Risk Integrated Project Prioritization: A Fresh Perspective on Stormwater Project Prioritization Using Asset Management Principles

INTRODUCTION
Many stormwater programs across the country are tasked with competing priorities; address flooding and water quality impairments. These programs must weigh how to alleviate impacts to homes, businesses, streets, and infrastructure from flood impacts, while at the same time meeting regulatory requirements for water quality, perhaps incorporate green infrastructure, or even deal with stream impairments from erosion. These competing priorities produce a conflict for funding, with communities struggling to know which investments are the 'right' ones to make. These communities often adopt what the authors refer to as the 'bucket' mentality; put so much money into the 'flooding bucket,' and the rest we'll put into the 'quality bucket.'
In addition to the question of divided priorities between quantity and quality, stormwater managers also often struggle with another issue: a forced level-of-service across their entire service area that stymies investment. For instance, if a community has adopted a 100-year level of service for flood improvements, those improvements often become major investments. What if managers could consider a 10- or 25-year improvement with a much smaller investment for some projects? How would they be able to communicate the value of those investments against 100-year investments in other locations? The authors put forward that there's a better way to address this fundamental question of project prioritization. At its most basic level, The Risk Integrated Project Prioritization (RIPP) methodology employs the concepts of Asset Management to consider stormwater projects as activities that reduce risk. That risk reduction (or risk 'Delta') is quantified, and then divided into the cost for those improvements. This produces an efficiency factor that represents the cost for one unit of risk reduction ('Dollars per Delta'). The project with the lowest cost per unit of risk reduction is the most efficient use of those dollars, and within this framework would be the preferred investment.
This is a community-driven process, with communities establishing how thy choose to consider the stormwater risks to their communities. This presentation would detail the development of the process, its applications, and how the process produces an 'even playing field' for flooding, quality, or multi-benefit projects. ###HISTORY
The Stormwater Management Program (SMP) of Johnson County, Kansas, has recently engaged in a process to prioritize its flood reduction and water quality projects. Historically, SMP has provided matching funds to its 20 cities for flood reduction projects meeting minimum programmatic criteria for their study, design, and construction. In 2016, SMP worked with B&V to complete a new strategic plan for reorganization of the program along watershed boundaries to form watershed organizations and the inclusion of water quality projects as an eligible project type.
In alignment with the program's stated goals of addressing stormwater quantity and quality issues, a risk-based approach, referred to as 'Risk-Integrated Project Prioritization' (RIPP), was created. The RIPP approach created a framework in which the risk of flood impacts is weighed alongside the risk of the impacts of degraded water quality. These factors were developed in conjunction with stakeholders over a series of Advisory Committee meetings. This stakeholder-driven process resulted in a technically-sound approach that incorporated the perspectives and expertise from a broad cross section of the County. The primary goal of the effort was to build a foundation for a stormwater CIP prioritization process that can be used to equitably prioritize stormwater projects based on reduction in the risk of flooding and water quality impacts. This approach was developed to be easily explained in terms of its priorities and results so that it can be a communication tool to describe and justify project prioritization to decision makers and elected officials.