Decentralizing stormwater management: a proactive approach to educate and engage communities

This Master of Urban Planning thesis examines stormwater management in southern California, with the goal of showing how residential-scale best management practices (BMPs) can be implemented more widely. The paper begins with sections on traditional management efforts and emerging strategies and then discusses examples of existing programs that use normative messages to encourage participation in environmental programs. The fifth section presents a case study of the Elmer Avenue Neighborhood Retrofit Demonstration Project, in which one block of a Sun Valley neighborhood was redesigned with stormwater BMPs, allowing it to treat and infiltrate runoff from 40 acres. The focus of this section is to better understand the extent of outreach about the project and missed opportunities to educate and inform others. Recommendations and challenges are presented.