Question: What is your plan to protect residents from flooding and excessive heat, which researchers say is an increasing risk for Denton?
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Karen DeVINNEY
The The recent Downtown Master Plan proposed Cool Streets for the downtown area and those principles would be great all over town. As a Master Naturalist, I helped develop an online survey tool to make it easy for cities to adopt Blue-Green Infrastructure, which is flood control that depends on natural elements such as plants and rock beds, rather than concrete-lined ditches and creek beds. I believe (not sure) both Lewisville and Denton have adopted the tool.
I’m also a strong supporter of planting trees and am proposing that Parks and Rec devote some space to a tree farm, perhaps in coordination with Keep Denton Beautiful’s tree giveaways. The city already offers incentives, in the form of reductions on utility bills, for planting trees.
It’s also important to keep in mind that the western third of Denton was originally prairie, and the deep roots (as deep as 12 feet with some species) of native prairie grasses are excellent flood control and can sequester more carbon per acre than trees.
Where possible, we should re-establish prairie. We could use the prairie restoration at Clear Creek Natural Heritage Center as a model.
Suzi RuMOHR
Both flooding and excessive heat are worsened by two things: too much pavement and too few trees.
Most pavement in Denton is automobile infrastructure like streets and parking lots. The City of Denton maintains 1,500+ lane miles of roadways–roughly 2,000 acres. For each automobile in the city, there are three to eight parking spaces–thousands more acres of pavement.
Not only does pavement contribute to excessive heat, it also reduces availability of cooling green space and trees that also reduce flooding.
I support the EPA and Smart Growth America’s strategies to address these issues by: (1) providing a variety of transportation options, (2) making more efficient use of existing streets and parking lots, and (3) directing new development to existing areas in order to preserve open space and farmland in rural areas.
I also support Denton’s tree initiatives and will look for opportunities to increase street trees to create natural shade and cooling while also making Denton more visually attractive.
Margie ELLIS
I think we have made strides in this area as we have improved and updated our tree code, made improvements in our development code requiring more green space and tree canopy, following ISWM (integrated stormwater management). We must ensure we are always updating our criteria manuals so we are following best practices.
Continued talk about heat islands and what we can do to avoid them is needed. That has come with improvement to our parking requirements, so we are not overparking development, thereby creating these heat islands or drainage challenges.
And it has been put into some newly crafted small area plans to include “cool streets” in developing or redeveloping areas.
As well, we must continue to work closely with our environmental services department with regard to our environmentally sensitive areas (ESA). And make sure they have the resources to identify and protect these spaces.