A Toolkit for Stormwater Asset Management and Funding

Communities throughout the United States are making investments in managing stormwater. As stormwater management becomes a higher national priority, municipalities are managing and building systems to provide flood protection and comply with National Pollutant Discharge and Elimination System (NPDES) permits. The US Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) Environmental Finance Centers throughout the country are supporting this goal and providing expertise and tools to improve local stormwater management capacity. The EPA’s Region 9 Environmental Finance Center at Sacramento State (EFC) developed a free stormwater financing toolkit to assist communities in sustainable stormwater program management and funding. The toolkit guides users in estimating costs for maintaining current assets, ensuring permit compliance, and projecting costs for future infrastructure. It also allows users to record data, calculate cost of service, and evaluate stormwater utility rate structures, including an ability-to-pay analysis for residential property owners. The toolkit was assembled as part of the EFC’s municipal assistance activities and tested in real-life municipal stormwater planning. Like most analysis and modeling efforts, data collection and integration constitutes the majority of the work. In undertaking asset management, utility managers will have to develop or update inventories of their system assets. Unit and program cost data will need to be gathered from accounting records and external sources, while property and census data will need to be assembled to estimate key factors that support utility billing systems. The toolkit and this document were developed to guide the user in not just what to do, but also how to do it and where to get necessary data.