The River des Peres: Then, Now and in the Future

On Monday evening, August 29th, I’m going to a gathering at the . The topic of the meeting? The River des Peres.

The River des Peres has been part of my life since very early on. I grew up in Rock Hill.  Fifty years ago I used to walk to Deer Creek with some of my many siblings to play in the creek. In the winter time we skated on the creek – I still remember the very thick, bumpy ice. Deer Creek is one of the many tributaries of the River des Peres and the one I knew best until I moved to U City in 1986.

When I came to University City I became familiar with University City subwatershed – our watershed where the creek is actually called the River des Peres. As I drove, walked and biked around my new home I started to see the river channels – often almost invisible behind masses of vegetation – including the dreaded non-native Japanese honeysuckle which I would get to know much better when I became part of the Green Center. (But that’s another story.)  I would pass over a short bridge in U City or Pagedale or Overland and realize – that’s the river! But I never saw any children playing in it, or skating on it. And it seemed the same, yet different, from the river channel I visited so often years before.

When I was Executive Director of the Green Center I met a gentleman named Bob Sutton who seemed to have the same sense as mine of this highly-degraded urban stream.  And, together, we founded the River des Peres Watershed Coalition.  We used a small grant from Tom’s, the toothpaste people, to start the Coalition.  And we made some good progress in bringing people from throughout the whole watershed (a good part of STL County and almost all of the City of St. Louis) together around the mission of the group:  The River des Peres Coalition aims to improve, protect, and maintain the River des Peres and its watersheds as a vital natural and cultural resource in the St. Louis metropolitan area.  (Although I am no longer an active member of the Coalition I still strongly support its work.)

Fast forward six or seven years, after many river clean-ups, organizing meetings and strategic planning sessions. I became a Councilmember in University City and one of the first neighborhoods I visited, and visited often over the ensuing years, was Wilson Avenue.  The residents of Wilson helped me put a new face on this river, not to replace my good memories of the past, but to add to them.  They helped introduce me to the NEW River des Peres, the urban stream that now carries too much water after big “storm events” (as MSD dubs them) because of widespread development throughout the watershed over the last fifty years.

Now I am Mayor of University City.  Now, after many years of effort, 26 homes are being bought out along Wilson.  Now, after a huge flooding event in 2008, we know that about 250 other homes in our City can be negatively impacted by this stream, including many just upstream from Wilson.  And we now know that the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers says that about 400 homes in our community are in the floodplain.

The University City subwatershed (the official name of this part of the river) includes, in part,  University City, Pagedale, Overland, Normandy, Bel Nor, the Village of Hanley Hills, Olivette and  Creve Coeur.  Rains that fall in those communities head downstream.  And we are downstream.  We are at the bottom of this watershed.  We get it all.

Early on in my term I met with Jeff Theerman, the Executive Director of the Metropolitan Sewer District of St. Louis (MSD). We talked about the river, and I told him I hoped to work with mayors from throughout the whole River des Peres watershed to talk about any and all challenges the river poses in our various communities; and work to present a united voice in the larger community about how those challenges might be met.  (There are about 38 municipalities in the whole watershed.)  Mr. Theerman voiced strong support for this effort.

On Monday, with equally strong support of the River des Peres Watershed Coalition, I will meet with some of the mayors and other officials from the U City subwatershed to begin this work.  They are coming at my invitation, but this will be the Coalition’s meeting.  I will be there as the mayor of an affected community.  The Coalition will hear about the river in each community; will offer its support to all of us in the form of river clean-ups, rain garden installations, and developing a coordinated plan for moving forward.  And the Coalition will update all of us on the recent settlement that has been reached between MSD and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.  (Please see: http://www.epa.gov/compliance/resources/cases/civil/cwa/stlouis.html.)

I hope this will be the first in an on-going series of meetings with these municipal officials. And I hope what we do in the University City subwatershed can be expanded to the full watershed in the years to come.  As MSD moves forward in implementing the terms of the settlement its reached with the EPA (which focuses more on sewage and the river than flooding)  it’s important that the municipal voice is heard.  It will be at the municipal level that funds for the settlement are raised.  It will be at the municipal level where people will have to start thinking about how to keep more rainwater where it falls; where building codes will have to be updated.

For Monday? I am optimistic about the meeting because I have been working with all the mayors who have been invited on other issues.  I know of their commitment to their communities, and I think, to the larger community.  If this smaller group can make progress I know we will be able to the same with other officials throughout the watershed. And I believe in the commitment of the current administration at MSD to deal with the problem of and challenges with the River des Peres.

Nothing will happen as quickly as we would like.  It will take a generation, I believe, to take this urban stream where I would like to see it go.  And it will take years to come up with a solution for the problems in the floodplain here in U City.

Someone, I am not sure whom, said “The first step towards getting somewhere is to decide that you are not going to stay where you are.”  If you don’t want to stay where we are on the River des Peres, I hope you will let me know; will get involved with the River des Peres Watershed Coalition (http://www.thegreencenter.org/rdp/introduction/timeline.asp) and will commit to starting work now on something that might not come to fruition for years.  The next generation of U Citians will thank you for it.

Ciao.

Mayor Shelley Welsch

The mayor's blog is NOT affiliated with the official University City website. That is at www.ucitymo.org. The mayor's personal website is NOT trying to replicate what's on the City's website.