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Portland Public Schools this year allotted $30,000 in its budget to perform maintenance on its storm-water facilities. But now that money is gone because of budget cuts, and the school district has nothing available to replace it.

“We are the second largest property owner in the city with only two grounds men and 34 storm-water facilities,” said Nancy Bond, PPS resource conservation specialist. “We don’t have the capacity to do the maintenance these facilities need.”

The city’s Bureau of Environmental Services may have a solution. The bureau has created a program called that will let businesses and homeowners tack donations onto their water and sewer bills to help pay for storm-water facility maintenance at public schools in the city’s six school districts.

The BES for the last few years has been looking for a way to pay for maintenance and improvements for storm-water facilities. Bio-swales, green roofs and rain gardens installed at public schools help the bureau slow the flow of storm water into the sewers, reducing flooding and erosion and decreasing the chance of combined sewer overflows into the Willamette River.

Schools also benefit from the facilities. Bond said PPS’ $1 million annual storm-water maintenance bill is reduced by $60,000 thanks to the BES’ Clean River Rewards program, which gives discounts to utility customers who manage their storm water on-site.

Unfortunately, school districts under budget pressure often cut maintenance funding first, according to Dean Marriott, director of the BES.

But he has high hopes for Greenbucks, which will allow ratepayers to make voluntary $1, $3 or $5 donations on their water and sewer bills to help schools pay for maintenance work. The donations, which are expected to generate $50,000 to $100,000 per year, will be managed by the BES, which will distribute the money to Portland Public Schools as well as the Centennial, David Douglas, Parkrose, Reynolds and Riverdale school districts.

“A rain garden costs more to maintain than a parking lot,” Marriott said. “But what I love about Portland is that people care about neighborhood schools. And anyone who has visited our schools has seen evidence of a need for more maintenance.”

Ricardo Moreno, landscape program manager with nonprofit Verde has seen firsthand what happens when a bio-swale or a rain garden is left to its own devices. His group provides job training to members of disadvantaged communities with a focus on environmental projects. Verde recently completed spring maintenance on storm-water facilities at 20 PPS schools.

“These bio-swales don’t do any good if they are not absorbing the water,” Moreno said. “They can get really weedy or overgrown with invasive species and weeds. Native plants used in these facilities are tough, but weeds are tougher sometimes. You need to be sure these plants stay healthy because they do most of the work.”

There has been ongoing tension around the issue of storm-water facilities, Marriott said, because many people don’t understand why an agency that manages the sewer system should be paying for bio-swales, which look like mini-gardens. An insert in customers’ water and sewer bills will explain how storm-water facilities work to manage Portland’s billions of gallons of storm-water runoff before it gets into the river.

About 5 percent of the money from the Greenbucks program will be diverted for program administration and community education.

“Another benefit of this program will be ramping up discussion of these projects,” Marriott said. “We need to get this information out there.”

Besides managing storm water, Bond said students benefit from having green space on their campuses. At Mount Tabor Middle School, an ornate rain garden replaced an asphalt parking lot.

“All of the rooms that faced the parking lot were miserable spaces,” Bond said. “Now teachers vie for those classrooms. The rain gardens really do enhance teaching and learning spaces.”

The Bureau of Environmental Services will be responsible for performing random inspections of the school storm-water facilities, which must be certified by BES before they can be enrolled in Greenbucks. Each district’s share will be determined by dividing the annual maintenance allowance for each storm-water facility by the estimated total maintenance allowance for all certified facilities.

If approved by City Council, a major rollout of the program will begin around September, Marriott said. A report on the progress of Greenbucks will be prepared by the city before Aug. 31, 2012.