Rain gardens sought for Suffolk parking lots

Suffolk County Legis. Edward P. Romaine walked through the parking lot behind his county office on a recent afternoon, took time to look at the orange butterfly weed, the bright red cardinal flower and the purple blazing star, and declared that the little island of green in the center of the parking lot was the wave of the future.

"We should build every new parking lot like this," he said.

His office is in the Cornell Cooperative Extension building in Riverhead, and the county, after swapping some land with Riverhead Town, had added a dozen badly needed parking spaces to the lot.

While they could have added five or six more, had they followed a more traditional grid pattern, they created a rain garden.

Filled with plants and cactus and gently sloped, the garden can provide enough space below ground level to temporarily hold three or four inches of the rain that falls on about 50 parking spaces in the lot.

The soil filters the water, the plants pick up or remove many of the pollutants, and the rest of the water eventually goes into the groundwater table.

"This will act almost like a sponge," Romaine said. "It provides a sea of green within a sea of asphalt."

Creating the 700-square-foot garden out of space in what had been a traditional parking lot cost about $8,000, with roughly $6,000 coming from the federal Environmental Protection Agency and the rest through the state's Soil and Water Conservation Committee.

Romaine (R-Center Moriches) said it took more work to convince the county Department of Public Works to build the water garden than it actually took to construct it. "They're engineers. They build parking lots," he said.

But, with complaints regularly coming into his office about flooding from parking lots, Romaine said he recognizes the value of breaking up large areas of asphalt with small, attractive drainage spaces that need little maintenance, can soak up rainfall without creating problems, and reduce flooding.

Each plant in the green space is labeled with its common name and its scientific Latin name, and all plants are native to Long Island, and picked to resist damage from dry spells and for their ability to soak up water.

There is also a large birdhouse on a pole at one end of the arrowhead-shaped garden. While it has no purpose except as a decoration, there is what appears to be a tiny television antenna on its roof.

Romaine said he is working on legislation that would require Suffolk County to create new rain gardens every time a new county parking lot is constructed, or major renovation work is done on an existing lot.

George Proios, chairman of Suffolk's Soil & Water Conservation District, said that if private businesses had used water gardens in their parking lots, a lot of existing problems could have been solved.

He said one large big-box store in Middle Island, now closed after having a series of owners, has "acres and acres of asphalt" leading to runoff of rainwater into Artist Lake, causing flooding and troublesome growth of algae and plants.