2017 Sun Corridor Stakeholder Engagement Workshop

Pathways to integrated urban water management

Responses to overcome barriers

• To create truly actionable science, academics need to understand how decisions are made, including the factors motivating and constraining decision making
• Academics don’t know what practitioners want

●       Data needs/ data gaps exist

• Lack of data on stormwater and how different impervious surfaces influence quantity and quality of stormwater
• Lack of consistent methodology for collecting information on stormwater and lack of clarity on whose job it is to collect data
• Need for larger scale efforts and more widespread data collection
• Need for information on the science of distributed capture in upstream watershed
• Questions remain about whether rainwater harvest displaces groundwater use

●       Work to understand practitioners’ values, motivations, decision making, drivers of decisions

●       The blueprint can roster the challenges practitioners are confronting

●       Models might help us predict storm water capture and communicate about it

• Regulatory system is a paper system
• Difficult to prove stormwater is renewable so difficult to credit
• Crediting utilities for recharge is a challenge because of the diverse responsibilities, goals, and budgets of different agencies, (ex. surface water and groundwater are managed totally separately)

●       Remaining research questions/ data gaps

• Can we capture stormwater and store it for outdoor use? What percentage of peak storm can be used? What fraction of precipitation would be available for stormwater capture and non-potable reuse?
• Who owns the recharge water and who has rights to water? Who is willing to pay to treat and store water?
• Who has rights to water when it gets stored?  Who had the rights before that is not getting the water now?
• Who benefits? How can you monetize those benefits? What are the potential payoffs?

●       Legal rights context impedes harvesting of stormwater

●       High costs of treating stormwater for utilities  

●       Recharge credits associated with retention basins…if AMAs can capture incidental recharge, they can get there.

●       Science to support adaptation of system of recharge credits

●       Could climate models or other scientific tools that project future conditions play a role?

●       How can you protect jurisdictions against losses from legal and political uncertainties associated with rights to runoff? Is it water rights or credit that stops folks from harvesting.

●       What types of information framing might work across agencies?

●       Minimizing health impacts might create rationale for putting stormwater into aquifer

●       Behavioral component to GI and other approaches is a challenge, communication strategies are needed

●       Perception of landscapes and human behavior

●       Questions about impacts of GI remain, for example, folks questioned relationship between small-scale rainwater capture projects and resulting changes in landscaping and how these changes feedback to water demand in different seasons (ex. Rain comes during peak rainy season, folks landscape to higher water availability, then use more water during dry season by irrigating)

●       Can’t show water savings from rainwater harvesting yet in Tucson

●       Study what fraction of water in small scale GI projects/ rainwater harvesting makes it to aquifer

• (ex: The City of Tucson, Tucson Water Department operates and maintains the potable and reclaimed water systems; (2) Pima County Regional Wastewater Reclamation Department (RWRD) operates and maintains a regional wastewater conveyance and treatment system that generates the effluent used in the City of Tucson’s reclaimed system; and (3) The Pima County Regional Flood Control District (RFCD) manages stormwater resources)

●       Policy and political aspects to breaking down barriers

●       Development community pushback against integration

●       Economic disincentives to integration

●       PAG is a regional coordinator, PAG is coordinating bonds; RTA (sales tax bond) provides an opportunity to coordinate across silos

●       Policies that allow partnerships & funding across agencies

●       Cross-jurisdictional regional coordinator for sw/ww

●       Revisiting long-standing policies, bring co-beneficiaries together through innovative funding mechanisms

●       Surface basins have never been adjudicated, if you restrain flow from a rancher downstream, it could be adjudicated

●       Many unanswered questions, legal cases go on forever or don’t get to court, there are incentives to keep them out of court

●       Economic barriers also exist within complicated rights issues, ex. What if you invest in harvesting, but then it gets adjudicated?

●       Water rights and different perspectives in different regions about rights

●       What makes folks act beyond the mandate? Concrete material benefits, organically coming together because of relationships, bottom up social networks instead of top down mandates work

●       Disincentive in state law

●       Issue of burdening constituents with costs/inconveniences and then losing out on the environmental benefit.  Why do we have to pay millions of dollars more to inject water?

●       Limited education on co-benefits.

●       Lack of knowledge on economic benefit of ecosystem improvements, property value impacts, the avoided cost of infrastructure development/ maintenance, these values are closer to arguments engineers use so they should be used to further arguments

●       Co-benefits: hard to finance especially across silos.  (Ex. Why would storm water management agency entirely fund something that benefits another agency?)

●       Ratepayers feel that utility is gifting to all when they are the ones paying. Who pays/ who benefits doesn’t match, how have those who have figured it out worked it out?

●       Uncertainty about co-benefits

●       Once you construct a facility, you are on the hook for a lifetime to maintain and pay for that.  Removing operations and maintenance costs by reducing infrastructure is a huge benefit.  How can this be better represented in project proposals?

●       Ability to talk at highest level of elected officials about reduced costs across multiple agencies speaks very well

●       Find co-benefits, measure co-benefits, and prove benefits to justify pricing

●       Communicate with groups like Governor’s Task force, those who have power

●       Show ROI

●       Cost-benefit studies/ ENVISION

●       Simplify messaging to elected officials

●       Inability to show line item budget impacts on individual agency budgets

●       Fractured system of accruing benefits across systems vs. costs

●       The institutions don’t support One Water Approaches in a number of ways: benefits, payments, regulations