Ponds Compliance Study

The General Services Administration (GSA) National Capital Region (NCR) Public Buildings Service (PBS) Office of Facilities Management (OFM), Facilities Management and Services Programs Division (FMSP), is pursuing environmental technical study work to meet juriNCR’s owned and operated portfolio includes 10 stormwater management ponds located at five different facilities or campuses. These ponds were designed and installed over a number of decades under different eras of stormwater and dam safety regulations in three different jurisdictions (DC, MD and VA). Some had shortcomings in the design that resulted in the ponds having poor or nearly impossible maintenance access. The construction commissioning status of almost all of them is unknown and as-builts only exist for the more recently-installed ponds. Facility managers and their O&M contractors have not been trained in how these ponds are supposed to function and be maintained so the ponds have largely been left alone with minimal pond bank vegetation clearing happening in a few cases. There has also been no monitoring of the loss of capacity from sedimentation in order to track and plan for dredging with the exception of one bathymetric survey conducted on NCR’s largest pond in 2021. So the performance of the original design function needs to be assessed. Design and permitting documentation has been collected and is accessible for most of them and the documentation for the few remaining should be locatable. But how complete that documentation is still needs to be assessed for about half of the ponds sdictional and EPA compliance and reporting requirements associated with stormwater management ponds in its inventory. The Objective of this study is to provide facility managers with the information they need to: 1. understand the original design intent of these ponds, 2. determine their current condition, 3. learn what maintenance will need to be done and repairs need to be made to restore each pond’s design function and achieve regulatory compliance with applicable stormwater management permits and dam safety regulations, 4. have the maintenance and repair needs translated into actionable scopes of work, 5. have meaningful cost estimates generated for those scopes of work, 6. understand what routine inspection and maintenance tasks should be pursued annually after restoration work is completed, and 7. understand what dredging option will be the most appropriate and cost effective considering each pond’s design and site access constraints. Besides determining what maintenance and repairs are needed to optimize the performance of the ponds based on the original design, GSA is also interested to understand where any practical retrofit opportunities could be implemented to enhance the performance of these facilities and help the agency meet its Chesapeake Bay pollutant load reduction targets. See Amendment 0001 See Amendment 0002 - REVISED evaluation factors