United States
Environmental Protection
Agency
CASE STUDY
City of San Diego Watershed Asset
Management Planning
Overview
With increasing pressure to meet water quality targets, anticipate flood risk, and account for the
effects of climate change, municipalities have a growing obligation to manage their aging
infrastructure with limited budget and resources. Asset management planning is a popular tool in
maintaining levels of service for water and wastewater systems, but has hardly been explored in
a stormwater context.
In order to anticipate and justify current and projected costs of complying with federal, state and
local stormwater regulations, the City of San Diego has
developed an integrated Watershed Asset Management
Plan ("WAMP") for its stormwater management system.
Background
The Clean Water Act's Total Maximum Daily Load
("TMDL") program requires States to address sources of
pollution entering streams, lakes and coastal waters that
cause them to not meet certain water quality criteria.
Throughout the 2000's, the San Diego Regional Water
Quality Control Board adopted various TMDLs for
pesticides, nutrients, metals, bacteria, and sediments for
local waterbodies. As indicated in the TMDLs,
responsibility for reducing pollutant loading in these
waters falls partially to the City of San Diego and their
stormwater management program. These requirements have come simultaneously with
tightening national standards for stormwater management for both water quality and flood
control.
AEPA
City of San Diego
By the Numbers...
Population
1.34 Million
Area
372 Square Miles
Valuation of Stormwater System
$1.99 Billion
Replacement Cost ofSWSystem
^3^49billion^^^^^^^^^^^

-------
Incidentally, in 2008, the City of San Diego adopted a zero-based budgeting approach requiring
City staff to show justification for every budget dollar requested each year. As a result, the City
found itself in a difficult position of having to comply with TMDL, and other stormwater
requirements, while being unable to justify to their officials how the requested funding would
lead to regulatory compliance.
In response to these pressures, the City decided to develop a WAMP to lay the groundwork for
meeting regulatory requirements as well as expectations of citizens regarding functions of the
storm drain system and the quality of water and related services to be maintained in local
streams, estuaries and beaches. The Plan was finalized on July 19, 2013.
Assessing and Prioritizing Resources
The first element of the WAMP was to assess the
current inventory, costs, and condition of the
system. In the plan, assets are categorized as
"hard," "natural," or "soft" and valuated
accordingly.
Each asset was identified by the level(s) of service
provides and the current condition of the asset. Frc
there, assets were given a "probably of failure"
("PoF") on a scale from 1 to 5. The City then
weighed that against a similar scale quantifying
"consequence of failure" ("CoF"). CoF scores
incorporated a triple bottom line approach equally
weighing economic, environmental and social
consequences.
By balancing the PoF with the CoF, the City was able to prioritize urgency of asset replacement
distinguishing between those assets needing immediate attention from those that resources can be
diverted away from due to unlikely or low consequence of failure.
The Bottom Line
After assessing the current state of City-managed assets, the WAMP goes on to quantify a long-
range forecast of funding necessary to maintain a baseline level of service. The projections are
calculated using a custom-built database which balances refurbishment and replacement costs to
keep assets functionally above a minimum acceptable threshold.
The result of the long-range forecasting projected a 100 year need of nearly $20 billion (in 2013
dollars). That equates to about $200 million per year, accounting for regulatory compliance,
capital and O&M costs.
Lastly, the plan articulates various potential funding sources and scenarios for achieving their
targeted level of service. Scenarios range from current budget to full funding attainment and
layout resulting backlog of needed infrastructure upgrades that would result from each scenario.
Hard Assets:
Storm drain system and equipment
greater than $5,000 in replacement
costs.
31
Natural Assets:
City managed, naturally occuring
resources such as receiving
waters, discharges, and land.
Soft Assets:
Human based resources such as
personelle, public opinion, policies
and relationships.

-------
Comparison of
funding
scenarios
evaluated by the
City of San Diego
ranging from
their current
operating
budget to the
budget required
to attain a
projected full
level of service.
Scenario 1 - Full Service Level Attainment "—^Scenario 2 - Current Budget ($34.5M)
Scenario 3 - Increase $2 M for 5 years	Scenario 4 - Increase $6 M for 5 years
Scenario 5 - Increase $8 M for 5 years	Scenario 6 - Increase $10 M for 5 years
c
0
1
vv
00
_o
-X
u
re
CO
"ro
o
$5,000
$4,500
$4,000
$3,500
$3,000
$2,500
$2,000
$1,500
$1,000
$500
$-
2014 2019 2024 2029 2034 2039 2044 2049 2054 2059 2064 2069 2074 2079 2084 2089 2094 2099
Barriers
Embracing adaptive management planning, particularly from a stormwater perspective, has been
met with much skepticism from municipalities who struggle to look beyond traditional hard
assets, such as drinking and wastewater infrastructure. Over the past 6 years, the City of San
Diego has overcome this bias and morphed their watershed asset management culture from
reactive to proactive.
Many municipalities are staff- and resource-constrained, limiting their ability to allocate
resources towards planning ahead. Paradoxically, planning ahead is most essential during times
of constraint. Projecting asset management needs creates a basis for increased funding, but also
is a mechanism for efficiently managing limited resources to pay for upgrades prior to costly
system failures.
The City of San Diego made the commitment to invest over $1 million over 5 years towards
asset management planning development. This investment, however, has resulted in a WAMP
that can be the basis of their funding needs indefinitely and will easily pay for itself in saved
maintenance and reparation costs over the life of the City's watershed assets.
Another challenging outcome of asset management is financial transparency. Opening up budget
projections to inter-governmental and public scrutiny has the added liability of opposition from
adversarial parties. Transparency, however, is an essential part of asset management since its
purpose is communicating needs to officials as well as the taxpayer and San Diego has embraced
the additional scrutiny.
Iteration and Collaboration
Developing a WAMP is an iterative process requiring continual input from stakeholders, new or
improved data, and updates to fiscal modelling efforts as awareness of costs becomes more
sophisticated, particularly in accounting for effects of climate change.
The process of developing a WAMP can also serve to inform the regulatory process. In
particular, an asset management perspective in context of a TMDL could substantiate reasonable

-------
compliance schedules for water quality attainment. In the context of stormwater permitting, an
asset management plan could be used as a compliance mechanism alternative to meeting water
quality-based limitations.
This is particularly true given the extensive collaboration and validation process used by the City
of San Diego as it developed its WAMP. The City convened working groups of senior staff
members that provided input and direction to a collaborative team of three outside consulting
firms. The outside team, led by URS and supported by GHD and HDR, offered the City's
working groups independent confirmation and access to best practices for asset specific and
general storm water management efforts.
U.S. EPA has a strong interest in working with State regulators and municipalities to find similar
solutions to encourage asset management planning for stormwater, wastewater, and drinking
water systems. EPA is encouraged by the progress demonstrated by the City of San Diego and
hopes to work with other municipalities and regulators to achieve similar success.
For More Information on the City of San Diego Storm Water Division:
City of San Diego
Transportation and Storm Water Department Storm Water Division
9370 Chesapeake Drive, Ste. 100, MS 1900
San Diego, C A 92123
Phone: (619) 235-1000
www, sandiego. gov/storm water
To access the plan, visit: http://www.sandiego.gov/stormwater/plansreports/
Publication Information:
U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, Region 9
Water Division
75 Hawthorne Street
San Francisco, CA 94105
Jamie Marincola
Marincola.JamesPaul@epa.gov
415-972-3520

-------