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Bowman Creek Project Garry Gilot, 1904 Lilac Trails Court South Bend, introduced Jay Brockman who is an associate dean for community engagement with Notre Dame and Ryan Nell who is an Enfocus intern who helped with Bowman Creek this summer. He stated Mr. Brockman will lead off the presentation. Mr. Brockman stated this was an initiative that began about two (2) years ago. It is a collection of students from a variety of educational institutions that are working on a variety of projects in the South East Neighborhood. The goal is to work with residents on projects that benefit the community as well as to enhance the education of the students by working on real world projects. This summer we came in with seven (7) plans of things we wanted to accomplish in the neighborhood and what we found was a number of offices within the City that once the students got going and the residents gave their feedback there was a lot of pitching in. Things we hadn't even anticipated before the summer got done because of all the wonderful collaboration. One (1) of the focal areas of the project was water issues. He turned the presentation back to Mr. Gilot to further explain. Mr. Gilot explained that rain gardens are depressions in the ground where you can take water off of roofs or parking lots and other flat hard surfaces and use them like a sponge to soak up the water. Rain water is a resource we want to recharge into our aquifer. All of our drinking water comes from groundwater so to treat that rain water as a valuable resource is a prudent idea. Rain gardens are part of what we like to call green infrastructure. A rain garden is different than turf grass because the plants have much deeper roots, sometimes ten (10) to fifteen (15) feet deep and they break up the soil and make it much more willing to percolate water. These rain gardens are scientific experiments that are designed and measured very carefully with input from the residents. We built tiers into the rain gardens and placed monitors to see if they are working correctly. Mr. Gilot provided images of the finished rain gardens in the residential neighborhood around Bowman Creek. They are not only working to keep our rainwater a resource they are also aesthetically pleasing. Mr. Gilot turned the presentation back to Mr. Brockman. Mr. Brockman continued by explaining how the students placed moisture censors in the rain gardens so they could analyze how effectively they were soaking up water during storms. The rains gardens held up pretty well following the major rain event we had a couple weeks ago. Some of these absorbed over five - hundred (500) gallons coming off a house in a big storm. Mr. Gilot continued that the City has a GIS, which is a geographic information system that provides intelligent mapping layers. We wanted to use that tool for students to figure out what happens after a thousand (1,000) houses in a thousand (1,000) days. That took blighted homes from negative to neutral but what the residents want to know is how do we optimize something positive to put back into our neighborhoods. The original plan for the students was to create an app but after meeting with the residents they realized they needed to go back to the drawing board. That led to this project. The biggest point the residents brought up was that they were worried about vacant lots. There were four - hundred (400) vacant lots out of sixteen hundred (1,600) parcels in this neighborhood. We brainstormed with twelve (12) different proactive adaptive reuses of lots and went through a few matrices on how to judge which are best for the community. Mr. Brockman turned over the presentation to Mr. Nell. Mr. Nell stated one (1) of K