The approved plan includes filtration chambers and settling ponds that will handle runoff from newly developed areas as well as from the pre-existing campus‹an area developed in the 1930s and '40s before such environmental regulations were in effect. "We're treating water that wasn't treated before," Mohr said. In the end, despite the new area being developed, the storm-water systems will produce a net improvement in the quality of runoff currently exiting the campus, and serious erosion damage in and around the edge of the woodlands will be repaired, he said.

The plans approved by trustees are the result of several years of planning involving firms from Maine and Massachusetts. The architectural firm Shepley Bulfinch Richardson and Abbott, of Boston, was engaged to help Colby develop a master plan for the campus. Reed Hilderbrand Associates Inc., a landscape architecture firm from Watertown, Mass., developed the schematic plans for the Colby Green and for campus landscaping. Mohr & Seredin Landscape Architects prepared construction documents for phase one and designed the environmental remediation systems associated with the plan.

The design challenge was to respect the rectilinear forms of the Miller lawn quadrangle, designed by Jens Fredrick Larson in the 1930s, while making an effective visual transition from that formal area to the fields and forest across the street, according to Eric Kramer of Reed Hilderbrand. The Colby Green's elliptical lawn with curving pathways was adopted because it relates to both the formal beaux-arts style of the academic quadrangle and to the less-developed pastures and woodlands that are also Colby hallmarks. "We're really excited about where this has come from and about the next phase," Kramer told trustees in April.