On January 21, 2016, the stormwater world lost one of its rock stars. Gary R. Minton, Ph.D., P.E., of Seattle, WA, passed away at the age of 72. Gary couldn’t sing like David Bowie, nor could he play the guitar like Glenn Frey, but make no mistake about it: his accomplishments over his 40+ year career made him a rock star to the stormwater community and industry.
Gary spent his professional career pursuing, identifying, and communicating innovative solutions to solving water resources problems, with urban stormwater quality at the top of that list. He cared about the environment and will always be noted as a significant contributor to—no, correct that…he was pretty much a founder in describing the science of stormwater treatment. And as a tribute to his many contributions to the industry, Gary received the 2007 AWRA Award for Outstanding Contribution to Washington’s Water Resources, which was a lifetime achievement award.
Gary was born in Seattle on May 4, 1943. He spent his first few years living in lower Queen Anne before the family moved to Burien, where he graduated from Highline High School. After high school he joined the Navy Reserve while attending the University of Washington. Upon graduation with a B.S. in Civil Engineering in 1964, Gary went on active duty with the Navy’s Construction Forces (Seabees). He spent four years on active duty, twice going to Vietnam (1966 and 1968), which left an indelible mark on him. Gary returned to the University of Washington to earn his Ph.D. in 1972, while also finding time to court and marry the love of his life, Marie-France. Shortly after their marriage Gary took a position teaching engineering students in Campina Grande, Paraiba, Brazil.
Gary began his engineering consulting career in 1974 when he joined what was then a little firm, URS in Seattle, where he worked primarily on wastewater engineering. After tiring of working for others, Gary decided to seek his own path, pursue his passions, and work for the best boss he’d known (himself) by starting Resource Planning Associates (RPA) in 1982. Initially, RPA focused on wastewater. However, Gary was always one to look to the future, where he saw the need to apply the processes at the core of wastewater to the infant field of stormwater management.
Gary will best be known for the textbook he first published in 2002, titled Stormwater Treatment: Biological, Chemical, and Engineering Principles. This was the first-ever textbook on the topic of stormwater treatment (now in its third edition, 2011). Gary’s book is 640 pages long and covers all aspects of stormwater treatment in great detail, including my life’s interest: source control. The book contains 2,846 indexed references on all aspects of stormwater, which makes it the obvious starting point for any serious stormwater practitioner wanting to successfully complete a stormwater treatment project.
Gary was one of the first in a small group of people who met and drafted a paper that stands as the foundation for the Washington Ecology TAPE program. He was actively involved in establishing the first protocols and programmatic structure for certification of manufactured stormwater treatment devices. He served as the first-ever technical reviewer for technology evaluation by Stormwater Management Inc.
Gary spent the last 15+ years of his career dedicated to teaching practicing engineers and scientists how to best design stormwater treatment practices. The best estimate I can make is that Gary, over a 14-year period (1995–2009), created and taught one- or two-day short courses that covered all aspects of stormwater treatment and presented them on 65 separate occasions. He traveled to approximately 34 different cities located throughout 10 western and eastern states and two western and eastern Canadian provinces. These short courses where attended by well over 1,000 engineers, scientists, and planners combined. Gary was well liked, and he was an excellent instructor who always got high marks from his attendees, who considered his courses to be an excellent investment in their educations, their careers, and their futures.
Gary was a frequent contributor to Stormwater magazine. He published 22 separate articles over an 11-year period, from 2004 to 2014. His articles were mostly on topics of stormwater treatment, but he did make the case for pavement cleaning and the importance of street dirt data collection, endearing himself to me forever. Gary reached out to me in 1995 after he read a few articles I had written on cleaning practices and their potential stormwater quality benefits, which contradicted the 1982 results of the NURP program that stated street sweeping was largely ineffective. We met for lunch at a café in his beloved Queen Anne district of Seattle. We bonded instantly and worked on a number of projects together. My favorite was a comprehensive stormwater quality study of the controversial Cross Israel Highway (CIH) in Tel Aviv, Israel. This project still remains to this day the most expensive and most comprehensive study of stormwater pollution in a major highway environment that we ever completed. It was during this project that I really got to know Gary. We traveled to Israel together three times from 2001 to 2004, and we always managed to find the time to do something fun like touring the Jewish and Christian sections of Jerusalem or ancient cities along the Israeli coast. It was on these excursions I realized that Gary’s dry and biting wit made him a pretty funny guy.
In 1995, Gary, along with Bill Leif of Snohomish County Surface Water Management, started a newsletter called Stormwater Treatment Northwest. The newsletter’s original intent was to inform the readers about ongoing stormwater research and its results. It also became over the years a forum for Gary to advertise his upcoming short courses and to provide useful information on local and national stormwater studies and many other topics that were usually covered in his courses. He charged a nominal annual fee to his subscribers, mostly to cover his printing and mailing costs. The quarterly—or sometimes, if he was motivated, five issues a year—newsletter ran for 15 years until Gary retired in 2011. One of the greatest honors that I received was when Gary asked me to co-edit the newsletter with him, which I did from 1997 through 2010. Of course Gary did most of the work, as usual, and I was only responsible for at least one issue a year. But, my goodness, how Gary could always inspire me to take the extra time to pause and communicate with others and educate them on what you know to be the truth!
It’s unclear just how many technical papers Gary wrote and presented at various conferences or published in conference proceedings and journals throughout his career. I know we co-authored eight different papers from 1998 to 2010. Gary’s own book references himself seven more times. He probably wrote more articles than this, but with so many it was hard to track down an accurate number. I know Gary specialized in writing stormwater manuals. For example, he prepared an early stormwater treatment manual for Caltrans, one of the first, if not the first, such manual in California.
Gary is survived by his wife of 46 years, Marie-France; two sons, Jon Christian, a business intelligence developer with Mercy Corps in Portland, OR, and Chris, a vice president with Larry Walker Associates in Seattle; two daughters in law (Sylvia and Kennedy); and two grandchildren (Brienna and Casey).
Here’s the thing about rock stars. They live, they create, and they die. But their music always lives on. Gary’s “music” was the words that he wrote in the articles he presented and had published, and the short courses he designed and presented with such passion. His music included the stormwater design criteria he essentially created and the stormwater policies of states that enforced them. Gary was a friend of mine for more than 20 years. Gary was a friend to most of my colleagues. We will all miss Gary, but I know just like any other rock star, his music will always live on. Rest in peace, my friend, and rock on.