Gerald Bright

As I pursued higher education at Central High School and later at Howard University, my early interests in streams and rivers began to align with my study of ecology, hydrology and other natural sciences. With this foundation, my interests expanded to include public policy, urban ecology and stream restoration, which led me to a summer internship at the Philadelphia Water Department's (PWD) Office of Watersheds while in graduate school at the Yale School of the Environment in 2007. Their watershed-centric planning approach presented an opportunity for me to apply what I'd learned from years of classroom and field studies to the rivers and the creeks in my hometown, and eventually led me to permanent employment with the PWD.

Now, I am an Administrative Scientist at the PWD and serve as Manager of the Green Stormwater Operations Unit (GSO). GSO is responsible for the inspection, operation, maintenance and repair of PWD-owned green stormwater infrastructure (GSI) assets. The highlight of my career to date has been being a part of the ongoing development and expansion of GSO. A few years after starting my career at PWD in 2008, I joined the newly formed GSI Maintenance Group as a Supervisor in 2012. The team was very small and had responsibility for only a handful of pilot sites, and standard operation procedures and labor resources were scarce. But GSO has since grown extensively through introducing and implementing frameworks for asset management, workforce development, contract management and through facilitating many of the inter and intra-department communication strategies required to operate PWD's GSI. At present, GSO has around 1,500 individual GSI systems and with the ongoing design and construction of GSI via PWD's Green City, Clean Waters initiative - we anticipate accepting close to 100 - 200 new systems per year through the duration of the initiative.