|
|||||
|
1.8 SUCCESSFUL SOLUTIONS REQUIRE PLANNING Establishment of a successful stormwater utility requires a vision of the comprehensive services that the community needs and a well-conceived plan of how to develop and implement the utility. As the old adage points out: If you don't know where you are going, Most established stormwater utilities have found that several of the keys to their success included a formalized statement of what the community's stormwater management program will do in the form of a clear vision statement with a focused mission statement and goals, coupled with a carefully conceived action plan for implementing the necessary changes. A number of Florida communities have discovered, too late, that failure to develop these items before undertaking the development of a utility has resulted in failure. 1.8.1 A Comprehensive Vision Citizen's awareness of stormwater issues and expectations of what their stormwater management systems should do has significantly evolved over the last three decades:
Political agendas came to include stormwater management issues in response to the evolution of citizens' awareness and concerns. Subsequently, the focus of the community's stormwater management activities changed to align with the citizens' concerns and the political focus of city councils, county commissions, and governing boards of regional regulatory agencies. Further expansion of the community's vision has occurred in response to ongoing comprehensive planning activities required by the Department of Community Affairs through their comprehensive planning regulations which impact all Florida cities and counties. Federal legislation, FEMA's National Flood Insurance Program and EPA's Stormwater NPDES Permitting Program, has also served to broaden the vision of many Florida communities by altering the scope and focus of their stormwater management activities. Most of Florida's successful stormwater management programs have formalized their vision in the form of a simple, "big picture" mission statement and a more narrowly defined action that clearly communicates their vision to the public and staff in terms of goals, annual operations and capital investments. 1.8.2 Creating Mission and Vision Statements Many Florida communities have developed comprehensive visions of what their stormwater management programs are about which typically focus on service to citizens through the management of flooding, the regulation of development, the maintenance of water quality, and the prevention of environmental/ecological degradation through cost effective operations. It is essential to convert the oftentimes-fuzzy vision into three distinctly different types of clear statements: Vision Statements Vision statements identify the community's expectations with regard to their investment in stormwater management. Volusia County's vision statement incorporates provides clear direction with respect to five basic stormwater management concepts:
Mission Statements Mission Statements set broad general direction for the community's staff and consultants to use in developing long-term stormwater management program components. The City of Tallahassee's a mission statement provides a good example of how a community's basic expectations are tempered with the realities of allocated funding, public consensus and real-world schedules:
Goal Statements Goal Statements provide more specific, performance-oriented guidance as to the manner in which the community's staff and consultants are to execute their work activities in order to achieve the intent of the vision and mission statements. Volusia County's goal statements provide clear direction with respect to three basic goals:
General guidelines for creating mission, vision and goal statement are as follows:
1.8.3 Creating the Action Plan Most of Florida's successful stormwater management programs have formalized their vision in the form of a mission statement and developed an action plan that translates the broad concepts of the mission statement into concrete actions with a realistic schedule. The basic steps in the action plan, many of which have been discussed in the preceding sections of this chapter, are generally outlined as follows:
Every community has its own unique needs, challenges and resources and this realization makes it impossible to define a simple, guaranteed approach that works every time in every community. Combined with a vision of the community's expectations with regard to their investment in stormwater management, these basic steps provide a simple process for moving from vision to reality. 1.8.4 Public Participation and Customer Involvement The best conceived and most logically developed stormwater utility is doomed to fail if it lacks support from the public and the utility's potential customers. The strategy that has been successfully utilized in most Florida communities is to educate and involve the public, through a public information program, undertaken at an early stage in the stormwater utility development process. The stormwater utility development and implementation process needs to recognize the public awareness and customer concerns, and while exhibiting similar themes across Florida, is specific and unique in each community. The approach used in developing the Public Information Program (PIP) for a given community typically consists of four fundamental steps:
This approach will ensure that the program's objectives, as defined by a community through selection of media, target groups, program budget and schedules, will be achieved. Customer Involvement Virtually every landowning citizen/family and business will become a customer of the stormwater utility and it is important to develop procedures to "sound out" the utility's future customers. Citizens advisory committees provide a simple means of acquiring direct input from potential customers on rates, charge algorithms, credit policies, user equity concerns, and similar issues that arise in the development of a stormwater utility. Recognizing and addressing these issues early in the development process can save time and money in the public education program and the utility implementation process. Public Education Public education can be achieved on many levels but the common objective is threefold: to make the average citizen aware of the cause and severity of the stormwater problems within his community, to make the average citizen understand the potential immediate and long-term benefits that can be derived from the implementation of a stormwater utility, and to either develop support for the stormwater utility or to provide a basis for the average citizen to balance the anticipated benefits against the "unreasonable costs and burdens" that will be raised by opponents of the utility. Public meetings, whether centralized in the "town hall" style or decentralized as a series of "community forums" or neighborhood meetings, provide a direct mechanism to reach the largest portion of the "general public." Selected Constituencies There are several different target groups to be reached with the PIP due to their community power, prestige and ability to influence the outcome of the stormwater utility development and implementation process. These groups can be reached in a variety of different manners depending upon their varying levels of involvement in the decision making process. An effective public information program typically includes distinct efforts aimed at individual target groups. Representative categories of selected constituencies that comprise the "general public" that should be included in the agenda of a community's PIP, include:
Experience in Florida communities has shown
that each of these selected constituencies play a special role in the
successful implementation of a stormwater utility.
Chapter
3 provides a discussion of what can be done to gain community
acceptance for a stormwater and focuses on the stormwater task force/stakeholder
process and the use of public opinion surveys.
1.8.5 Commitment
The process of developing a stormwater utility is not unlike birthing
an elephant: it is takes time, it is done with a lot of noise and it
can get messy. Communities considering stormwater utilities need to
take the time to fully understand their problems, develop a comprehensive
game plan, develop consensus, and then commit to completing the process.
Detractors of strategic planning have often said that strategic planning
is "where the rubber meets the clouds." Successful long-term
solutions to a community's stormwater management problems require a
vision, a game plan, community involvement, and the commitment to get
it done. Perhaps the best piece of advice can be seen on contemporary
bumper stickers:
In Conclusion Stormwater management, TMDL compliance and stormwater utilities are long-term programs that are intended to solve significant problems. Vision and commitment provide the skeleton that organizes and links the disparate components of these long-term programs. Communities' stormwater utilities are the glue that holds their long-term stormwater management program together and sustains it function, thereby enabling communities to solve their problems and successfully meet the needs of their citizens.
|
