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Lotus Water
Project Updates - Tis the Construction Season!
Project Updates - Tis the Construction Season!
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Lotus Water
2023 Company Retreat
2023 Company Retreat

news

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Project Updates - Tis the Construction Season!

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2023 has been a busy, busy year for construction projects at Lotus Water, and as the year wraps up, here’s a sneak peek on construction progress.

Sonoma Ranch Institute - Sonoma County, CA

Sonoma Ranch Institute—a vision for a learning laboratory of design, regenerative agriculture, and sustainable land stewardship—is deep into the construction of Phase Two, which includes grading the majority of the site, establishing new road alignments, installing site utilities and irrigation, and constructing new conveyance swales and bioretention basins. The site has made significant progress and the contractor is racing to finish work within the onsite stormwater reservoir before El Niño kicks into full gear this rainy season. This 7 acre-foot reservoir, adapted to meet the site’s sustainability goals of self-sufficient water use, will eventually capture and store rainfall to meet sitewide irrigation and fire prevention water needs.

California College of the Arts - San Francisco, CA

A year after the California College of the Arts (CCA) extension campus in San Francisco resumed again in 2022, construction is humming along with the campus’ massive indoor-outdoor structure rising above the entire superblock. Surrounding street improvements for the project have also been approved after several rounds of review with the City. Check out the live-feed cam of the campus’ ongoing progress here!

Mission Bay Bayfront Park P-22 - San Francisco, CA

Part of the open-space network along the new Mission Bay waterfront, Park P-22 has made significant progress in grading the site and adding terrain through geofoam and backfill. All bioretention basins have been excavated and lined, while trees and planting installation for the basins and park have begun to take shape in time for the start of the Warrior’s regular season.

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Team Events in 2022

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Always up for taking advantage of gorgeous weather in the Bay and opportunities to break up the routine of WFH, Zoom calls, GIS, or H&H modelling, the Lotus team still finds time to get together for outdoor fun, food, laughs…and a rare chance to see each other IRL!

Spring Fling // Oakland Waterfront

Our spring event was the perfect opportunity to check out Brooklyn Basin and Township Commons, a beautiful public park plaza on the Oakland waterfront, whose design by Einwiller Kuehl integrates community priorities, sea level rise adaptation, and sustainable stormwater features with the area’s rich shipping history.

After an amazing lunch at Brotzeit Lokal biergarten (Oktoberfest in May, because why not?), we strolled (and kayaked!) along the water to Township Commons for music, suprisingly competitive games of Spikeball and Throw Throw Burrito, and just kicking it. Throughout the afternoon, we observed how thoughtful public spaces like the Brooklyn Basin can recall its historic past in design elements echoing the spacing of the former loading docks. We also saw how spaces can adapt to a post-Covid world; the large, open spaces at the Basin easily allowed for social distancing, while its waterfront location lends itself to be a destination for all kinds of recreation and activities. It was wonderful to see the park full of people roller skating, running, playing with their dogs, and to be reminded how important shared open spaces are to creating connection and community.

(footage courtesy of Brooklyn Basin/Township Commons)

Fall Picnic // Presidio of San Francisco

Once again inspired by innovative design and a new waterfront park, the Lotus team gathered for an afternoon picnic at San Francisco’s new Presidio Tunnel Tops Park in early October. Over frosty drinks, a spread from Souvla and Gregory’s Underground Bakery, and frisbee with furry friends, the team enjoyed a chilly but beautiful sunset while exploring the 14-acre park overlooking Crissy Field and the Golden Gate Bridge.

Despite the wind and a strong appearance by Karl the Fog, we toured the grounds to appreciate various design elements included by the James Corner Field Operations team. Partitioned spaces of lawns, meadows, outlooks, and outposts throughout the park allow for varied programming and a plethora of gatherings to take place simultaneously. Imaginative nature-inspired seating areas made of tree trunks, reclaimed wood, and boulders are sprinkled throughout for visitors to take a load off and enjoy the views. The design also incorporates bioretention areas to manage stormwater, infiltration galleries for groundwater recharge, and sea level rise and saltwater intrusion measures along the park’s lower outpost play area.

We had a blast together and look forward to exploring other new parks being built around the Bay, including India Basin Waterfront Park and Lotus’ own Mission Bay Bayfront Park!

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Breaking Ground: New California College of the Arts Campus

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Despite a prolongued delay due to the ongoing pandemic, construction for the new California College of the Arts (CCA) extension campus in San Francisco succesfully resumed in 2022. The CCA gathered with the community, city officials, and the project team in November to officially celebrate with a ceremonial groundbreaking and reception showcasing the campus’ vision of sustainability.

Designed by a team led by Studio Gang, the new campus will feature overlapping courtyards and plazas that tie in a campus vision of interdisciplinary practice, engagement, and connection to the surrounding urban neighborhood. Both the construction process and the completed campus’ functionality are meant to be resource efficient. Lotus provided all civil engineering design for the campus and public realm spaces from concept phase through final design, and continues to provide support during construction.

 

live webcam of the work site

“To fuel culture and industry, a great city needs a great art school. CCA is building the most exciting urban art and design campus in the country, the only independent, privately endowed art and design school in Northern California. We educate students to meet the many challenges of our world with creative problem-solving, to become the innovators and game-changers of the future,” said Stephen Beal, President of CCA. “We know that diverse perspectives and experiences are critical to innovation and that educating students from diverse backgrounds is essential to realizing the full potential of art and design to positively impact the future of our communities,” said President Beal. “These valued organizations share our commitment to diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging in the arts and design. Together, we are empowering talented students from historically underinvested communities to focus not only on their education but on becoming creative leaders who will make powerful contributions to shape our world.”

We’re excited to watch this project unfold and come to life!

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Seeds of Innovation: Resilient Design Competition

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In September 2022, Lotus Water participated in the Water Flows Forward - Seeds of Innovation: Resilient Design Competition, hosted by The Water Collaborative, a grassroots organization in New Orleans, Louisiana. This year’s competition challenged teams to develop a floating planter box for indigenous communities in Louisiana’s Grand Bayou Village, a region rich with culture and history. Given the area’s unique coastal setting and vulnerability to land subsidence, water levels, and climate change, bayou communities need an adaptable planter box with the flexibility to float while planted, withstand brackish water, be transportable both on land and in water, and integrate a water catchment system.

Inspired by the opportunity to help communities build resilience and find a solution for food security, we assembled a multi-disciplinary team of engineers and planners to put our water resource minds together to create a design that was multi-functional and a reflection of the local community in New Orleans.

Our Design

The Pirogue Planter pays homage to the pirogue boats used throughout the bayous of Southern Louisiana. The planter’s innovative and modular design provides removable planter boxes, rainwater harvesting and storage, accessibility options, as well as land and water mobility. Designed for current and future conditions as sea levels rise and coastal communities, such as the Grand Bayou Village, lose land to subsidence and flooding, the Pirogue Planter reflects the communities’ culture while providing a flexible solution for food and medicinal sovereignty.

Pirogue Planter (shown with rainwater catchment wings engaged) has flexibility to grow plants both on land and while afloat in water.

Pirogue Planter - Key Components:

Boat shell - made of powder-coated aluminum to withstand saltwater exposure and prevent rusting. Powder-coating can be customized to showcase local identity and traditional colors. The shell geometry allows for vertical stacking and lateral tesselation, streamlining efficient storage and transport at scale.

Planter boxes – removable t-shaped aluminum planter boxes, with drainage holes, that provide soil depths of 6” through 22”. The range of planting depth was selected to allow for a variety of food and medicinal crops, such as the “Three Sisters”, to be grown together sustainably.

Rainwater catchment wings - panels of the upper hull can swing out and be locked in place using a sofa ratchet hinge, creating an angled plane that captures rainwater and routes flows through a perforated false bottom into a reservoir.

Reservoir - the boat bottom stores rainwater for watering plants. Drainage holes in the bottom of the planters, which sit above and extend into the reservoir, allow plants to access stored water through capillary action. The intermediate false bottom has two reservoir access lids where collected rainwater can also be used for hand-watering the planter or other nearby plants in the community.

Drainpipe - a drainage opening in the bottom of the boat leads to an exterior drainpipe that can be adjusted to control the depth of water storage in the reservoir. A check valve prevents brackish water from entering the reservoir when afloat. This drainpipe system still allows drainage from the reservoir when the planter is afloat even if the interior water level exceeds the water level outside the boat.

Although the Lotus team did not win the design competition, the opportunity for our staff to collaborate in new ways, stretch our creative problem-solving muscles, and apply our expertise where it’s needed most was so rewarding. It’s not every day that our team gets to perform buoyancy calcs, analyze capsize stability, and research planting almanacs! Congrats to the winners - check out their inspiring designs here.

Lotus looks forward to continuing to work with communities to plan, design, and build for resilience on future projects and competitions!

Modular deployment of floating Pirogue Planter in water

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Water Needs in the Bay Area's Vulnerable Communities

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A Regional Water Needs Assessment report, led by the Disadvantaged Community and Tribal Involvement (DACTI) Program and funded by the Integrated Regional Water Management Program's (IRWM’s) Proposition 1, was released in September 2022. The report is the culmination of four years of research and findings from 13 individual needs assessment processes that were conducted between 2017 and 2021 by community-based partners—from a Tribal needs assessment process administered by five Tribal Outreach Partners and from the peer-to-peer needs assessment—to understand how people experiencing homelessness or poverty are accessing water for drinking, sanitation, and hygiene. Lotus’ Community-Involvement Planner, Maddie Duda, was the lead author and community liaison for the report.

The needs assessments revealed how strikingly similar priorities for water management are across the participating Disadvantaged Communities and Tribes. Many communities shared:

  • a distrust for tap water quality and safety

  • concerns about flooding related to storm surges, sea level rise, and groundwater rise

  • concerns about lack of access to green space and nature — including creeks, rivers, and the ocean — for recreation.

The report’s Regional Connections section summarizes these priorities, best practices for making grant programs more equitable and accessible to Disadvantaged Community groups and Tribes, and other overall recommendations from the San Francisco Bay Area IRWM Region DACTI Program.

This report is the product of the collective work of many partners that was spearheaded by DACTI with a goal of amplifying the voices of DACTI groups and people experiencing homelessness, and incorporating their needs into the planning process. Ultimately, the report serves to keep the San Francisco Bay Area region accountable to achieving the California Right to Water law enacted in 2012 that guarantees that “every human being has a right to safe, clean, affordable, and accessible water adequate for human consumption, cooking, and sanitary purposes.”

Fieldwork Meets GIS: Bioregional Habitat Restoration Support

The San Francisco Public Utilities Commission (SFPUC) Alameda and Peninsula Watersheds consist of a combined 53,000 acres of diverse and unique habitats ranging from oak woodlands and coniferous forests, to serpentine grasslands, to a variety of uses including grazing, plant nurseries, and quarry operations. Much of these expanses is remote and difficult to access, complicating the management of infrastructure assets, water resources, and native plant and animal life.

Over the course of numerous site visits and hours of fieldwork, Lotus collected field data and created maps to establish an inventory of Bioregional Habitat Restoration (BHR) conservation easement assets for the SFPUC in coordination with the Land Trust as part of long-term management of the BHR sites throughout Alameda and San Mateo Counties. In collaboration with asset management, biological resources, and GIS specialists, Lotus created a feature-rich geospatial database of over 350 unique site assets, including 230 assets which had not been previously mapped.

Granular asset data was collected real-time in the field using ESRI’s Collector app, including photographs, measurements, condition analysis, maintenance recommendations, and precise physical location. Asset maps were created both digitally (as interactive, zoomable web maps and full attribute table availability on-click) and statically (as carefully crafted PDF maps with illustrative labeling and symbology), supporting GIS layers such as utilities and boundaries, and detailed annotations. Additionally, Lotus worked closely with Avila & Associates to provide biological support services with on-site habitat and species surveys, and wildlife and plant monitoring and management support to ensure that the BHR assets and easements met regulatory compliance for resource protection.

The Lotus team embraced the opportunity to use the power of technology to help enhance ongoing and future BHR work and looks forward to expanding our web-based tools on other asset management projects!

Orange Memorial Park Undergoing Major Renovation

Orange Memorial Park is getting a makeover starting with what lies underneath. Starting March 22, 2021, residents will see construction fencing lining a portion of the park to get ready for Phase One of the Orange Memorial Improvement Project, consisting of a Regional Stormwater Capture Project that will provide water quality improvements to meet the requirements of the San Francisco Bay Municipal Regional Stormwater Permit (MRP). The project is designed to reduce discharges of PCBs (Polychlorinated Biphenyls), which have been linked to a variety of adverse health effects, and mercury to the San Francisco Bay.

“This regional project, which is spearheaded by our City, will provide multiple benefits in addition to improving water quality, including reducing localized flooding and reusing treated water for irrigation and groundwater recharge,” said South San Francisco Mayor Mark Addiego. “We’re excited that we are leading this effort as the first of its kind in the Bay Area, in hopes that this encourages others to do similar projects that will ultimately benefit our health and the environment.”

(image: incommon)

How it Works

Once water is diverted into the park, the system treats the water to remove trash, debris, and sediment. Pretreated water will then enter a pipe leading to an underground cistern located under the sports field for further treatment and disinfection so it can be used to meet irrigation and other non-potable demands, which includes irrigation to the park and along portions of Centennial Trail. When full, the cistern overflows into an infiltration gallery which will provide groundwater recharge benefits. Construction of a stormwater capture system will occur underneath a portion of the existing baseball and softball fields, and along the picnic area.

(image: incommon)

This project helps clean water flowing from our cities to the Bay. The reach of Colma Creek running through Orange Memorial Park drains over 6,500 acres of land from six different municipalities, including the City of South San Francisco. This regional stormwater capture project, the first of its kind in Northern California, diverts all dry-weather flow and the first flush of urban stormwater runoff from Colma Creek into an underground system integrated within the park. Overall, 200 million gallons of water, or 15 percent of the annual flow in Colma Creek, pass through the system for treatment and beneficial use.

The Phase One project is funded through a $15.5M cooperation implementation agreement with Caltrans to help satisfy its pollutant load reduction.

What About the Sports Fields?

Revitalizing the sports fields is Phase Two of the Orange Memorial Improvement Project, which will also include pavement restoration and other associated surface improvements. This multi-sport, all-weather field will include:

  • Electronic scoreboards

  • Synthetic turf

  • Sports field lighting

  • Enhanced planting areas

  • Spectator areas

  • One adult/teen softball diamond with dugouts, bullpens, and batting cage

  • Two youth baseball diamonds with dugouts and bullpens

  • Two adult soccer fields with portable goals

  • Two junior soccer fields with portable goals

  • Four youth soccer fields with portable goals

  • Drinking fountains

“Determining what this multi-sport, all-weather field will look like was the result of many community meetings, where we heard from a variety of sports representatives in terms of how they envision the future of this field,” said Sharon Ranals, Parks and Recreation Director and Assistant City Manager.

“Having played on these fields in my youth, I know firsthand how valuable youth baseball is to our community. These field improvements and expansion will provide years of recreation and memories for generations to come,” added Vice Mayor Mark Nagales.

Schedule

Phase One construction begins March 22, 2021, continuing through Spring 2022.

Phase Two construction will begin in Spring 2022 with sports fields anticipated to reopen in Spring 2023.

Follow the progress of this project by visiting www.ssf.net/OMPImprovements and read more about Lotus’ role on the project here!

 
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Lotus Wins Overpass Challenge Award!

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Lotus is excited to be one of three winning teams selected for the 2020 Greater Milwaukee Green Infrastructure Overpass Challenge! The contest, funded by the Tellier Foundation and administered by the Milwaukee Metropolitan Sewerage District (MMSD), is focused on reducing and treating polluted stormwater runoff, the biggest remaining threat to rivers and lakes across the US. Teams were challenged to identify new, innovative approaches to maximize the capture and treatment of runoff from interstate overpasses, while attaining other triple bottom line benefits such as activating otherwise neglected spaces.

Many cities are transforming transit underpasses—such as I-94 in Milwaukee—into public parks, replacing vacant lots, overgrown weeds, and dark passageways with art installations, pedestrian thoroughfares, and community amenities. (image: Google Eart…

Many cities are transforming transit underpasses—such as I-94 in Milwaukee—into public parks, replacing vacant lots, overgrown weeds, and dark passageways with art installations, pedestrian thoroughfares, and community amenities. (image: Google Earth)

Gathering Place by the Water

Water is of vital importance to Milwaukee, which sits at the confluence of 3 rivers and Lake Michigan. The city’s name fittingly means “gathering place by the water”, derived in part from Potawatomi (“manwaking”) and Ojibwe (“omaniwakiing”). Drawing inspiration from this rich heritage and identity, Lotus teamed with incommon to develop two prototype concepts that, in addition to achieving stormwater management objectives, would improve safety, enhance connectivity, and create gathering spaces for the community. Both designs would reconfigure the existing drainage pipe system from the freeway, connecting it to a new treatment system below, consisting of water treatment elements with the flexibility to be implemented individually or as a hybrid combination based on specific site conditions and needs.

Sculpture Park

The Sculpture Park concept manages water with a distributive approach, using modular components that are flexible in their implementation. The existing freeway drainage system would be routed down to a baffle box element that settles out sediment and other contaminants. Baffle boxes would be housed in sculptures designed in collaboration with local artists, inviting visitors to explore and interact with the park features, while also providing educational information about local flora and fauna.

Waterways Parklet

The Waterways Parklet concept is a more centralized treatment system well-suited for space-constrained sites, with vegetated wattle waterways that spiral down and around overpass columns, providing initial filtration as runoff is captured and conveyed below. The Waterways Parklet would provide air quality benefits, while introducing vertical wildlife habitat and vegetation to the site.

renderings by incommon

Both designs finish the water treatment process with a constructed wetland and bioretention elements that provide wildlife habitat, public interaction touch points, and community greening.

Tune in Wednesday, February 24, 2021 at 10a PST to learn more about the Green Infrastructure Overpass winning designs.

 
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San Mateo County Streets Reimagined

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When is a street not just a street?

What if the streets in our communities were better designed to provide safety and protection for pedestrians and cyclists, help increase resilience against the effects of climate change, and beautify our neighborhoods?

BEFORE

BEFORE

AFTER

AFTER

To take the leap toward sustainable streets throughout the county, the City/County Association of Governments of San Mateo County (C/CAG) created the San Mateo Countywide Sustainable Streets Master Plan in collaboration with Caltrans under the Climate Adaptation Planning Grant Program. This long-term planning effort builds on years of watershed modeling and stakeholder input, and takes a closer look at how and where to build sustainable streets in San Mateo County that integrate stormwater management with local priorities, like bike and pedestrian mobility, transit improvements, climate change adaptation, and more. The plan also includes a down-scaled climate change analysis to better understand the potential future precipitation related impacts from climate change and how green stormwater infrastructure can help adapt to changing conditions.

Lotus—along with key project partners Alta Planning, Paradigm Environmental, and Urban Rain Design—worked with C/CAG to identify and prioritize sustainable street projects throughout the County, developing a scoring methodology to prioritize projects and a companion Green Infrastructure Tracking Tool website that summarizes sustainable infrastructure in San Mateo County and the benefits it provides for stormwater capture and climate resiliency.

Page through the complete plan and its associated documents here.

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Green Schoolyards From Award-Winning Grant Program

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Earlier this year, the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission (SFPUC) celebrated the one-year anniversary since the launch of its Green Infrastructure (GI) Grant Program, the City’s first large-scale GI grant program that provides funding to San Francisco property owners to capture and manage stormwater through GI. The first year of the GI Grant program saw many milestones, including an applicant workshop with over 100 participants, 6 project grants totaling $5M in funding, and winning a 2020 Outstanding Sustainable Stormwater Program Award from the California Stormwater Quality Association (CASQA).

Today, we celebrate another exciting milestone - the first two grant projects have completed construction, just in time for the rainy season!

 
 

Bessie Carmichael Middle School

The SFPUC awarded San Francisco Unified School District (SFUSD) $0.4M, working with SFUSD’s Green Schoolyards program and additional funding, to transform the Bessie Carmichael schoolyard. The GI Grant Program funded:

  • Site soil remediation

  • A repaved and painted play yard

  • A mural to promote education around the environment and infrastructure through art

  • Three in-ground planted bioretention basins, and

  • Four above grade planters to manage roof and yard stormwater runoff.

Altogether these seven stormwater management BMPs will manage 275,000 gallons of stormwater annually within the Channel Watershed.


 

Lafayette Elementary School

An additional $0.5M was awarded to fund stormwater infrastructure improvements at Lafayette Elementary School, integrated into SFUSD’s building modernization project. The grant funded:

  • Two bioretention basins

  • A large planted dry creek bed to manage stormwater runoff from the play yard and a portion of the roof

  • New planters

  • Impervious surface removal, and

  • Educational signage throughout the yard.

The stormwater improvements will manage 350,000 gallons of stormwater annually in the Sunset Watershed.

Lotus Water continues to provide technical and programmatic support for the GI Grant Program, working closely with the SFPUC to develop the program guidebook, perform site visits at potential grant project sites, review applications and plan submissions, and provide construction administration services.  

Read more about the GI Grant Program here.

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Imagine A Day Without Water

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2020 has been quite a year – we’re in the midst of a global public health crisis from the coronavirus pandemic, which has highlighted the critical role that water and wastewater systems play in our communities to protect public health, safeguard the environment, and make a healthy economy possible.

Today, we Imagine a Day Without Water.

It’s a day to pause and notice the way that water systems impact our lives and communities, and commit to ensuring a sustainable water future for generations to come.

Lotus recognizes how essential water is for our communities to thrive and is committed to working toward a future that ensures all people have access to clean, safe, reliable, and affordable water.  Our philosophy is rooted in the belief that traditional engineered systems are most effective when integrated with innovative solutions that restore natural processes, optimize water reuse, and incorporate community insight and priorities to balance environmental, social, and economic benefits. Together with project partners, such as the SFPUC and King County, Lotus carefully considers potential equity and environmental justice impacts throughout our capital planning, project, and policy development process. Through this collaborative triple bottom line approach, Lotus is engineering solutions for a better environment while building stronger, more resilient communities.

 

We can all use our voices to speak up in support of water infrastructure by voting.

 

For many of us, this is the most important election of our lifetimes. It is increasingly imperative that we hold our elected officials accountable for addressing the climate crisis, fixing our failing infrastructure, prioritizing safe drinking water for all, and protecting water for future generations. Below are some resources about candidate views on water issues and information on how the voting process might be different this year.

FEATURED PROJECTS

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A Playground With A View!

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The McLaren Park Playground and Group Picnic Area is nearly complete! Lotus Water staff performed the final site inspection in early August on this important community project within San Francisco’s second largest park. The project, led by CMG Landscape Architecture, includes a new nature-inspired playground that is centered around a 20-foot tall climbing tower that will give kids amazing views as they play. It also includes accessibility and landscape improvements, native plants, as well as new stormwater management features such as permeable pavement and infiltration galleries. Estimated to be complete in the next 1-2 months, the project will add a valuable outdoor amenity envisioned to reenergize this area of the park and its surrounding communities.

Enjoy the videos and music you love, upload original content, and share it all with friends, family, and the world on YouTube.

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Back to School

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In alignment with Lotus’s commitment to corporate social responsibility, Lotus is partnering with the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission (SFPUC) by participating in its community benefits program. The program’s purpose is to be a “good neighbor” to communities that are impacted by SFPUC facilities and operations. Through the program, Lotus endeavors to give back to these communities through volunteer work and donations.

One of the ways Lotus gives back is by applying its technical and environmental expertise to support the development of STEM curriculums and green schoolyards in San Francisco public schools, including Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Academic Middle School, Bret Harte Elementary School, Leonard Flynn Elementary School, and McKinley Elementary School.

At Leonard Flynn Elementary, Lotus staff coordinated field trips to the Mission Science Workshop, where students of all grades do hands-on science lessons and experiments ranging from dissecting squid to building circuits. Other volunteer acitivites include bringing tadpoles to Flynn’s second grade classrooms and support the students and teachers in caring for them while students learn about their lifecycle and observe their metamorphosis into frogs. Lotus also organized a workday to reactivate Flynn’s rainwater cistern, by installing piping to bring captured rainwater to irrigate the school’s garden.

To read more about our community benefit work, check out this post on volunteering at Literacy for Environmental Justice in Southeast San Francisco.

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Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat...and WATER!

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CAUTION!

sous-chefs @ work

You know what they say about company culture:

“A team that okonomiyakis together, stays together. ”

Joking aside, Lotus Water fully embraced the spirit of okonomi (“what you like”) and yaki (cooked”), by taking time to enjoy each other’s company, learning some tasty new culinary skills, and celebrating a successful 2019 with a home(office)-cooked meal with the folks at 18 Reasons.

The cooking class and menu were collectively chosen by Team Lotus as our company’s annual holiday event. Everyone had a blast in the kitchen, from mandolining carrots, searing pork belly, flipping okonomiyaki pancakes, to whipping up matcha soufflés…and of course EATING with each other and looking forward to another big year in 2020!

Want to put on your chef’s toque? Menu + recipes here!

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Another GI Plan in the Books!

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As part of its obligations to regulate stormwater runoff pollutants under NPDES MS4 Phase I requirements, the City of Menlo Park has adopted a Green Infrastructure Plan for Stormwater (GI Plan) that demonstrates a shift from traditional “gray” infrastructure, which channels untreated runoff directly into San Francisco Bay, to a more resilient and sustainable stormwater system that integrates “green” infrastructure strategies. Along with its teaming partners, Lotus helped establish how source control, redevelopment requirements (C.3), green streets, regional capture projects, LID retrofits, and additional City policies can collectively combine to meet runoff capture targets cost-effectively. Dive into the complete document here.

SJ Green Stormwater Infrastructure Goes Public

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The City of San José has published a Green Stormwater Infrastructure (GSI) Plan that lays out the approach, strategies, targets, and tasks needed to transition traditional “gray” infrastructure to include GSI over the long term. Lotus Water was integral in developing the plan, which serves as an implementation guide for institutionalizing the concepts of GSI into standard municipal engineering, construction, and maintenance practices. As California’s weather becomes increasingly unpredictable and extreme, GSI strategies can provide the City with enhanced climate resiliency, local water supplies, and energy savings, consistent with the City’s sustainability goals. The GSI Plan is available here for public review and comment until May 15 - take a peek and share your thoughts!

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Green Thumbs + Green Nodes for Visitacion Valley

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Under sunny skies, community members and local officials gathered Saturday to celebrate the reopening of the newly spruced up McLaren Community Garden, which features a series of rain gardens designed by Lotus as part of the SFPUC’s Visitacion Valley Green Nodes project. The new green infrastructure will manage 800,000 gallons of stormwater each year from approximately 1.5 acres of impervious surface, while providing a pedestrian and habitat connection to McLaren Park from Leland Avenue. “I am thrilled to see the community and environmental improvement projects at McLaren Park,” said Senator Scott Wiener (D-San Francisco). “We are lucky this year to have gotten so much rain, but that’s not always the case. The new rain garden will help us to reuse hundreds of thousands of gallons of rainwater each year. We need more projects like these that bring benefits to local communities while helping advance our broader environmental goals.” The ribbon-cutting ceremony was followed by community yoga, gardening activities, and a walking tour of the rain gardens where community members were able to see the bioretention areas in action after the rainy week. Attendees also learned about how the City is implementing green infrastructure through capital projects, programs, and grants to sustainably manage stormwater. Read more about the Visitacion Valley Green Nodes here!

Lotus Water Gets a Makeover

 

It’s been an exciting few months here at Lotus Water - new space, new hires, new projects, new logo, and now a new…

…website!

 

We wanted to update our look to capture the energy of the growing Lotus team and portfolio, with new features like our staff bios and news updates about what we’re up to, both in and outside the office.

 
 
 

We hope you stay awhile to look around, and be sure to check back for the latest in Lotus news!

 

Have ideas or feedback to share?

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New GI Grant Program is a HIT!

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The SFPUC GI Grant Program has launched!  Lotus helped developed the program and will be providing ongoing technical support during implementation.  The first public workshop about the program sold out with over 100 attendees, and the first applicant has already submitted!  The SFPUC aims to award $6M in GI grants during the first two years of the program, with up to $2M max per project. Learn more about the program and how a grant could benefit you!