Water Resources Research Act Program

Details for Project ID 2005IN169B

Stormwater Guidance and Implementation in Indiana: Perspectives on the new Rule 13

Institute: Indiana
Year Established: 2004 Start Date: 2004-09-01 End Date: 2004-12-31
Total Federal Funds: $2,000 Total Non-Federal Funds: $7,120

Principal Investigators: Jack Wittman, Jack Wittman

Project Summary: Over the past two years the Indiana Department of Environmental Management has developed a new rule and guidance material for implementing phase two of the Clean Water Act (Rule 13). This new rule is designed to reduce the water quality impairments caused by stormwater inflows to Indiana's streams and rivers. The basic idea is that the diffuse development that occurs in watersheds in urban and urbanizing areas needs to account for the increases in stormwater runoff that is caused by the impervious areas in the watersheds of the state. These new rules are to be implemented by the designated MS4 operator with limited background (virtually no institutional history) and in most cases, very limited funding. While it is not uncommon for Indiana's municipal governments to bear the burden of state regulation, it is not common for the state to be requiring performance standards with no experience in evaluating the performance of any measure that is proposed as a best management practice by the stormwater management authority. The implementation problems associated with this new rule are related both to the institutional capacity of the jurisdictions doing stormwater management and the technical nature of stormwater management (where to protect and from what contaminants). Like many other rules adopted by the State Water Pollution Control Board, implementation of Rule 13 will not be uniform across Indiana. Some counties have more resources and internal capacity to manage new rules related to fairly technical topics. Some counties have limited resources and yet they are required to satisfy the same rules with the same performance requirements. The current rule 13 guidance refers to existing standards and programs (e.g., total maximum daily loads, wellhead protection, etc.) and forces the counties to be responsible for a new world of problems and impacts. Reckoning with these problems, while new to Indiana, is part of the existing landscape of Europe. Most European countries have been using stormwater management for stream water quality improvement for over ten years. In Germany, for instance, research and water quality sampling programs have been adopted that demonstrate how particular stormwater management strategies alter water quality. If a particular method for managing stormwater quality works in one area (soil type, vegetation, cropping pattern, etc.) and not in another, there is generally data to indicate what methods work in different hydrologic and development settings. It is clear that we could benefit from the experiences of municipal governments in Europe.