On curb grass, stormwater, challenging, and not pandering.

We've got a lot of curb grass this summer, and while this can be explained by an inordinate amount of rain, it also suggests that street sweeping isn't really cleaning the streets, because if it did, would there be soil enough for the grass to grow?

So, what do you do except mow the streets every now and then, as workers were doing recently at the Coyle Corporate Welfare Site?

Here is why this matters.

It is a problem, but wouldn't we be helping alleviate the problem if our stormwater runoff effort included not only big ticket expenditures, but also matching grants for various steps homeowners themselves could do to keep water from reaching these drains?

And educating about where the leaves and yard clippings belong, and enforcing them?

As it stands, we as a city collect monies and deploy them from the top down to "solve" the stormwater problem without any active expectations on the part of the citizenry. However, I think little efforts add up to big ones, and accrue less expensively than the big ones.

They're harder to hang plaques on, but who needs to take credit so long as something gets accomplished?