Condition Assessment of Green Streets Bioretention in the Right of Way – It’s a Numbers Game

The City of Portland has, for nearly 20 years, been managing stormwater bioretention facilities, known as green streets, in right of way locations. What started as a program with just a few facilities has burgeoned into nearly 2500 in publicly owned inventory. Operations and maintenance condition assessment of green streets has evolved over the years as the City of Portland’s Bureau of Environmental Services moves to manage green streets in an asset management framework while retaining necessary adaptive management processes. In 2019, a new condition assessment framework was implemented to inform operations and maintenance as well as overall functional condition. We will explore the details for the inspection monitoring framework, observation fields, severities of each category, and the weighted numeric indexes behind each category which ultimately determine an overall facility score. Aggregated values inform action items for maintenance operations. The overall facility score informs the public and other stakeholders about functional condition.