Thousands of BMPs? How to Best Manage and Prepare for Maintenance

Best Management Practices (BMPs) are continually evolving with new technology being developed to treat stormwater runoff. The maintenance needs for all BMP types needs to be clearly understood for communities so they are able to maintain the water quality benefits they provide to the overall ecosystem. This presentation will walk through how one community recognized this need and developed a comprehensive BMP maintenance program to meet the challenges of a wide range of BMP types. The overall goal of the presentation is to: (1) educate individuals on the need to develop a comprehensive program to ensure budgets are adequately addressing the long-term costs, (2) taking this systematic approach to maintenance will ultimately save the community money in the long term and (3) how a community can go about setting their own program up. The City of Woodbury, is one of the fastest growing cities in Minnesota. As part of the development process, the City requires the creation of stormwater management best practices (BMPs) within the developments which has led to over 1,700 city owned BMPs within Woodbury. As the City's BMP system has expanded so have the stormwater regulations as well as the complexity of BMPs being used to meet the increasing requirements. This increased complexity of the system and maintenance needs created an opportunity for the City to step back from regular pond dredging projects and reconsider the system in its entirety. City staff from various departments worked together over the course of a year to understand the system, identify any challenges, and review best practice recommendations from external and internal sources to create the Woodbury BMP Maintenance Plan which takes a holistic approach at managing every part of the public stormwater system to meet the requirements within the current MS4 permit, manage the resources responsibly, and do so cost efficiently. Developed in collaboration with this plan are three guides for the City to use: 1) an Inspection and Maintenance Framework and Guides for each BMP type to be used to train new staff, to increase consistency between staff and to help inform private owners on operation of their systems, 2) a public engagement plan, which provides guidance to city staff on when and how to engage the general public on projects and 3) cost estimation model was created for staff to utilize and inform decisions on budget, capital improvement plan and utility rate adjustments. The findings from these guides will be shared in order to show how plan concepts can be turned in to usable materials. The Plan was published in October 2021 and the City completed their first annual BMP maintenance project using the plan in Winter 2021/2022. Submitted with this abstract are graphics from the plan and results from the initial use of the plan will be included in the presentation.