Where Third Creek Greenway winds between the playground and the creek in Tyson Park, a picturesque bridge spans the water. It arches over the grayish stream, swollen with rain, beckoning to the lush green meadow beyond.

A little girl runs toward the bridge, arms outstretched, and peers down at the burbling water. Next to her is a sign that reads, “Notice: Avoid Physical Contact. Stream Fails State Bacteriological Standards. Possible Sources of Contamination: Sanitary Sewer Leaks/Overflows, Failing Septic Tanks, Animal Waste.”

A moment later the girl’s family stops for a photo on the bridge, the 3-year-old perched on her father’s shoulders. “It’s her birthday,” says her mom, Kristin Hickman. The park is a family favorite, and her two daughters often want to play in the creek. “I usually don’t let them do it, but sometimes I really can’t fight them,” she says. She had never noticed the sign before.

“It’s sad,” says Joe Walsh, Knoxville’s parks and recreation director, in a later conversation. “That sign’s been up since I’ve been here, for 23 years. I’m looking forward to the day we can take it down.”

That day may be getting closer, as Knoxville’s urban creeks slowly begin reaping the benefits of new environmental rules. But in many respects the greenways receive more support than the creeks they’re often built around. Most of these streams are choked with mud, contaminated with bacteria from human and animal waste, tainted with nutrients from fertilizers and soaps—or polluted by all of these at once.

Street signs direct us to the greenways that adorn the creeks—but then we are faced with the other signs.

In some ways it’s a paradox. In others, it makes sense. Brian Hann, chairman of the Knoxville Greenways Commission, says, “It’s not really our charge to work on water quality.” But he thinks the commission is doing so indirectly: “You’ve got to get people to the water to get them to care about cleaning up the water.”

Until about 30 years ago, urban creeks were mostly a dumping ground that few people saw as an asset. For much of the 19th century, the city was growing so much that nobody saw them at all. Streams were routed into pipes under neighborhoods and parks, in concrete canals behind factories and strip malls, and in straight ditches next to roads. Greenways have reminded us not only of the creeks’ presence, but also their potential to be something beautiful and natural.

“Our kids should be able to be at the park and play in the water,” acknowledges Mayor Madeline Rogero. While the city has a regulatory and legal responsibility for water quality under its state stormwater environmental permit, it also has a commitment to sustainable use of resources, Rogero says.

“The whole purpose for the greenway is to enjoy the beauty of our place. And to do that, our place needs to actually be beautiful,” she says. And there can be a secondary advantage to clean water: “I think quality of life and economic development go hand in hand. Who’s going to want to build a house or a business next to a contaminated creek?”

The city has budgeted $1 million for developing new greenways this fiscal year, as it did last year. It will spend about half as much on creek cleanup. But that investment has risen about 16 percent over the last five budget years. The city is also spending $3.3 million on its entire stormwater program, which is aimed at reducing runoff for both flood control and pollution prevention. That is up from $2.7 million in fiscal 2011/12, a 22 percent bump.

Approaching a likely second term, Rogero says the city needs to keep doing more of the same. State environmental officials have praised city stormwater enforcement.

But Rogero also faced criticism  from Angela Howard, the former executive director of the defunct Fort Loudoun Lake Association, for the city’s role in sinking the non-profit river and creek cleanup group last October. The association lost a (publicly bid) city contract to clean up the river to Ijams Nature Center, and shut its doors soon afterward. In its absence, the local chapter of the non-profit Tennessee Izaak Walton League may restart its program of keeping trash skimmers on First Creek, says its executive director Mark Campen. The league manages a constructed wetland surrounding the Turkey Creek Greenway.

“These streams they say don’t touch and don’t swim in—it doesn’t mean you’re going to get sick or die if you jump in and look for some crayfish,” says Campen, who is also a city councilman. Campen and other league members waded into First Creek in June to remove trash. “Our feet didn’t fall off,” he says. “But you’ve got to be smart about it. You don’t want to have open sores or cuts in urban streams.”

That doesn’t actually inspire great confidence, especially in a parent. (What kid under age 10 is ever without an open cut or sore?) And truthfully, Campen remembers his aunt jerking him back from the water in Tyson Park when he was a boy 30 years ago. Kids want to wade. They want to turn over stones looking for salamanders. As a parent, you want to encourage your child’s natural wonder. But you have to say no.

Will Knoxville’s creeks ever be safe enough to touch?

A Flood of Pollution

East Tennessee is known for its beautiful lakes and pure mountain streams, and the region has pinned its hopes on ecotourists and their dollars.

Yet the Fort Loudoun watershed is polluted. According to the watershed plan by the state Department of Environment and Conservation, just 39 percent of its evaluated streams and rivers can be used fully as intended. In most cases, intended uses include fishing, recreation, irrigation, and a source of water for animals.

First, Second, and Third creeks have a specific “do not touch” water contact advisory because of bacteria like e. coli in the water. These pathogens are found in human and animal feces. Unsurprisingly, ingesting them can make you very sick.

But other creeks on local greenways also have such heavy bacteria loads that they can’t support swimming, wading, or fishing, according to the state. Among them are Fourth, Williams, Beaver, Goose, Turkey and Ten Mile creeks. (See map to find which greenways follow these creeks.)

TDEC spokesman Eric Ward says the state began requiring warning signs in 1985 for First, Second, and Third creeks, based on criteria that made them a greater threat to human health. “Pathogen levels were excessive” and included a “significant” component of human waste from sanitary sewers, he wrote in an email. TDEC also considered whether streams passed through publicly-accessible areas like schools and parks.

Most urban creeks in Knox County have so much bacteria that the state has assigned them a “total maximum daily load” (TMDL). It’s basically a specific reduction goal, ranging from 86 percent less bacteria in Beaver Creek to 94 percent less in First and Goose creeks.

Bacteria is just the most high-profile of the streams’ problems. Goose Creek is coated with polychlorinated biphenyls, cancer-causing chemicals that can travel up the food chain and remain stored in living tissue. PCBs settle in mud and are almost impossible to remove without dredging, which is discouraged because it destroys habitat.

First, Second, Third, and Love creeks have enough nitrates or nitrites  (found in fertilizers as well as some pesticides and soaps) that the federal government requires a TMDL, although state regulators have not yet written them.

Ten urban creeks also carry too much dirt. In fact, it’s often their biggest source of pollution. Yes, dirt.

A heavy load of dirt in a stream buries rocks that provide a place for fish and mussels to live and breed. It can alter the temperature and acidity of the water. This can reduce oxygen levels, killing fish.

Dirt gets into local streams mostly from construction sites, where land clearing causes erosion, and from the banks of streams reshaped by people. Farm animals can also cause stream bank erosion in urban streams that start in the countryside.

According to the TMDL documents written for local creeks, Second Creek needs to reduce its silt load the most, by 75 percent. Beaver Creek needs the most modest reduction, at 48 percent. That means the creek requiring the least improvement still needs to cut its dirt load in half.

How did it come to this?

Ripples in a Stream

State regulators didn’t start creating TMDLs for creeks until the turn of this century. By then, the federal Clean Water Act had forced factories and mines to clean up their worst offenses.

Sewage treatment systems were next. Bacteria problems in creeks were closely tied to leaky sewer lines and inadequate sewage treatment plants.

“Any time it rained, the city was awash with sewage,” says Renee Hoyos, executive director of the Tennessee Clean Water Network.

Heavy rains caused so many sewage spills in 2002 and 2003 that some city greenways had to be closed, says Knoxville stormwater manager David Hagerman. TDEC held the city responsible through its permit to release storm water.

The city joined the Clean Water Network in a lawsuit against KUB, which led to a 2005 consent order with the federal Environmental Protection Agency. KUB has since reduced sewer overflows, replaced leaky pipes and broken manholes, upgraded two treatment plants, and added additional storage for sewage when heavy rains penetrate pipes.

Funded by steep rate increases, this effort became the $530 million Partners Acting for a Cleaner Environment (PACE 10) program. KUB has completed 134 required projects, 23 affecting First Creek alone, according to its 2015 annual progress update.

Most significantly, KUB reports that sewage spills have dropped by 75 percent between 2003 and July 2014.

“(KUB) really embraced the challenge… and the streams are a lot cleaner than they were when I got here,” Hoyos says.

Other sewer systems, such as Hallsdale-Powell Utility District, are still working to correct similar problems. But with a few exceptions, the most obvious culprits have been handled. That leaves lots of smaller businesses and individuals: the dog owner who doesn’t pick up his pet’s poop, the car dealership that washes its cars near a ditch, the landscape company that fertilizes your yard right before it rains. Each contributes a little, with their combined effects expanding like ripples in a stream.

It’s not one fix that’s needed. It’s a thousand little fixes.

In many ways, local governments are still the ones that must make those fixes happen because of their stormwater permits. As a larger city, Knoxville had to begin managing its stormwater by 1996; Knox County was part of a second wave of smaller governments to face the requirement, starting in 2003. These government stormwater programs touch industries from restaurants to car sales. Among their duties, stormwater divisions permit and inspect large construction sites, and search for “illicit” pollution released into ditches and stormwater drains.

Measuring Up

State environmental officials say Knoxville and Knox County are doing an innovative stormwater management job.

Robert Karesh, TDEC stormwater coordinator, praises Knoxville for putting many inspectors on the ground and for requiring “special improvement abatement permits” for businesses with the most potential to create polluted runoff. (An example is restaurants, which can no longer install dumpsters near a stormwater drain.) Hagerman says Knoxville was first in the state to institute a $5,000-a-day maximum penalty for stormwater violations.

Similarly, some of Knox County’s most effective efforts were not required by its stormwater permit, says county stormwater management director Chris Granju. For example, the county conducted extensive stream sampling in Cox Creek to better pinpoint sources of its pollution. Using that information, the county focused public education on septic systems and helped farmers develop better methods for bringing their livestock to water. As a result, pathogen levels in Cox Creek dropped enough that stream was removed from the state’s list of polluted creeks.

Because of their track records, Knoxville and Knox County are among just five local governments in Tennessee whose land disturbance permits act as a proxy for the state’s permit, cutting out a step for developers. “It’s a way to streamline the development process and recognize those that are doing a great job,” Karesh says. “It was clear to us that (Knoxville and Knox County) have a program that was as protective or more protective than ours.”

Neither local government has had any violations of their stormwater permit over the last five years, he says.

Although city officials initially feared the stormwater rules would drive businesses to leave (and some made empty threats to do so), that hasn’t happened, Hagerman says. Rogero says she’s heard no complaints from businesses. On the contrary, she sees the stormwater program as part of the sustainability profile she hopes will help make Knoxville attractive to progressive companies like Green Mountain Coffee.

“Those are the kinds of businesses we want,” she says. “If you just want to pollute and don’t care about the community, go somewhere else.”

“I think Knoxville does very well” at enforcement, Hoyos says. But she sees the county handling violations inconsistently. “I think the county will always struggle,” she says. “I don’t think there’s the stomach to enforce against development.”

But Granju says the county has a written penalty system to ensure fair enforcement. Penalties can range from $250 to $5,000 a day. They are based on the county’s cleanup cost, plus the profit made from breaking the rules. The goal is to make compliance cheaper than the alternative. But the county is still perfecting the process, such as how to handle repeat violators who own or operate multiple companies, Granju says.

Reversing the Flow?

Knox County was issued its current stormwater permit in 2010. Knoxville receive its last “five-year” permit in 2004. The city’s permit technically expired in 2008, but the state waited until it could model the update on a new version of the permit being issued to smaller governments, Karesh says. He calls the old permit requirements “fairly vague,” while the new one in the pipeline for later this year will include more measurable benchmarks.

Hagerman says he’s impatient with the permit delay and concerned that its changes might be less protective than what Knoxville does now.

“I think Knoxville has had a successful program the last two decades,” he says. “What I don’t want to see is: ‘Let’s start from scratch.’”

Some changes are more restrictive. For the first time, the new permit won’t allow any increase in polluted runoff from new development, even after construction is finished. This will require projects to be designed differently to pre-treat and store stormwater or let it seep directly into the ground. Knox County is implementing this already.

Granju says the county is in the process of educating real estate and title companies about this because owners will have new long-term responsibilities. Stormwater holding structures will have to be inspected by a professional annually, and every five years a landscape architect or engineer will have to certify that they still work. “Owners are not being told,” Granju says. “That requires us to be inserted in a lot of parts of the real estate process that we have not been in the past.”

Knoxville is “on board” with the new storm water design requirements and has been testing some out. Hagerman hopes to roll out these requirements next year along with a new mitigation program. A development on land with physical obstacles that make it tough to meet stormwater requirements could have an alternative: improving a stream elsewhere as a kind of swap. An example might be the University Commons shopping center, which replaced an industrial plant built directly on Third Creek where any buffer had been destroyed long ago. The shopping complex shrunk its footprint to leave more trees on the site to make up for this, Hagerman says.  With a mitigation program, a developer would receive more credit for a mitigation project that improves the same stream or a stormwater “hot spot.” Hagerman says other government agencies are helping the city develop a system for identifying these places “where we could get the most bang from our buck with green infrastructure.”

Chattanooga recently became the first Tennessee city to offer this kind of stormwater mitigation bank. But unlike Chattanooga, Knoxville would not allow “credit trading,” because that would relinquish the city’s control over the location of the projects, Hagerman says.

What would mitigation projects look like? In most cases, Hagerman envisions that private companies would start restoring creeks, a recent focus for both the city and county.

That’s because a lot of the mud choking Knoxville’s streams came from past decisions to straighten streams or put them in pipes. At the time, the goal was to ease development and reduce flooding by moving water to the river as quickly as possible. But heavier flow causes a creek to scour its own bed. The city and county have started restoring stream curves and slowing the water with eddies, pools and riffles. The most visible of these efforts in Knoxville was in Third Creek between Sutherland Avenue and Concord. Hagerman says the biological health of that section of the creek rebounded after the city threw in $100,000 to match a state contribution of $1 million for the stream restoration.

More of these projects are in the works at a tributary to Goose Creek in South Knoxville, a tributary of Williams Creek near the city’s new urban forest, and a Second Creek tributary that had been piped underneath houses on Banks Avenue and West Glenwood. (Hagerman says the city bought a house there that was collapsing into the stream beneath it, tore the house down, and plans to reopen the part of the stream where the pipes failed.)

“We didn’t just protect something,” he says. “We are reversing it.”

Hann, who works for downtown developer David Dewhirst, says he’d like the city to provide developers a toolkit of incentives for responsible development and stream restoration near creeks. (The mitigation program seems a step in that direction.)

Pointing out an example, Hann scrambles over an inexplicable stack of white fabric bags at the edge of a field to reach a concrete platform behind the old Standard Knitting Mill. The mill hangs over First Creek, which is completely encased in a concrete aqueduct scrawled with graffiti. A ladder, a tire, and large plastic tubs are visible through water shaded by trees growing out of the looming mill, which is slated for redevelopment.

Hann says he would prioritize First Creek and Williams Creek for restoration because of the neighborhoods and downtown areas they cross. Goose Creek also deserves extra attention, he says, because it passes through Fort Dickerson Park before emptying into the Tennessee River in the South Waterfront redevelopment area.

“The stream bank is a crucial asset to inner-city development,” Hann says. “You need to see water quality also from a development standpoint, because people will inherently want to be near water.”

Scouring Your Own Bed

The question is, will they want it badly enough to help keep the water clean? Campen and Hoyos point out that local governments can only do so much when people continue to toss their trash on the ground, rake their leaves in a ditch or over-fertilize their lawns.

Campen has seen one improvement in citizen responsibility over the last decade: Dog owners are being more cooperative about picking up dog waste that otherwise washes straight from greenways into creeks. The Isaak Walton League has installed pet waste dispensers all over town and the city pays it $7,500 a year to educate residents and keep the dispensers clean and stocked with bags (about 60,000 annually, Campen says).

If he wins a second term on City Council this fall, Campen plans to propose an updated litter ordinance, with some combination of increased enforcement, education, and fines.

“People say we’ve got better things to do than go after people throwing cigarette butts out, and I agree—but still you have to remember the significance of economic development from having a clean city,” Campen says. Little sins rack up. “If there are 20,000 people that smoke and every day they throw five butts in the street, think what that means annually.”

Perhaps the ideal situation is for residents to take more ownership of the creeks they enjoy. At Mary Vestal Park, community volunteers recently yanked up kudzu, privet, and honeysuckle to uncover Goose Creek, then fished tires and debris from the stream. Gene Burr, whose architectural firm designed the park decades ago, applied for grants. A few months ago, the Vestal Community Association partnered with the city, the health department, and the South Knoxville Alliance to extend the greenway, drawing bikers and walkers who felt unsafe when the path was hidden in a corridor of vines.

“The creek really makes it a delightful setting,” Burr says. “The more use it gets, the more it’s going to get cared for.”

Hann would like to see something similar happen on the stretch of First Creek Greenway that runs by Caswell Park. There, too, the creek is mostly hidden. But Hann knows where to hunt along the vine-draped bank to find a shaded ledge overlooking the creek. A branch flows from a pipe underneath the park to join the stream in a little waterfall. An emerald damselfly with black wings buzzes by.

“See, you can be walking right next to this and never know it’s there!” Hann says.

Hann says he and a friend paddled a long stretch of First Creek on a raft after heavy rains in June, finding natural beauty, garbage, and few signs that people visit the stream. The Greenway Commission is in the process of evaluating potential new greenway corridors, and Hann says it would like to use the urban streams as much as possible, despite their poor condition.

“Some of this is the price we pay for our standard of living,” Hoyos points out. “I can’t find fault with what the city is doing. Yet the stream remains polluted. How much are we willing to accept? Well, apparently we’re willing to accept quite a bit.”

More Stories:

• What the Heck is a TMDL? And What Does it Matter?

• The State of Knoxville’s Creeks