Saugus Meeting member calls for drainage board

SAUGUS – With a little time on his hands since he resolved a neighborhood flooding issue, former Town Meeting member Richard Mytkowicz is looking to take on a new project: drainage.Selectman Peter Rossetti noted during a recent meeting that Mytkowicz is seeking to put together a committee to look at drainage issues town-wide. He is hoping to catch the projects that fall between site plan review guidelines and local building codes.First, however, it needs to be determined who will choose the committee. Mytkowicz said he thought the process should go through Town Meeting, but it was suggested by that body that the request should go before Selectmen. The Selectmen tossed it back toward Town Meeting and Mytkowicz said he tends to agree.Town Moderator Robert Long could not be reached for comment.Mytkowicz said all he really wants to do with the committee is address the way builders, be they home owners or businesses, use pavement. He pointed to two projects on Main Street, a laundromat and a church that he believes perfectly depict what he foresees as a key drainage problem in town. Church builders not only paved in front of the building, but behind it as well. Mytkowicz said that causes rainfall and runoff to sheet directly off the property and into the street, which leads to drainage issues when the town’s catch basins and sewer lines become overrun.He said the problem is that unless a development triggers a need for a site plan review, there is little in the building codes that addresses how a property can be paved. Mytkowicz also said the Conservation Commission has no teeth in the matter unless the property is a certain distance from a body of water.Other communities, he said, have addressed the issue by simply limiting how much of an area can be paved. Other states, he said, have further addressed the issue by using porous concrete or pavers.Mytkowicz said he was in Chicago for a baseball game last summer and the 20-acre parking lot was lined with porous paving stones instead of being paved. That way, rainwater seeped back into the ground instead of running off into the streets, catch basins or drainage ditches.Mytkowicz pointed to large local parking lots, such as the sprawling lot at Kowloon Restaurant, and said it would be a good thing if large lots in the future could be done like the one in Chicago, nothing he expects that will happen anytime soon.”This will take 100 years,” he said with a laugh. “I’ll be dead before it’s done.”Mytkowicz is no stranger to lengthy projects, though. He spent nearly a decade fighting to get a flood mitigation project for Shute Brook in his neighborhood. After years of documenting flooding and chasing grants and state and town officials for help, the Shute Brook project was finished last year.Mytkowicz said he has no intentions of reinventing the wheel and would look to other communities for ideas on how to write a bylaw that would project drainage issues.”It’s a big issue nationally, not just locally,” he said. “I just want to get our bylaws into the 21st century.”