Overview

In March 2019, the Clean Stormwater and Flood Reduction Act was signed into law, which authorizes local and county governments to create stormwater utilities at their discretion. A stormwater utility can be established by any county or municipality, and the law also allows certain agencies to provide stormwater utility functions: a municipal sewerage authority, a municipal utilities authority, a county sewerage authority, or a county improvement authority. The law also allows for shared services between municipalities and a county. These stormwater utilities may charge and collect reasonable fees and other charges to help pay the stormwater utility’s costs for stormwater management, including maintenance. The Bureau of Nonpoint Pollution Control (BNPC) is developing a website that will provide information and guidance on the implementation and operation of stormwater utilities.

Stormwater utility “maintenance jobs,” and related training, can be discussed from two perspectives. The first focuses on the physical maintenance of stormwater facilities, and the other focuses on optimizing support actions to ensure successful stormwater utility operations and management along with continued stakeholder support.

Training for Stormwater Utilities

Maintenance training for stormwater utilities is basically the same as training for stormwater systems in general, except that stormwater utilities can be larger operations, covering a larger geographic extent (e.g., across multiple municipalities), with more complex interconnected stormwater elements.

Stormwater utility functions and operations can include maintenance, occurring at municipal, multi-municipal, county, and authority scales of geographic operation. Maintenance managers and workers may encounter a wider array of designs for stormwater infrastructure best management practices (BMPs) and “systems” in which several stormwater devices or facilities are inter-connected. This is the reason that Stormwater Maintenance is identified as a core area of training, and training need.

It is anticipated that stormwater utilities in NJ will require maintenance that includes both expanded knowledge by staff for maintenance of physical assets as well as maintenance of information technology (IT) and asset management data environments. This relates not only to stormwater facilities, but also information about the property types that are the basis of fee development, credits and fee waivers.