Community-enabled Lifecycle Analysis of Stormwater Infrastructure Costs (CLASIC) A Tool for Sustainable Water Infrastructure Municipal Planning: A Framework OverviewEPA National Priorities Grant #836173

The US Environmental Protection Agency (US EPA) estimates that communities need to spend $106 billion to upgrade stormwater infrastructure and improve combined sewer overflow (CSO) management (US EPA 2012) to meet Clean Water Act (CWA) goals. However, federal funding for infrastructure is changing and smaller urban communities, struggling with affordability, are oftentimes unable to raise rates or taxes to fund critical upgrades. In addition, rate payers are increasingly insisting on more efficient spending and increased levels of human health and environmental services in water infrastructure investment (San Francisco Water 2012, Portland Water Bureau 2014).

However, tools to assist municipalities in planning for and implementing sustainable stormwater infrastructure are lacking. The purpose of implementing "green infrastructure" * is to capture not only performance benefits (reducing stormwater quantity and improving quality) but also attendant amenities, or co-benefits, that improve the community.

The CLASIC tool is structured to operationalize 1) urban best management practice (BMP) scenarios of quantity and pollutant reductions, 2) life cycle cost of scenarios, and 3) relative comparison of BMP co-benefits to the community. The tool interface will be windows based and user friendly, providing a feasibility level life cycle cost assessment of 12 urban best management practices. The life cycle cost analysis framework that underpins the tool specifies the differences of input choices on not only performance but also capital, operations, maintenance, and end-of-life cost per functional unit (dollars per acre treated to user specified performance).

The importance of the CLASIC tool is that it is a nationwide application being created by a team of experts, that will be peer-tested, end-user informed, accommodate regional scale variation, and include ability to model extreme events. Many tools and costs have been developed for urban BMP implementation. CLASIC rolls existing and new data and into a cloud-based platform that enables an "apples-to-apples" cost comparison of retrofitting the stormwater infrastructure of our urban landscapes sustainably.

*Green infrastructure (GI) is also termed stormwater control measures (SCM) or urban best management practices (BMPs).