Debt Funding for Water Conservation Programs

Debt Funding for Water Conservation Programs

The cheapest and quickest way for cities and towns is to use less “grey” infrastructure and concentrate on conservation, efficiency, and green infra- structure. But those solutions can be hard to implement on a large scale. Sometimes it is because engineers are more comfortable knowing what will happen with pumps and pipes. But often it is because we can’t figure out ways to fund large investments in things that don’t look like the assets we used to build. Many water agencies are effectively dealing with water shortages or growth in their service areas by creating “new” water out of already-developed supplies. A number of agencies have “turf buy-back” programs that will pay customers to replace their lawns with low-water-use landscaping. Others are starting major programs to provide efficient washing machine, toilet, and greywater reuse system rebates. Others are providing property owners and developers with incentives to install stormwater capture systems. Each of these actions creates mini-reservoirs that collectively provide substantial public benefits to local water utilities and their ratepayers. To really make a difference, these programs need to be larger than what can usually be funded through an agency’s operating budget without an unwelcome large increase in rates. That is why it is so important to consider how to use debt funding as part of the capital program, allowing the costs to be spread over the life of the benefits.

This report outlines how water utilities can debt fund water conservation programs. Click the link below to download the full report.

Compendium of Debt-Financing Options

Compendium of Debt-Financing Options for Scaled Investments in Distributed Green Stormwater Infrastructure

A Quick Reference Guide for Green Bay, Sheboygan & Mid- Sized Wisconsin Cities

Funding and Financing Countywide GSI Investments

Funding and Financing Countywide Green Stormwater Infrastructure Investments

The City/County Association of Governments of San Mateo County (C/CAG) implements the San Mateo Countywide Water Pollution Prevention Program (SMCWPPP) established in 1990 to reduce the pollution carried by stormwater into local creeks, the San Francisco Bay, and the Pacific Ocean in partnership with each incorporated city and town in the county, and the County of San Mateo, which share a common National Pollutant Discharge Elimination System (NPDES) Municipal Separate Storm Sewer System permit. As part of the SMCWPPP implementation, C/CAG is working to advance regional-scale and distributed, parcel-scale green stormwater infrastructure (GSI) projects in San Mateo County by developing a Regional Collaboration Program Framework to describe a countywide stormwater program focused on both potential regional projects and distributed green infrastructure implemented by private sector developers that can provide water quality and resiliency benefits. C/CAG is also working to identify potential funding and financing mechanisms to implement the strategies to be identified in the Regional Collaboration Program Framework.

As part of WaterNow’s Tap into Resilience (TiR) initiative, this report details WaterNow’s initial legal and accounting analyses of the potential funding and financing options available to C/CAG, its members, and possible regional partners to inform and advance San Mateo County’s increased investments in countywide regional-scale green infrastructure as well as parcel-scale green infrastructure. This report also explores a hypothetical spending plan for a large-scale green stormwater infrastructure program in San Mateo County that includes multiple regional-scale and robust investment in distributed, parcel-scale projects built over a 20 year timeline.

Building Blocks of Trust

Based on interviews with successful community and water utility partnerships, River Network and WaterNow have developed a set of 8 best practices for building trusting partnerships:

1. Prioritize Transparency and Accountability
2. Restore Community Confidence
3. Deepen Community Understanding of Utilities Roles and Responsibilities
4. Highlight Shared Goals to Leverage Mutual Benefits
5. Include the Community as Part of Utility Decision Making
6. Adopt a Community-Facing Orientation
7. Cultivate Long-Term Community Relationships with Intention
8. Build from Personal to More Formalized Relationships

These foundational steps for building trust are a constellation of practices that can be applied in any order depending on where a particular utility and community fall on the trust spectrum.

Click the link below to download a 2-page summary of the Building Blocks of Trust report. Click here to read the full report.

Strengthening Utilities Through Consolidation

Strengthening Utilities Through Consolidation: The Financial Impact

This US Water Alliance and UNC Environmental Finance Center report synthesizes the body of evidence about the financial outcomes possible
with water utility consolidation, and examines the experiences of eight communities who consolidated utility service in different ways and for different reasons. With this report, the US Water Alliance and the Environmental Finance Center aspire to fill the gap in current research about the economic attributes associated with different consolidation models and help communities understand the opportunities, tradeoffs, and financial impacts of consolidation.

 

Click the link below to read the full report.

Green Stormwater Infrastructure: Impact on Property Values

Green Stormwater Infrastructure: Impact on Property Values

This Center for Neighborhood Technology and SB Friedman Development Advisors report shows that GSI also adds value to homes based on modeling of the impact of GSI installations, such as rain gardens and swales, on property sales data in two cities that showed statistically significant higher sales prices of homes near GSI. These findings add to a growing body of research that shows that nature-based solutions to stormwater management provide many benefits in addition to flood control. In particular, the study found that doubling the square footage of rain gardens, swales, planters, or pervious pavement near a home is associated with a 0.28% to 0.78% higher home sale value, on average.

Click the link below to read the full report and learn about the implications of these increased property values.

Renewing the Water Work Force

Renewing the Water Work Force: Improving Water Infrastructure and Creating a Pipeline to Opportunity

This Brookings Institute report provides an in-depth exploration of the water workforce to uncover the accessible, well-paying opportunities in water sector. Key findings include:

1. Water occupations not only tend to pay more on average compared to all occupations nationally, but also pay up to 50 percent more to workers at lower ends of the income scale.
2. In 2016, nearly 1.7 million workers were directly involved in designing, constructing, operating, and governing U.S. water infrastructure, spanning a variety of industries and regions.
3. Most water workers have less formal education, including 53 percent having a high school diploma or less. Instead, they
   require more extensive on-the-job training and familiarity with a variety of tools and technologies.
4. Water workers tend to be older and lack gender and racial diversity in certain occupations; in 2016, nearly 85 percent of them were male and two-thirds were white, pointing to a need for younger, more diverse talent.

Based on these findings and dozens of conversations with utility leaders and other workforce groups, the report lays out a new water workforce playbook for public, private, and civic partners to use in future hiring, training, and retention efforts.

Click the link below to download the full report.

Pathways for Localized Water Infrastructure

Tap into Resilience: Pathways for Localized Water Infrastructure

Building on a 2019 dialogue hosted by University of Irvine School of Law's Center for Land, Environment, and Natural Resources  and WaterNow Alliance, this report focuses on the considerable and largely overlooked opportunities presented by localized water infrastructure—distributed systems that extend beyond centralized water infrastructure and are located at or near the point of use.

The report makes nine recommendations and identifies roughly two dozen achievable, practical action items to overcome the financing, institutional, and legal and policy barriers to largescale adoption of LWI. These recommendations and action items set a foundation for expanding access to and understanding of LWI in an effort to catalyze and accelerate the shift towards sustainable, climate resilient, affordable, and equitable water solutions.

 

Click the link below to access the full report. Click here to read the Executive Summary.

Philadelphia Water Department: Stormwater Credit Explorer

Philadelphia Water Department: Stormwater Credit Explorer

What is the Stormwater Credits Explorer?

Philadelphia Water Department offers a number of incentives to encourage property owners to retrofit their property and install green stormwater infrastructure (GSI) to manage stormwater onsite, and has worked with businesses (both small and large), faith-based institutions, hospitals, and other nonprofits over the past decade interested in adding these cost-saving GSI to their buildings and grounds. PWD’s Stormwater Management Guidance Manual, a start-to-finish guide for retrofits and new development, includes instructions for picking the best GSI tools, standard details for easy design, ongoing GSI maintenance requirements, and detailed information on available grant programs.

As a digital complement to the Stormwater Guidance Manual, PWD also offers the Stormwater Credits Explorer—an app that virtually adds GSI tools to non-residential properties and calculates potential savings on their stormwater bill through the Credits Program. Launched in 2015, the user-friendly, web-based tool makes it easy (and fun) for non-residential property owners to see the financial benefits of GSI features like green roofs and porous pavement. The Credits Explorer turns any non-residential property into a canvas where a user can sketch out ideas of up to 5 different types of “Stormwater Tools,” including Green Roofs and Rain Gardens, Permeable Pavers and different types of storage basins. The tools enable users to lay out potential changes while keeping realistic limits for that given property. As Stormwater Tools are added or removed, the application updates the monthly stormwater charge for that property. Users can rapidly get a sense of the feasibility and effectiveness of adding stormwater infrastructure systems.

The Credits Explorer, and the retrofit incentives, are part of the city’s 25-year, $2.5 billion Green City, Clean Waters plan to manage stormwater and protect watersheds.

Stormwater Credits Explorer: Encouraging Participation in PWD Green Stormwater Infrastructure Retrofit Programs 

The Stormwater Credits Explorer is designed to encourage more commercial property owners to apply for PWD stormwater grants, build distributed green infrastructure, and receive credits to reduce their stormwater bills.

In Philly, all properties pay a stormwater fee; the residential fee is flat, and the non-residential fee is based on the property’s size and the amount of impervious surface it contains. The Water Department transitioned from a meter-based stormwater charge to a parcel-based stormwater charge in 2010. These fees not only help fund Green City, Clean Waters projects but also help the city comply with state and federal water quality regulations.

PWD used a manual process to estimate potential credits customers might receive if they were to reduce the impervious area on their property by installing GSI features. In other words, PWD staff were doing the credits calculations by hand. 

To streamline and automate the process, PWD developed the Stormwater Credits Explorer. With the Credits Explorer non-residential, condominium, and multi-family properties with more than four units—the types of properties eligible to receive stormwater grants and credits—can virtually imagine how GSI like green roofs, permeable pavement, rain gardens, or subsurface storage would reduce the impervious area of their property and calculate how much money they could save in PWD fees. The target end-users are non-residential properties with large amounts of impervious surfaces that contribute stormwater runoff to the sewer system.

The Stormwater Credits Explorer not only drives participation in PWD incentive programs and helps property owners save money, this innovative tool benefits PWD. The more non-residential property owners that install GSI to keep stormwater out of the city’s combined sewer system the closer Philadelphia will be to achieving the objectives of its Green City, Clean Waters plan—a 25-year plan to reduce the volume of stormwater entering the city’s combined sewers using green infrastructure and to expand stormwater treatment capacity with traditional infrastructure improvements. As of August 2021, PWD incentives for private non-residential property have created 740 greened acres. (A “greened acre” is an acre of previously impervious area that is reconfigured to utilize GSI to manage at least one inch of stormwater runoff or ~30,000 gallons of stormwater.) And in 2021 Fall, $20 million in grants will be given to private and non-city-owned properties for installing green stormwater infrastructure. PWD anticipates that continued, and increased, use of the Stormwater Credits Explorer will lead to even more retrofits and greened acres.

How Does the Stormwater Credits Explorer Work?

The Stormwater Credits Explorer is an online, interactive way for commercial property owners to add Stormwater Tools to their non-residential properties and calculate potential savings on their stormwater bill.

To start, users can either search by address or explore the map. From the map, owners can select their property, see their approximate monthly stormwater bill, and the gross and impervious area of the parcel. To explore how the property owner could reduce impermeable surfaces on the selected property, they click the “Explore Stormwater Tools” button and can then add a variety of GSI strategies, including Green Roof, Permeable Pavement, Rain Garden, Stormwater Basin, and Subsurface Storage. Adding these GSI strategies is as easy as clicking on the marked impervious surfaces of the parcel. 

For example, to add a Green Roof use the cursor to select the roof areas of the property and close the “polygon” to draw the desired Green Roof area. The Stormwater Credits Explorer then calculates the managed area, the impervious area reduced, and the estimated monthly bill reduction. Any combination of the GSI solutions can be added using this same process. 

After the suite of GSI strategies are selected, users can see a summary of the results showing their one-year, five-year, and ten-year estimated reduction in stormwater fees. The example below shows that by adding a Green Roof to the property to manage 227,094 square feet, the property owner stands to save nearly $300,000 over ten years. As a commercial property, this owner may also be eligible for a PWD grant to defray the cost of installing the Green Roof. 

Grant recipients include a hardware store that installed a rain garden, a children’s hospital that installed a green roof and ground level plaza that captures stormwater, and a historical society that installed a rain garden and courtyard. PWD estimates that on average property owners’ monthly stormwater charges could be cut by 50% or more after installing green infrastructure. 

Property owners interested in pursuing the savings identified through the Stormwater Credits Explorer can use the Stormwater Management Guidance Manual to get instructions for picking the best GSI tools for their site, find standard details for easy design, ongoing GSI maintenance requirements, and detailed information on available grant programs. In this way, the Credits Explorer is designed to put commercial properties, and PWD, on the path towards widespread installation of GSI throughout Philadelphia.

Building the Stormwater Credits Explorer for PWD

In order to build out this tool, PWD engaged with Azavea, a Philadelphia based professional services firm that builds geospatial web applications. Azavea was a firm that had already worked successfully with PWD in the past, building out internal management tools to manage their stormwater credit and appeals program.  Initially the idea was to build GSI tools into the existing parcel viewer application, but after working with Azavea on a few design and architecture iterations, it was decided that creating a separate Credit Explorer tool would best fit PWD’s needs. 

The key data layers that feed into this application include: 

Satellite imagery of Philadelphia (produced by the city annually)

PWD billing data (specific billing calculation for Philadelphia, accounting for potential credit impact) 

Parcel layer data (created by PWD’s Stormwater Management Program)

Impervious area data (maintained by PWD Stormwater Management Program). 

Given Azavea’s previous experience building internal management tools for PWD, they started this project with a deep understanding of these data layers.  They also brought with them strong past experience building user-friendly mapping tools.

Since the 2015 launch of the platform, PWD and Azavea continue to work closely to maintain this application. Led by a project manager and a team of software engineers, Azavea updates software libraries, fixes bugs, and swaps-in the latest satellite imagery layer as they are made available. PWD’s team of GIS specialists, engineers, and city planners work together to ensure the tool is accessible to customers and updated as needed to incorporate any changes in the structure of the credits program.

Lessons Learned

Limit the application to just a tool

The importance of content prioritization was one of the key lessons learned while building this application. In the initial designs, PWD shared ideas for more content on the site including copy outlining the credits program and explanations of best management practices for stormwater. With the guidance of Azavea’s User Experience Design team, this content was eventually removed as it did not contribute to the interactive experience of the application.  PWD wanted to be able to update the content on their own without involving Azavea.  They therefore decided to maintain this information on a separate page of the water department's website that included content management features that the PWD staff themselves could update. The Credit Explorer page, in turn, narrowed its focus to the interactive tool itself.    

Selection of software libraries

Azavea has used numerous software libraries to update and maintain this application.  Some have been fundamental in improving the functionality of the application, while others have been quickly abandoned after initial testing.  These learnings and iterations could easily be transferred to a new water department looking to build out a similar application to encourage GSI in their city.  

Sources

Philadelphia Water Department: Stormwater Credits Explorer

Philadelphia Water Department: Green City, Clean Waters

Philadelphia Water Department: Stormwater Grants

Philadelphia Water Department: Stormwater Billing & Retrofits

Philadelphia Water Department: Green City, Clean Waters Growing with Local Business (Blog)

Azavea: Cutting costs and cleaning rivers

Sustainable Business Network Citywide Stories: An Unexpected Philly Partnership Is Leading the Way for Stormwater Management Across the Country

Next City: New Philly App Turns Saving Water Into Addictive Game

Optimizing the Structure and Scale of Urban Water Infrastructure

Optimizing the Structure and Scale of Urban Water Infrastructure: Integrating Distributed Systems

In March 2014, the Johnson Foundation at Wingspread partnered with the Water Environment Federation and the Patel College of Global Sustainability at the University of South Florida to convene a diverse group of experts to examine the potential for distributed water infrastructure systems to be integrated with or substituted for more traditional water infrastructure, with a focus on right-sizing the structure and scale of systems and services to optimize water, energy and sanitation management while achieving long-term sustainability and resilience. Participants at the March 2014 meeting identified five principles for successful implementation of distributed systems, to help utility managers evaluate alternatives for improving, expanding or revamping their infrastructure. With the goals of sustainability and resilience in mind, these principles create space for the successful integration of distributed infrastructure into existing water systems.

Click below to access the Convening Report and read more about the key principles for and benefits of implementing distributed infrastructure.