Category:

Setting Performance Targets

East Clayton ‘Green’ Development in Surrey established BC precedent for implementing performance target approach to rainfall capture


“The Neighbourhood Concept Plan (NCP) established rainfall capture objectives to maintaining the predevelopment runoff rates and volumes. The clay soils and limited infiltration rates drove innovation in both the calculation methods and the design details to allow the volumetric runoff coefficient to be maintained in both single family and multi-family sites,” states Jim Dumont.

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City of Surrey moves beyond pilot projects to a watersheds objectives approach to green infrastructure implementation


“A decade of on-the-ground experience has enabled the City of Surrey to move beyond pilot projects to a broader watershed objectives approach to on-site rainfall capture. As we move forward, the new Drainage By-Law endorsed by Council in 2008 is the tool that will enable the City to establish watershed-specific performance targets for rainwater runoff volume and rate reduction,” states Remi Dubé,

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Characterizing Stormwater Quality: A Fool's Errand?


“Our community wash-off models have for 40 years been structured based on land use: residential, commercial, and industrial. The deep weakness of such models is that the structure is not directly related to the BMP programs. Let’s consider structuring our models based on scape: roadscape, parkingscape, roofscape, and landscape,” writes Gary Minton.

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Protect Stream Health: Set Achievable, Affordable and Effective Watershed Targets


“Once we went back to basics and developed the concept of a Rainfall Spectrum, this then led into the concept of Performance Targets for rainwater runoff capture. The reason runoff percentage is the performance target is that municipalities exert control over runoff volume through their land development and infrastructure policies, practices and actions,” explained Kim Stephens.

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STORMWATER PLANNING: A GUIDEBOOK FOR BRITISH COLUMBIA – “The Guidebook also introduced the concept of performance targets to facilitate implementation of the integrated strategy for managing the complete rainfall spectrum,” stated Kim Stephens, Guidebook project manager & principal author


“The goal of adaptive management is to learn from experience and constantly improve land development and rainwater management practices over time,” stated Kim Stephens. “The Guidebook introduced two innovations that are inter-linked with each other and with an adaptive management approach. The first was the concept of an integrated strategy for managing all the ‘rainfall-days’ that occur each year. The Guidebook also introduced the concept of performance targets managing the complete rainfall spectrum.”

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Rainwater Management in British Columbia: Performance Target Methodology at heart of Provincial Guidebook


“The widespread changes in thinking about rainwater runoff impacts that began in the late 1990s reflected new insights in two areas: hydrology; and aquatic ecology. These new insights were the result of improved understanding of the causes-and-effects of changes in hydrology brought about by urban development, and the consequences for aquatic ecology,” explains Peter Law.

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