City of Ventura Watershed Restoration Masterplan

About City of Ventura Watershed Restoration Masterplan

The City of Ventura, CA applied a SmartCode overlay to a downtown redevelopment area and asked CGI to provide a watershed analysis and green infrastructure framework to appropriately comply with MS4 (Municipal Separate Stormwater Systems) regulations. CGI analyzed the watershed, discovered surprising opportunities and constraints, and developed green street retrofit designs so that the City could facilitate off-site mitigation protocols for private development projects.

Challenges

The community desires to incentivize redevelopment of the Westside North Ventura Ave neighborhood with a SmartCode overlay and other incentives, while the new MS4 permit added one-size-fits-all stormwater regulations that were difficult to apply to high density mixed-use sites.

Solutions

The watershed analysis showed that the MS4 regulations did not address the real issues of this sub-area in this watershed; but located and designed green street retrofits that could remove the regulatory burden from individual sites.

Project Images