Planning is one thing - gaining funding and public support requires different strategies.

By Karen M. Luken and Steve Swenson

In November 1999, EPA finalized regulations that require communities in urbanized areas to develop programs to manage stormwater runoff. To comply with these National Pollutant Discharge Elimination System (NPDES) Phase II regulations, communities must demonstrate how they will address the following six minimum control measures for stormwater management:

1. Public education and outreach on stormwater impacts
2. Public involvement/participation
3. Illicit discharge detection and elimination
4. Construction-site stormwater runoff control
5. Postconstruction stormwater management in new development and redevelopment
6. Pollution prevention/good housekeeping for municipal operations

Many communities will want to plan for how they can successfully implement the programs to address the six minimum control measures. Whether the recommendations from this planning process become a reality or just a document on a shelf typically comes down to how these three questions are answered: (1) How much will it cost? (2) Who will pay for it? (3) Will the public support it?

Answering the first question will be the product of the communities’ planning process. However, answering the second and third questions and obtaining support for the answers will be the most difficult task. It is possible to get public support to pay for these new programs if a community establishes the right approaches and tools at the beginning and uses them throughout the planning process to make this plan successful.

How Much Will It Cost?

Before a community can select the best funding and financing strategies for the six minimum control measures, it must understand how much money its stormwater management program will cost. This cost includes both start-up and ongoing expenses. Additionally, local regulations and pressures may result in stormwater management programs that are even more stringent than those required by Phase II, thus increasing the cost. In 1998, EPA developed detailed cost estimates for the six minimum control measures, shown in Table 1.

According to these figures, the annual cost for implementation of the Phase II requirements for a community of 100,000 could range from $139,000 to $783,000.

Because of this cost, some communities chose to develop a multijurisdictional stormwater management plan. They believe it will be more cost-effective to spread the cost for some of these programs over multiple communities. Educational materials and outreach campaigns are two practices that lend themselves to meeting the needs of more than one community. Additionally, design standards and ordinances for implementing the following minimum control measures might be able to be cooperatively designed for multiple communities:

• construction-site stormwater runoff control,
• postconstruction stormwater management in new development and redevelopment,
• illicit discharge detection and elimination,
• prevention of illegal dumping,
• pollution prevention/good housekeeping.

Besides substantially reducing implementation costs, educational messages will be more consistent. Therefore, support from the business community for the stormwater plan may be greater if compliance requirements are consistent from one community to the next.

A multijurisdictional approach will not work in all situations. One component of the stormwater management plan that is more community-specific involves the process needed to address operations and maintenance procedures. Typically these procedures ensure the reliability and dependability of the stormwater infrastructure, including catch basins, pipes, infiltration systems, culverts, and open ditches. These procedures may vary dramatically from community to community, making it necessary to design specific operations and maintenance plans for each community.

Communities will have a number of stormwater-quality issues that the NPDES regulations require them to address. The issues needing examination include, but are not limited to, the following:

Operations and Maintenance

• Frequency of storm-drain inlet and pipe cleaning
• Frequency of street sweeping
• Frequency of vegetation mowing and cutting in ditches and swales

Public Education

• Extent of public education

Local Regulatory Requirements

• Detection and elimination of illicit discharges

• Permitting and inspection of new construction
• Extent of current construction-site stormwater control

In addition to the above NPDES permit issues, there are traditional storm-drainage issues to address in any "valid" stormwater management plan. These include, but are not limited to,

• elimination of "water in basement" incidences,
• elimination of hydraulic bottlenecks,
• system cleaning and maintenance dictated by hydraulic capacity concerns.

The need for capital projects to solve traditional stormwater problems is also specific to each community. These capital projects may be needed to solve flooding problems that are not required under NPDES regulations. Including them in the overall program, however, could be essential to gaining community support.

One key to gaining support for implementing new stormwater programs involves presenting the community with alternative levels of service and associated costs. Making decisions on the appropriate service level or using a single- or multijurisdiction approach or some hybrid of the two should be performed using input from citizens committees, elected officials, and the public at large in order to get the support needed to fund these new programs.

Who Will Pay For It?

Beyond operating and maintenance costs, the stormwater management plan will need to identify costs and funding alternatives for regulations and enforcement, administration, public education, and possibly capital improvement projects. When evaluating various funding alternatives, the community needs to examine the range of realistic funding options available and a probable funding mix for the stormwater program.

Many communities develop stormwater utilities to create a dedicated and reliable funding mechanism for their stormwater management program. To accomplish this, state-enabling legislation and local implementation ordinances are of critical importance.

The basic philosophy behind the utility fee is that users should pay for the stormwater programs to the extent that they contribute to the problem. The term "users" in this case includes property owners—particularly the owners who have impervious surfaces on their property. Here are the major issues when implementing a utility service charge:

• What are the options for the applying rates to your customers (e.g., impervious surface area and assessed value)?
• What (if any) types of exemptions and credits are appropriate to study?
• What are the types of alternative fee structures in terms of application, equity, and implementation issues?

As with most revenue-generating mechanisms, stormwater utilities include both advantages and challenges.

Advantages

• A steady funding mechanism is dedicated to stormwater management.
• Fees can be based on a customer’s "contribution to the problem," which is more equitable.
• Financial incentives can be used to encourage businesses and institutions to implement stormwater best management practices.

Challenges

• It might be difficult to get the community to accept a new service charge.
• It might be difficult and/or time-consuming to implement a utility that requires devising an equitable rate structure, and to develop a database with required information, such the amount of impervious surface.

Will the Public Support It?

The most challenging obstacle facing utilities and most other revenue-generating mechanisms is opposition from residents, businesses, and communities. Building support and getting political consensus for stormwater management programs require planning, communication, and perseverance. It is essential to recognize that, by nature, most of us are like the "Domino Man" caricature found in the cartoon below.

Domino Man could be a developer, an environmentalist, a resident, a business—anyone who will be impacted by a community stormwater management plan. Domino Man is a stakeholder more concerned about how stormwater affects himself rather than the community around him.

The first step in getting a group of Domino Men or diverse stakeholders to see the big picture is to get them together. Involving members of various groups, as well as citizens at large in an organized meeting, helps ensure that key stakeholders feel involved in the decision-making process and provides them with a sense of ownership of the plan. The result of this ownership is oftentimes more widespread support.

Getting a group of diverse people together does not mean automatic support for the stormwater management plan. Involving diverse stakeholders can pose challenges. The process can end in chaos unless the meetings include a process for shifting individuals from their own viewpoints to a shared vision for stormwater management.

An effective tool for accomplishing this goal is the systems thinking approach. This consensus-building tool is an interactive process that can help move stakeholders from personal viewpoints to a shared vision for a stormwater management system through illuminating

• the concerns and motivators of key stakeholders,
• the interrelationship between individual components of a stormwater system and the success of the entire system,
• the cause and effect of stormwater management system decisions.

It provides a dynamic model that can help turn subjective opinions into objective decisions.

This strategy has worked very successfully in other environmental planning projects by helping groups identify essential issues and relationships quickly and with maximum buy-in.

Stakeholder involvement is only half of the story. The Phase II regulations also require communities to use public outreach as a component of their stormwater program. A common mistake many communities make when developing an outreach message is trying to reach everyone on a limited budget. Communities are not alone in using this shotgun approach. Fortune 500 companies throughout the United States now realize that they developed and implemented many of their programs without measurable goals, identification of specific target audiences, strategies to meet the goals, or monitoring mechanisms. In response to this shortfall, now program managers must often develop continuous improvement plans. Stormwater management planners should also consider this same continuous improvement process for public education and outreach activities to help with the following activities.

Define Success. Different stakeholders will have different definitions of success that might sometimes contradict each other. Through a continuous improvement plan, all definitions of success will be identified and evaluated for possible conflicts, and strategic plans will be developed to meet all goals and minimize conflicts.

Improve Cost-Effectiveness. Just because something is cheap does not mean that it is a good buy. To illustrate, a stormwater management plan could include workshops for homeowners to prevent dumping pollutants into the storm-drain system. If the outreach campaign intends to reach everyone in the community, time and money will be spent on reaching residents who don’t have downspouts (e.g., apartment owners and children). The targeted audience for this campaign should be homeowners. There are many ways to reach them. Newspaper advertising is one relatively inexpensive alternative, yet it can end up extremely expensive if readership among homeowners is not high. Radio advertising might be more expensive than newspaper advertising, unless the community can select a radio station with high ratings among this demographic group, making the cost per reach for this target audience less expensive. Deciding how best to provide this community outreach is all part of this continuous improvement process.

Develop Monitoring Mechanisms for Nonquantifiable Goals. Some stormwater management programs are extremely easy to quantify. For example, how much did it cost to clean one catch basin and how many catch basins were cleaned? Nonquantifiable goals, such as an outreach campaign targeting a specific audience, are equally important. Through the continuous improvement process, nontangible goals such as this can be identified and monitoring mechanisms developed.

Reduce Mistakes and Duplicate Successes. As part of the continuous improvement process, a final review evaluates the following:

• Was the target audience reached?
• Were the goals met?
• Were the strategies to meet the goals successful?
• Are the monitoring mechanisms effective?

Through this final review, the community will be able to learn from previous mistakes and duplicate successful endeavors in future stormwater management programs.

Finally, choosing the right message will be critical. The average American consumes of 94 lb. of newsprint per year. That’s more than 10 million words per year just from newspapers. Still, when you couple that estimate with the 75,000 television images viewed by the average American each day, the importance of clear and simple messages becomes apparent.

For example, most people agree that illicit discharges into communities’ creeks and rivers should not be permitted. Their enthusiasm might be reduced, however, if eliminating illicit discharges requires them to change personal habits or be penalized for noncompliance.

Consequently, for a media campaign on illicit discharge detection and elimination to be effective, the informational materials must communicate the need for a stormwater management program in a way that is meaningful to the public. When developing a media campaign, one of the following types of messages will most likely be employed:

Rational: Messages that are directed to the rational self-interest of the audience and are used to demonstrate the functional benefits of illicit discharge detection and elimination. For example, "Illicit discharge detection and elimination helps prevent water pollution and environmental degradation."

Emotional: Messages encouraging support for illicit discharge detection and elimination by tapping into emotions. For example, "Without illicit discharge detection and elimination, every rain shower carries motor oil, bacteria, and pesticides from our neighborhoods into our water supply."

Moral: Messages appealing to a person’s sense of what is right or wrong. For example, "It makes sense to eliminate illicit discharges, rather than leaving a legacy of pollution and expensive remediation for our children."

How much will it cost, who will pay for it, and will the public support it? Communities, residents, and businesses will ask these questions during every stormwater management planning process. With the right approach and tools, a community can find answers that result in the successful implementation of its stormwater management programs.

Karen Luken is a project manager with R.W. Beck in Cincinnati, OH. Steve Swenson, P.E., is a project manager with R.W. Beck in Seattle, WA.