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“The legislative authority for integration of land use planning and asset management, including financial management, already exists. Local governments can develop a truly integrated Asset Management Strategy that views the watershed though an environmental lens,” states Glen Brown. “Start with effective green infrastructure and protect environmental values. Get the watershed vision right. Then create a blueprint to implement green infrastructure.”

“While its primary purpose is to provide province-wide guidelines, Develop with Care 2012 also emphasizes how environmental protection and stewardship can benefit the community, the property owner and the developer, as well as the natural environment,” states Marlene Caskey.

“VIEA collaboration with CAVI created an opportunity for early success in moving forward and the ‘CAVI Forum within the 2011 Summit’ provided a springboard to Island-wide action. Together we can achieve much…just imagine the strength of committed individuals all working towards a common focus,” stated Dave Willie.

“Effective change in the way we develop land and respect water will result from collaboration of business, local government and community. A desired outcome is that local governments will view watersheds through a ‘sustainable service delivery’ lens,” writes Kim Stephens.

“It’s important now that we realize that water policy and eff ective improvement of the way we manage water is not merely a government strategy anymore— it has to be a broader societal commitment which includes the average citizen who has an interest in what’s happening in his or her watershed,” says Bob Sandford.

“In February 2012, we were pleased to draw attention to the great work of the Partnership for Water Sustainability. The Partnership connects water, land and people. It is demonstrating the effectiveness of a top-down and bottom-up approach to leading change in the local government setting,” states Pia Nagpal.

The purpose of the Primer is to provide engineers and non-engineers with a common understanding of how a science-based approach to rainwater management has evolved since the mid-1990s. “Pioneer research yielded guiding principles; these are standing the test of time. Evaluation of, and analyses using, the entire rainfall and stream discharge spectrum allows us to see new connections to stream health and to begin the process of creating effective mitigation strategies,” reports Kim Stephens.

From the stream health perspective, appropriate and effective green infrastructure is a way to increase the level-of-service. Expressed another way, green infrastructure that restores the rainfall absorption capacity of the watershed landscape will increase the level of ecological protection. “For storm sewer systems, the process of establishing an acceptable ‘Level-of-Service’ will require local governments to review, examine, and justify the existing standards and how to transition into the future where costs must be balanced against public needs and expectations,” states Jim Dumont.

The report provides a consolidated reference source to guide those about to embark upon an ISMP process. It is a compendium: front-end plus all five documents in the ‘ISMP Course Correction Series’. “The genesis for ISMPs was a desire to integrate the community, engineering, planning and environmental perspectives. The implicit goal was to build and/or rebuild communities in balance with ecology. Local governments knew they had to do business differently to protect or restore watershed health,” states Robert Hicks.

“We spent the last half a century trying to control runoff with dikes, storm sewers, curbs and gutters. Now, increased development and increased storm intensity from climate change are increasing peak flows and altering the rules of the game. We can’t engineer away our problems fast enough, and have to look at other, lower impact solutions. This workshop was held to highlight the importance of rainwater management to climate change adaptation and to showcase examples from other areas that could be applied to the Okanagan,” states Anna Warwick Sears.