Mark your calendars for a very important meeting on Wednesday, March 16.
Currently under construction in Smoketown, the Metropolitan Sewer District‘s (MSD) Logan Street CSO Basin is the only one of 12 such projects in Louisville to be built above ground, with no public space or neighborhood amenities included. Compounding the problem, the hulking concrete bunker casts a blank wall for hundreds of feet of Logan Street and Breckinridge Street and blasting for the project has allegedly been damaging neighboring structures.
Above: Broken Sidewalk’s Elijah McKenzie speaks with residents about the Logan Street CSO Basin. Read his full report here.
In an effort to improve the design of the basin and make some amends to the neighborhood, MSD has enlisted the help of Louisville-based De Leon & Primmer Architecture Workshop to re-imagine the building facade facing the street. And community input is needed.
The architects will hold a design meeting for the Logan Street CSO Basin on Wednesday, March 16, at Meyzeek Middle School, 828 South Jackson Street, from 6:00–7:30p.m. We encourage you to attend.
“A summary of community suggestions created at the first neighborhood design meeting—held January 28—will be presented,” the event description reads. “You will have the opportunity to help further develop strategies and concepts concerning the facade of the structure during this meeting.”
MSD is under a consent decree with the EPA to reduce Louisville’s Combined Sewer Overflow problem. These basins are the method MSD chose to pursue to fix it.
A push had been recently made calling for MSD to revise plans for the CSO Basin, burying the structure further and bring it to grade with some kind of public space for the community. MSD officials had indicated that the agency saved around $4 million in designing the Smoketown project below the same standards as other neighborhoods in the community.
For more information, follow the event’s Facebook page.
Thanks for continuing coverage of how engineers spend your rate millions. In this case they chose the absolutely worse alternative in a hand out to big contracting firms. In the first place, millions of gallons of stormwater that could have been kept out of the sewers by green streets practices will instead be held and pumped to Morris Forman to be mixed with full strength industrial, commercial and residential sewage and given secondary or less treatment. Millions of gallons from local area drains at Mid City Mall, the Government Center on Barrett and other major parking lots and roofs could have been diverted. MSD chose to inflate the problem and the money drain. EPA didn’t mandate bad solutions and are now belatedly pushing for diversion of stromwater. Just like our 60s era highways, we remain 50s era stormwater.
EPA GreenStream:
Green Streets: The Road to Clean Water
Newly released U.S. Environmental Protection Agency video – Green Streets: The Road to Clean Water – “Green streets” are natural and engineered methods for controlling stormwater that would otherwise gather pollutants and rush from hard streets into storm drains and out into local waterways. This video highlights green streets as a technique for managing stormwater and providing other economic and community benefits. Shown are examples of green streets in localities that have worked with EPA and other partners to incorporate green streets as part of their stormwater management plans. Green features shown include porous pavement, rain gardens, vegetative curb areas and sidewalk trees.
Link: https://youtu.be/TxqxEqnHIKw
Sad! We’re really scraping the bottom of the barrel on this one; I’m getting sick of this firm’s “work.”
@Suzanne: Are you kidding? De Leon & Primmer are one of the best firms in the city. They didn’t design the basin—MSD engineers did—they’re just coming in to help fix it.
De Leon & Primmer is one of the few firms that could actually salvage this atrocity!
I think they have done some excellent green work that could be of serious value to Smoketown’s own version of the Buy A DieJester. If they cannot make it better then likely it cannot be done.
I’m not a fan! And neither are most of the people I talk to who have to drive by the new Filson Historical Society Building. I’m sure they can handle the criticism, but I wish them luck on this project!
You should be so lucky that a backwards-ass city like Louisville has a design firm such as De Leon. Their studio is beautiful and looks like something that should be in Chicago or NYC.
yikes folks. i think suzanne is entitled to an opinion!