In a society monopolized by the idea of "greening up," Richard McKown isn't afraid of brown.

McKown, developer for Norman-based Ideal Homes, doesn't fertilize his yard, deeming the plant food one of the main culprits of water pollution.

Despite neighborhood campaigns to convince him that he's tarnishing the area's green aesthetic, his brown grass doesn't bother him.

"People are always mad at me. Fertilize more. Make everything greener. They just don't understand," said McKown, who said most yards are only deficient in one of the three nutrients found in the common fertilizer, prohibiting plants' ability to absorb the other nutrients found in the fertilizer, which are picked up in water runoff and carried into water sources, contaminating the supply and producing algae as a byproduct.

Alarmed by the growing rate of water pollution, the Oklahoma Conservation Commission's Water Quality Division is shelling out money from its 2008 grant from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, about $500,000, to battle the deteriorating water quality of Lake Thunderbird, as urban development continues and impervious surfaces -- structures like roads and pavements covered by asphalt and concrete -- also increase.

McKown was contracted by the division, which typically concentrates developments in rural watersheds -- bowl-shaped water centers made from water runoff -- to build a project in the Trailwoods neighborhood that will use low-impact development methods from the area's natural resources, while simultaneously protecting the local ecology, to test experiments aimed at improving the drinking water for central Oklahoma.

This is the first time the division has employed low-impact developments in an urban setting, said Judith Wilkins, environmental projects coordinator of the commission's Water Quality Division.

"It'll be subtle changes," said Wilkins, such as how the weatherman no longer says to fertilize the yard before it rains. "This isn't an implementation project like we usually do; it's an education project. How many people do you think even know what impervious means?"

Low-impact development methods include consideration of neighborhood walkability so people don't have to drive, and use of public spaces to create a cool environment that promotes walkability and keeps roads below scorching temperatures in the summer, provides habitats for other organisms and uses locally available materials.

The makings of a team

Ironically, McKown said his neighbors' fertilizer fetish is contributing to pollution, like the accumulation of algae in a local pond where McKown lives in Carrington neighborhood, a development built by Ideal Homes.

"This is your drinking water right here. Tasty, right?" said Reid Coffman, OU landscape architecture professor, motioning to the pond, which, until McKown poured $4,000 worth of chemicals into it this summer, was drenched in green slime.

The Water Quality Division has contracted with the University of Oklahoma and Coffman has been named project coordinator of the Trailwoods development. He has assembled a team that will design, construct and monitor the neighborhood with these low impact methods aimed at reducing stormwater flooding and improving water quality.

The McKown and Coffman duo has been working for about three and a half years in McKown's Carrington neighborhood, testing projects like rain gardens -- small gardens of plants used to trap pollutants in the water runoff before they meet the mainstream -- that could appear in the Trailwoods development.

Designing the blueprints

The theme for Trailwoods reads like Dr. Seuss' book, "The Lorax," which is McKown's inspiration for the neighborhood's street names.

The experiment will include a street, named "Sharpish" -- a description of the antagonist in "The Lorax" -- implementing these low impact developments and another, named "Onecer," -- the antagonist in "The Lorax" -- acting as the control.

McKown said the houses in this neighborhood will be very energy efficient and compacted on smaller lots to promote walkability.

"You have to start with that intense building block of making it compact and walkable," McKown said.

Unlike Brookhaven Village, which he said is difficult and inconvenient to walk through, since most residents can only enter through Robinson Street or 36th Avenue, this neighborhood will have entrances at all angles and is close to Norman North High School so students can walk to school.

McKown said wooded areas of the neighborhood will be preserved and the neighborhood is being designed to move rain water through filtration systems like rain gardens, which will extract these pollutants to help trees grow.

"When we're done, we'll have an urban forest," said McKown, noting the trees he plans to hang over the sidewalks to promote walking by controlling the heat and wind.

At the end of each street will be a flume, an artificial water channel, that will collect the runoff water, which beginning in 2013 will be analyzed by OU engineering students to compare the effectiveness of the low-impact methods to the control.

Plans for Trailwoods, however, have not been approved yet by the Norman Planning Commission. McKown said they are still working on the drawings and hope to have the plans finalized the end of this year, with building beginning in January 2010.

Since some of the plans are not approved under current city ordinances, Wilkins said the city is giving leeway to the experiment.

The entire projected, including observations and analysis, is set to be finished in 2014, when model ordinances, which Wilkins hopes the city will adopt, will be presented, along with a cost-benefit analysis and workshop for area municipal stormwater personnel, builders and developers.

What's to blame

Water ponds like the one in Carrington run directly into Lake Thunderbird, the main source of drinking water for Norman, Midwest City and Del City.

McKown said this pollution, which he attributes to fertilizer, tail pipes and hot roads, is picked up and distributed into the public's water supply when it rains and leads to the aftermath of a larger problem -- utrification -- where plant growth like algae fills the water, choking out beneficial plants from growing and compromising the water's chemical properties as it raises pH levels.

"I tell people to stop fertilizing your yards, and it'll fix the problem. The easiest way to fix water quality is to outlaw fertilizer, but everyone just laughs when I say that," McKown said.

The commission has found traces of phosphorus, cholorphyll-a and some bacteria in Lake Thunderbird, Wilkins said.

"The process is the same no matter what the scale," Coffman said. "Utrification can happen in this pond, or it can happen in Lake Thunderbird. We have to stop this."

Halting the pollutant stream

Until McKown and Coffman can convince gardeners to trash their fertilizer, they're experimenting with innovative ways to divert these pollutants from killers to creators.

Drawing from the basis that these pollutants can grow algae, the pair is using the pollutants' powers for good, like in the rain gardens of Carrington, which upon approval by the planning commission, McKown plans to include in Trailwoods.

Here these pollutants are converted into nutrients as the water flows down a created channel and into filtration gardens, causing plants to grow.

The idea for Trailwoods is for each house to have its own rain garden, which has been found to trap 95 percent of motor oils off the street and 25 percent of fertilizers, so they can clean the water before it becomes concentrated and hard to control.

"In Oklahoma, the water comes so quick it's like a flash flood. It's not like Seattle where it's a slow rain," said McKown, who has traveled across the country to places like to Maryland to observe which low impact developments these states are utilizing. "We could do this everywhere. It's not rocket science, but it's also not easy. If it were easy, we would be implementing things people already figured out like in Seattle and Maryland. But it rains differently there."

Beyond drawing ideas from other states, the duo is enlisting the help of Coffman's graduate students, who have submitted models of rain gardens built across the country and designs of best practice methods, also known as low-impact methods, for the development.

But McKown said some of the ideas are a little too ambitious and over the development's budget.

If done right, Reid said low-impact developments can be less costly because natural resources are used, as opposed to concrete which is expensive to make since it is resource-intensive and uses large amounts of energy to crush the rocks and transport.

McKown said the team plans to extract small components from the students' ideas, as they continue to search for new inspiration, whether from students' models or other states, and tweak tried experiments.

"We're failing forward," McKown said.

Nanette Light 366-3533 pop@normantranscript.com