Alternate: Prioritizing Stormwater Funding Requirements by Integrating Asset Management and Watershed-Focused Capital Planning

The public and their civic leaders are often unaware of stormwater until a flood or a collapsed pipe triggers an expensive emergency response. As a result, stormwater program managers often react to the latest emergency rather than proactively plan and prioritize system investments. System planning is further complicated as the diversity and complexity of stormwater management issues increases, causing decision-making to be siloed in different departments with competing objectives and funding sources. This presentation will describe a comprehensive asset management framework (Figure 1) that uses a common set of criteria to define risks associated with poor system condition and performance. This framework, in turn, may be used to define the risk-reduction achieved by different system renewal and improvement alternatives, as well as identify cost-effective alternatives benefiting public safety, community welfare, and environmental integrity. Asset management supported by an integrated risk framework provides a defensible set of criteria justifying investments across a diverse range of stormwater projects: Stormwater Assets, both constructed and natural, typically are owned by different entities, and often operated to achieve to different objectives. An asset management approach recognizes how each asset fits into an integrated stormwater system and establishes complementary owner/operator responsibilities. Level of Service (LOS) Objectives establish stakeholder expectations for how the stormwater system should protect human life, aquatic life, property, and community well being. They are typically expressed as system performance expectations; system operation, maintenance, and renewal practices; and rules governing discharges into the stormwater system. Likelihood and Consequence of Failure Criteria (Figure 2) measure deviations from LOS objectives. Once defined, these criteria may be merged through unique algorithms to establish equivalent levels of risk for different asset failure modes (e.g., structural failure, flooding, erosion, water quality impairment). Capital Planning Priorities. Desktop evaluations generate surrogate criteria to establish initial asset risk levels and identify priority areas for detailed assessment and capital planning (Figure 3). Then, detailed risk assessments involving field inspections and modeling are conducted to further define priority areas for capital planning and/or system renewal. Risk-Based Cost-Effectiveness Evaluation (Figure 4) integrates three factors the risk-reduction associated with system improvement and renewal alternatives, their life-cycle cost estimates, and other associated economic, social, and environmental benefits to define an overall cost-effectiveness score used to select a preferred alternative and prioritize and/or phase preferred alternatives for implementation.