The City of Myrtle Beach is developing a plan to improve the quality of storm water runoff and bodies of water.
City leaders presented the new plan at their fall planning retreat Wednesday.
For the past twenty years, the city said quantity took a priority over quality, meaning that the city focused most of its efforts on fixing the amount and frequency of neighborhood flooding.
Now they’re turning their efforts and money to water quality.
The city is still going to focus on keeping up with flood prone areas and addressing new areas, but the public works department came up with a new “master plan” for improving water quality, which they revealed plans for today.
To create the master plan, the city picked one area as their starting point, the Withers Basin area, to first test and study.
“We can look at one particular area and develop standard operating procedures to roll out that particular plan city-wide,” Janet Curry, Director of Public Works, said.
The city-wide plan is something the Myrtle Beach leaders will use to make future development and policy decisions.
Council members said during the meeting that overdevelopment has led to many storm water and water quality issues. Low-impact development options were discussed.
“For instance, allow the water to infiltrate into the local soils– should the soils be permeable enough to accept those types of conditions,” Curry said.
The pilot study of Withers Basin will take about eight months. It will take about three years to implement the master plan city-wide.
The city will hold a public meeting next month for residents and businesses around Withers Basin to address their flood concerns and also hear more about the project.
