Communities are increasingly turning to “smart” water systems to address their often-competing stormwater challenges. This begs the question “how much more effective are smart stormwater systems?”. To address this question, we evaluated the smart stormwater system at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden in Brooklyn, New York. The Water Garden Pond at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden uses continuous monitoring and adaptive control (CMAC) to automatically control the timing and rate of discharge from the pond to the downstream combined sewer system.