Business View Magazine - July 2016 63
for the town’s 18 square miles of infrastructure. He
discusses a few of the projects in his Division of the
Department of Public Works: “In terms of the city’s pol-
icy toward infrastructure, we’ve been very fortunate in
that we’ve received three Proposition 84 bond grants.”
(Proposition 84 - also known as California’s Depart-
ment of Water Resource’s Safe Drinking Water, Water
Quality and Supply, Flood Control, River and Coastal
Protection Bond Act of 2006 -authorizes $5.388 bil-
lion in general obligation bonds to fund safe drinking
water, water quality and supply, flood control, water-
way and natural resource protection, water pollution
and contamination control, state and local park im-
provements, public access to natural resources, and
water conservation efforts.)
Union City is applying those monies to develop a num-
ber of rain gardens at various sites in the city’s Decoto
district. City workers have been building rain gardens
in bulb-outs filled with bay-friendly plants that remove
pollutants from storm water runoff. The gardens have
depressions that allow the water to sit and percolate
through the soil. “We take the storm drain water, run it
into a planter area with special material that takes the
pollutants out,” Ruark says. “Then the water bubbles
up and goes into the storm drain system below.”
In addition, asphalt along the curbs is being torn out
and replaced with pervious pavers that allow runoff
to seep through into underground gravel beds. “The
water runs into the pervious pavers and soaks into the
ground,” Ruark adds. “A filtration system removes the
pollutants and then it is piped to the rain gardens and
not into the storm drain system.” Ultimately all the re-
freshed water empties into Dry Creek, which feeds into
Alameda Creek and eventually into San Francisco Bay.
“One grant was for $720,000, which we placed to our
