, prof ect-specific maintenance agreements for stormwater facilities, including rain gardens. Approximately 680 rain gardens were installed by the City during these projects. The City entered into a maintenance agreement pursuant to each RCWD permit. The agreements are fairly short and were created to ensure that the rain gardens continue to perform per design. They require the City to inspect rain gardens annually to preserve live storage capacity at or above the design volume and remove vegetation, maintain healthy plant growth and remove excess sediment and debris. RCWD staff has passively informed City staff that they (RCWD) have never formally enforced these maintenance obligations. The agreements each have a 5-year term with an automatic 5-year renewal, and also provide that they are superseded if and when the City enters into a City-wide maintenance agreement with RCWD. There is no language authorizing the City to terminate these agreements unilaterally. The City desires to vacate or modify the aforementioned maintenance agreements, thus eliminating or greatly reducing its obligations with respect to the rain gardens that were installed. Stormwater design standards have changed recently and, if those new standards had been in place at the time of these public linear projects, far less rain gardens would have been required. Additionally, there are questions and skepticism about the effectiveness of rain gardens. When the City raised these points informally last summer, RCWD brought the issue to its board without informing the City and without providing an opportunity for the City to appear or participate in the discussion. The RCWD board briefly discussed the City's concerns and decided that they are unwilling to entertain the City's request to eliminate the agreements for the following reasons: 1) The rain gardens serve an important volume management and water quality function for road runoff; 2) When rules or regulations are amended, prior permitted and constructed development is not reconsidered or modified to conform to the revised rules or regulations, and RCWD does not want to set a precedent inviting similar requests, 3) The recent exclusion of road �econst�uctzon projects from Rule C's requirements was triggered by said requirements often being infeasible to retrofit and, the existence of the rain gardens in this case suggests that they were indeed feasible; and 4) The City and RCWD entered into a separate Stormwater Volume Management Agreement in 2009 (we have not seen a copy), and apparently this agreement was entered into to allow the. City to make up for a 2004 stormwater debit by implementing rain gardens as part of its street reconstruction projects. City staff wants to know what additional recourse or options the City might have to alleviate itself of the costly maintenance requirements imposed under these agreements. 552997v2 MU210-263