University Stormwater Management within Urban Environmental Regulatory Regimes: Barriers to Progressivity or Opportunities to Innovate?

Abstract

U.S. public university campuses are held directly responsible for compliance with many of the same federal-and state-level environmental regulations as cities, including stormwater management. While operating as 'cities within cities' in many respects, campuses face unique constraints in achieving stormwater regulatory compliance. To compare the abilities of campuses to comply with stormwater regulations to municipalities, we conduct mixed-methods research using primary data from five University of California (UC) campuses. Public universities constituted over 20% of California's "nontraditional" permittees under the municipal separate storm sewer system (MS4) regulation regime in 2013. We utilize semi-structured interviews with campus and regulatory officials, a survey of campus students and staff around support and willingness to pay for innovative stormwater management, and content analysis of campus stormwater management documents to examine challenges to public university stormwater compliance. We find that, despite their progressive environmental practices in other areas like energy and water conservation, even as compared to cities, stormwater management practices on the evaluated campuses are constrained by several factors: infrastructure financing limitations, lack of transparent and coordinated decision-making, a lack of campus resident involvement, and regulatory inflexibility. Our study provides new insights, both for understanding campuses as sustainable 'cities within cities' and more broadly for urban environmental compliance regimes globally.

Green stormwater infrastructure: A critical review of the barriers and solutions to widespread implementation

“…Put simply: the mechanisms for placing an economic value on GSI's benefits remain under‐developed. As a result, many jurisdictions struggle to identify funding streams necessary for GSI development and maintenance, even in contexts where there is widespread support for the adoption of such infrastructures (Pierce et al, 2021). Notably, this characterization holds true within China's much‐lauded Sponge Cities, which have had difficulty obtaining financial support for sustained GSI maintenance (L. Li et al, 2020; Qiao et al, 2019).…”

“…Most commonly suggested solutions to overcome the institutional barriers are related to more effective coordination, communication, collaboration, and cooperation between the teams involved in the GSI projects (Drosou et al, 2019; Gashu & Gebre‐Egziabher, 2019; C. Li et al, 2019; Onori et al, 2019; Pierce et al, 2021; Shafique & Kim, 2017). Departmental policy integration (Drosou et al, 2019) and improved partnership among stakeholders (Angelstam et al, 2017; Sarabi et al, 2019) to overcome institutional fragmentation are among other cited solutions.…”

Environmental Attitudes and Knowledge: Do They Matter for Support and Investment in Local Stormwater Infrastructure?

“…Three of the five campuses in our sample have disproportionately large populations or land areas compared to their surrounding municipalities and three contain or discharge runoff to environmentally sensitive, protected habitat (UC Santa Barbara 2014; UC Irvine 2018; UC San Diego 2019). Our previous research found that, like municipal Public Works Departments, campus Environmental Health and Safety (EHS) offices shoulder the burden of responsibility for urban runoff compliance (Pierce et al 2020). Campuses can serve as pilot areas for innovative green infrastructure approaches.…”

Can Smart Stormwater Systems Outsmart the Weather? Stormwater Capture with Real-Time Control in Southern California

“…In the search for innovative water supply solutions, universities can serve as living laboratories for new ideas that require evaluation and field-testing before they are implemented on a city- or state-wide scale . In that spirit, the five University of California campuses in Southern California participated in a multi-year research project, “Fighting Drought with Stormwater,” focused on identifying and overcoming perceptual, regulatory, and technical barriers associated with making stormwater a significant component of Southern California’s water supply portfolio. ,− Focusing on the University of California, Irvine (UCI) campus in Irvine, California, as a test bed, this paper answers the following question: what are the best-case limits of an RTC stormwater capture system on the UCI campus relative to delivering water supply and stormwater retention benefits, and how do these benefits depend on the total rainfall each year and the region’s seasonal patterns of precipitation?…”