Background The Northeast Ohio Regional Sewer District's Regional Stormwater Management Program (RSMP) was initiated in 2013 to address flooding, erosion, and water-quality issues across community boundaries. The RSMP is the basis for managing the Regional Stormwater System (RSS; Figure 1), which includes culverts and regional storm sewers, streams, in-line detention basins, and ponds and lakes receiving drainage from an area greater than 300 acres. When functioning properly, these assets manage, clean, and convey stormwater runoff and natural drainage within the District's 347 square mile service area (Figure 2). Decades of deferred maintenance, poorly-planned development, and increases in impervious surfaces have negatively impacted RSS function and quality. The District manages and improves the RSS through the RSMP. Specifically, the District completes watershed master plans, hydrologic and hydraulic modeling, data management, inspection, maintenance, monitoring, financing, design, and construction projects. Additionally, the District provides customers access to technical support and resources. Over the long-term, these efforts will help to optimize RSS function, thereby improving water quality, mitigating the effects of flooding, and reducing stormwater-induced erosion. The District's Stormwater Construction Plan (SCP) is part of the RSMP, and it guides the implementation of stormwater system improvements. Typical projects on the SCP include stream restoration, conveyance improvements in culverts, bank stabilization, basin improvements, and general maintenance of the RSS. Challenge Each year the District completes efforts to prioritize projects in the SCP and to formalize a budget request for the following year's program. The original process was modeled after the planning process used for wastewater and collection system infrastructure. It presented three primary challenges to the long-term planning for the RSMP: -- Inconsistent scoring: Four separate groups within the District's Watershed Programs Department manage and implement the RSMP. The responsibilities for tracking and reviewing information from each group was not streamlined, which often complicated the review process and scoring results. Additionally, project scores were not well distributed. -- Indirect connection to RSMP goals. The original framework used a Business Risk Exposure (BRE) tool. The BRE scoring was based on the risk of not completing the project, where the probability of failure accounted for 50% of the score. The BRE tool did not directly account for program priorities of addressing flooding, erosion, and water quality issues. -- Overlooked existing data. The scoring process did not incorporate valuable sources of new data generated from stormwater master plans, asset condition inspections, communication with customers, and maintenance. Objective The District addressed the three challenges with the prioritization process and focused on developing an improved framework for maintaining a long-range SCP. Specific objectives included: -- Establish consistency among projects in terms of evaluation, cost estimating, scoring, and prioritization criteria; -- Consolidate and consult existing data for the annual SCP planning cycle; -- Improve tools for project nomination and scheduling processes; and, -- Develop tools to visually explain the implementation status of the SCP. Approach The effort was organized in two phases. The first phase included a comprehensive review of the program, focusing on nomination forms and procedures, and observing tools and interactions during annual meetings. This provided an understanding of data sources and inputs, metrics, workflows, and tools used to develop the SCP. Additionally, this phase included review of the distribution of scoring results to identify deficiencies in evaluation criteria, and screening other stormwater management programs similar to the District's RSMP. The second phase focused on process improvement, including a new project tracking template and a revised scoring tool. The tracking template was an online SharePoint Project Nomination Form (Figure 3) completed in a web browser. The form includes details related to project background, inspection and maintenance history, results of field observations, a summary of asset condition and risks, project costs, and documentation of coordination with customers. Responsibility for entering project information is shared among internal staff from each of the four groups within the Department. The forms are structured to be continuously updated, and each section of the form allows staff to provide a recommendation for the project. The revised scoring tool was developed based on the program goals and data. It includes six separate scoring factors (Figure 4) to evaluate a project and is directly related to the information contained in the SharePoint Project Nomination Form. The scoring factors align to components of the District's RSMP, performance of RSS assets, and regional considerations. It is based on the anticipated benefits of the project rather than the risk of not completing it, and it prioritizes projects that meet RSMP and asset management goals, assigning higher scores to projects that provide Regional Benefits -- for example: system resiliency, co-benefits, and distribution in the service area. The new scoring tool (Table 1) was applied to a representative set of 20 projects, and scores were compared to those from the original BRE scoring tool to identify changes in scores and prioritization. The scoring metrics, values, and weights were reviewed and refined during workshops with District staff. This collaboration helped build support for the refined process. Results The process improvement recommendations were applied to the 2019 and 2020 SCP planning cycle, and results were positive. Key outcomes included the following: -- Improved communication during annual nomination meetings. Distributing responsibility for completing the Project Nomination Forms required that at least one representative from each group in the District's Department input and manage project data. This helped to improve communication, increase the efficiency of annual project validation meetings, and reduce uncertainty in scoring and prioritization. -- Integrated existing RSMP data. The scoring criteria rely on data generated from ongoing data collection efforts and address the observed deficiencies of the former BRE scoring tool. -- Scoring prioritizes RSMP goals and regional impact. Aligning the scoring tool to the goals of the RSMP prioritized projects that are anticipated to reduce flooding and erosion and improve water quality. The use of weighting in the scoring values distributed the scores. -- Visual tools elegantly convey information about the Stormwater Construction Plan Microsoft PowerBI software was used to demonstrate how program data can be tracked and visualized across watersheds and communities, and in terms of project phase, schedule, and costs (Figure 5).
Document typeConference Paper
PublisherWater Environment Federation
Print publication date Mar, 2020
ISSN1938-6478
DOI10.2175/193864718825157609
Volume / Issue
Copyright2020
Word count1,129