SFPUC staff convened the first charrette for City and County of San Francisco employees on September 6, 2007. This event engaged City staff who are involved in stormwater and drainage management in furthering the concept of green stormwater management. It was also an opportunity for staff to begin to conceptualize drainage problems from a watershed perspective and to include the larger land use, urban design and planning issues as they relate to stormwater management. Staff proposed green stormwater management strategies in the Sunnydale and Islais Creek Basins. Participants were engineers, hydrologists, and water planning specialists whose insights yielded many ideas for improving management of the drainage basins.

The second Urban Watershed Planning Charrette was held on September 27, 2007 at the Port of San Francisco’s Pier I offices. Approximately 70 members of San Francisco’s greater community with interest in stormwater management, which consisted of activists, engineers, landscape architects, ecologists and urban designers, gathered to “play” the watershed planning game. Participants were provided baisc information about LID and used maps of San Francisco’s four eastern watershed basins: Channel Basin, Islais Creek Basin, Yosemite Basin, and Sunnydale Basin to make recommendations for stormwater management projects that reduce and detain peak flows and volumes of stormwater using of LID measures. Each team was careful to work within both a capital cost budget and towards specified stormwater management goals. The groups tallied the stormwater benefits and costs of their proposals, voted on their favorite ideas, and presented their recommendations to the larger group. Volunteers were on hand to record all of the ideas that came out of each group.

This summary document contains a composite of ideas common between groups or that were particularly unique and compelling. These proposals will undergo a more detailed analysis to determine their impacts on the stormwater management system and their feasibility in terms of costs, pipe alignment and opportunity to overlap with various planning efforts already underway throughout the City. SFPUC staff will use the results of the analysis to identify and prioritize future stormwater management efforts in San Francisco.