Fish & Water
Chances are that you know someone who lives in a homeowners association, also known as an HOA. However, did you know that HOA rules and expectations can strongly impact local water quality? HOAs are not regulated in Alabama, but they can impact the local community and environment by determining residential landscaping norms. They determine how landscapes are managed, plant choices, and how stormwater practices are maintained. All of these things can have a significant impact on local water quality, wildlife, and flooding management.
The Concern
Houses in urban areas can inadvertently contribute to water pollution as oil, fertilizers, pet waste, or excess grass clippings are washed into storm drains and local water bodies.
As stormwater flows across land, it collects and transports many pollutants on the ground, including fertilizers, pet waste, sediment, pesticides, automobile fluids, litter, and more. By carrying these pollutants into waterways, the stormwater itself can become a pollutant. Individual households in HOAs can contribute to the volume of stormwater and the types of pollutants being washed into storm drains. Some of these pollutants include fertilizers, grass clippings, oils, paints, and pet waste.
How HOAs Can Help
HOAs are uniquely positioned to encourage homeowners to use best management practices on their home landscape. Properly maintained landscapes can play a role in improving water quality and maintaining ecological biodiversity. Covenants, conditions, and restrictions (CC&Rs), rules and regulations, and bylaws are usually determined when a developer incorporates the community. The developer will try to anticipate the type of community or commercial property space they are creating. However, the needs of a community often aren’t fully clear until residents move in. Initiate a conversation with your HOA’s board or Architectural Control Committee to discuss your interest and reasoning in watershed protection early on. This can be helpful when submitting future requests that might affect the external appearance of your house or yard.
The following are ways that HOAs can take proactive roles in improving their local water quality and encourage water stewardship.
Reduce Paved Areas and Turf
Interlocking permeable pavement can be an aesthetic way to let rainwater sink into the landscape.
Impervious surfaces—such as roads, rooftops, and parking lots—prevent stormwater from soaking into the ground, where natural filtration of water would otherwise occur. Paved areas can cause flooding in urban streams, eroding stream banks and harming habitat. Opting for permeable pavement options—such as gravel, stone, or interlocking pavement bricks—can allow rainwater to infiltrate the soil where it falls.
Rainscape Yards with Stormwater Best Management Practices
Rainscaping is any combination of plantings, catch basins, permeable pavement, rain gardens, and other activities that manage stormwater as close as possible to where it falls, rather than moving it someplace else. In addition to rain gardens and bioswales, a diverse landscape that includes trees, shrubs, perennials, mulch, and amended soils intercepts and disperses rain as it falls. This allows more water absorption into the soil and by the plants.
Depending on who oversees the HOA and how suggestions are addressed, consider providing educational materials on the value of rainscaping a property to your HOA. Many native plants—such as pink muhly grass (Muhlenbergia capillaris), purple coneflower (Echinacea purpurea), blanket flowers (Gaillardia spp.), and Coreopsis (Coreopsis lanceolata)—are attractive perennials that are well adapted to rain gardens. The river birch (Betula nigra) is a tree option that is well adapted to floodplains and along stream banks.
Change Perceptions Through Education
Cultural norms are one of the biggest impediments to environmentally friendly changes in the landscape. Biodiverse yards can sometimes be perceived as wild or untamed if the monoculture lawn is the neighborhood norm. Understanding the importance of a biodiverse landscape with native plants can slowly shift cultural norms. Talk to your neighbors about why rainscaping your yard is important for reducing pollution and how these practices can be beneficial, both ecologically and aesthetically. Share tips on how to fertilize lawns properly with neighbors, host litter pickups or storm drain markings, or talk to your yard maintenance crew about fertilizer and pesticide concerns you may have.
Maintain Stormwater Management Systems
Most residential developments have some form of stormwater management system in place. Stormwater best management practices are often permanent facilities (infiltration basins, stormwater ponds or wetlands, bioswales, detention ponds, etc.) that are designed to handle stormwater runoff for a specific area. As a property owner or HOA, you may be responsible for maintenance of these facilities.
More Information
All HOAs exist within the larger river basins and watersheds that often incorporate or span city limits. The rules and decisions HOAs make can have a larger, city-wide and watershed-wide impact on water quality. Learn more about water stewardship by reading the Alabama Watershed Stewards Handbook, available at www.aces.edu.