Kowalczyk, Katie

Katie Kowalczyk is a civil engineer and urban planner who has focused her career in stormwater retrofit through watershed planning, facility design,...

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About Kowalczyk, Katie

Katie Kowalczyk is a civil engineer and urban planner who has focused her career in stormwater retrofit through watershed planning, facility design, construction oversight, permit compliance, development of guidance documents, and change management. She has worked on projects on the east and west coast as well as the Midwest where she was hired as the first Green Infrastructure Coordinator. In her current role in the city, she continues to manage the green infrastructure program while expanding her tasks to include watershed coordination, climate resilience planning, and community support on equity initiatives. You can often find her detouring around the city on her bike looking for excuses to get together with the maintenance team

Kowalczyk, Katie

Titles from this speaker

Description: Not Just A Stormwater Project: Incorporating Racial Diversity Into An Urban Retrofit...

Not Just A Stormwater Project: Incorporating Racial Diversity Into An Urban Retrofit Infrastructure Project

Abstract

Lacking a landscaping team to take care of your native vegetation installations? Don't know how to reach people who are under-represented in your community? Struggling to recruit the future workforce? Want artistic elements to promote your capital projects? These are some of the challenges we face in public works departments as we try to react to the urgent demands of climate change and racial equity with limited resources and expertise. The City of Minneapolis looks for ways to align our work with resources in the community to meet these pressing priorities.
The first project we piloted in public works involved the retrofit of an existing stormwater flood surge basin to provide water quality treatment. The project's adjacency to a diverse high school provided an opportunity to incorporate outreach and environmental job exposure to students.
The city crews do a lot of heavy construction; however, the equipment and skills are limited when it comes to restoration and enhancement of the vegetation. Concurrently, entities in the community focused on environmental skills development in local youth approach us looking for meaningful projects. We know that our current methods of outreach do not always reach all affected by environmental issues and further do not engage these communities most affected by environmental injustice to develop skills that help them represent and connect their communities to contribute to decision making. We also do not always have the skill sets or resources to support racially diverse youth employment. Current trends in youth jobs training include urban agriculture, which means non-profits in the region look for opportunities to expand their reach and get involved in infrastructure projects with high visibility, larger scale, and direct applicability to water quality and environmental needs.
Minneapolis is making a concerted effort to diversify the city's engagement and find new, more successful methods to install vegetation in stormwater facilities. Re-evaluating how we structure our projects helped to identify a contract with a local non-profit. We looked at the parts of projects where we lack resources and set up an RFP to fill these gaps. The parts of the project we outsourced consisted of community outreach, engagement, installation of the native plants, and a two-year maintenance period for the native plants. The new structure allowed us to leverage an organization that fosters established relationships with diverse communities to implement an environmental project that provided important secondary benefits of more effective and modern community outreach and jobs recruitment without added cost.
This presentation will briefly describe the retrofit project and focus on the contracted outreach and native plant restoration work. We will cover the benefits of working with atypical organizations, the city's role, lessons learned, and how we plan to continue and expand more of this type of funded partnership to increase and broaden our community involvement and make gains in racial equity.

Incorporating equity practices into green infrastructure initiatives can feel daunting, especially for staff tasked with building projects and without guidelines or examples for how to incorporate equity. Equity components may take many forms, some of which are easier for staff without expertise in community involvement to implement. This presentation covers a few of the approaches Minneapolis has taken to restructure our process and provide paid opportunities through creative partnerships.

SpeakerKowalczyk, Katie

Presentation time

16:00:00

16:25:00

Session time

15:30:00

17:00:00

TopicIntermediate Level, Diversity, Equity & Inclusion, Facility Operations and Maintenance, Public Communication and Outreach, Stormwater and Green Infrastructure

Author(s)

Kowalczyk, Katie

Author(s)Katie Kowalczyk1</sup

Author affiliation(s)Minneapolis Public Works, Minneapolis, MN1

SourceProceedings of the Water Environment Federation

Document typeConference Paper

PublisherWater Environment Federation

Print publication date Oct 2022

DOI10.2175/193864718825158708

Volume / Issue

Content sourceWEFTEC

Word count15

Description: Urban retrofits: Stormwater retrofit plan for Minneapolis and what our first project...

Urban retrofits: Stormwater retrofit plan for Minneapolis and what our first project did to incorporate paid learning lab jobs training into infrastructure projects.

Abstract

One of the new requirements of the MS4 permits consists of a stormwater retrofit plan. This presentation will summarize the plan developed for the City of Minneapolis. We will also showcase one of the retrofit projects that was constructed, explaining how we took a different approach to incorporate environmental equity into the project through a jobs training learning lab without increasing the budget. The city has four flood surge ponds that are being evaluated for retrofit to provide water quality treatment. These ponds activate only when extreme weather events cause conveyance pipes to back up. This type of existing pond retrofit can be very cost effective and in some cases, may be one of the few options available in an already developed urban area. The first pond to undergo retrofit for water quality treatment was the Holland Basin, an existing flood surge pond that covers an entire city block. The basin is adjacent to a public high school and the neighborhood used the pond as a park space, adding to the complexity and outreach needs. The adjacency to a public high school in an over-burdened community presented an opportunity to use the project as a learning lab by employing youth to help with outreach, training material development, and restoration of the disturbed area using native plants. The project was successfully completed in the summer of 2021, and the learning lab contract continues for the warranty period to provide establishment maintenance. The learning lab paid 92 youth and installed more than 4,000 native plants for a project that provides water quality treatment for 20 acres. This presentation will explain the retrofit project and the approach to incorporate racial equity into an infrastructure project.

This paper was presented at the WEF Stormwater Summit in Minneapolis, Minnesota, June 27-29, 2022.

SpeakerKowalczyk, Katie

Presentation time

14:00:00

14:30:00

Session time

13:30:00

15:00:00

Session number05

Session locationHyatt Regency Minneapolis

TopicDiversity and Inclusion, green stormwater infrastructure, Sustainability And Social Responsibility

Author(s)

K. Kowalczyk

Author(s)K. Kowalczyk1

Author affiliation(s)City of Minneapolis1;

SourceProceedings of the Water Environment Federation

Document typeConference Paper

PublisherWater Environment Federation

Print publication date Jun 2022

DOI10.2175/193864718825158476

Volume / Issue

Content sourceStormwater Summit

Word count24

Base text size -

Kowalczyk, Katie

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