Latest News

This brief, Basic Water Utility Management: A Guide for Local Leaders, presents tools to help mayors understand their water systems and utilities better. Cities are better off with strong water systems, but these take time, investment, and political will to build and maintain. Many cities are facing aging infrastructure, water quality challenges, combined sewer overflows, and more. These things impact the quality of life of everyone within the ...

This brief, Paying for Water Systems: A Guide for Local Leaders, focuses on the most sustainable, equitable toolkit to finance and operate publicly-owned water utilities, for which elected city or utility leaders can advocate. Water infrastructure systems are complex, but elected and staff leaders in cities are well poised to advance more sustainable funding arrangements while addressing the affordability of the water bill for their ...

This Applicant’s Guide, from I-Bank, DEP and New Jersey Future, is intended for any municipality, utility authority or other eligible entity with an interest in obtaining financing for green infrastructure projects from the New Jersey Water Bank. It offers a "roadmap" for applicants by providing information in one place regarding what is involved in getting from an initial funding query through to final construction dollars. The Applicant’s ...

Despite being an important tool for sustainable water management, utility consolidation is one of the most difficult topics to discuss in the sector. Communities considering options to better meet their water service needs struggle to find fact-based information. Historically, consolidation has put different interests in the water sector in opposition and been difficult to undertake. The US Water Alliance developed to support informed, ...

This report, Opportunities for Strategic Energy Management in the Municipal Water Sector, focuses on the opportunity to integrate Strategic Energy Management (SEM) into the municipal water-wastewater sector by providing recommendations and resources for key stakeholders, namely municipalities and those working within the facilities and utility program administrators who are in a strong position to support adoption. The report presents findings ...

The purpose of this report, Balancing Green and Gray Solutions to CSO Management, is to provide guidance to CSO permit holders and their Supplemental CSO Community Teams, to help guide the development of LTCPs for determining an optimal green/gray balance. Although the target audience is permittees and their communities, other readers should benefit from the summary of current CSO programs. It is recognized that there are varying paths towards ...

The Green Infrastructure Municipal Toolkit from New Jersey Future is a one-stop online resource useful to any community in New Jersey, whether new to the opportunities green infrastructure presents or already implementing GI and seeking more specific expert guidance. The toolkit includes detailed information and a variety of tools that cities and towns can use to plan, implement, and sustain green infrastructure in public- and private-sector ...

This Procurement Toolkit for Cities and Utilities will help city and utility officials make critical early stage procurement decisions, including which “big city” procurement tool is most relevant and how to apply it to build resilience. It focuses on ways cities and utilities can use current procurement systems to enable better outcomes. The procurement toolkit was piloted by seven U.S. cities: Anchorage (AK), El Paso (TX), Camden County MUA ...

This paper, Accounting for Trees in Stormwater Models, is intended to help the stormwater engineering community more easily account for trees in runoff and pollutant load calculations so that they can more readily incorporate them into their stormwater management strategies. Funded by the US Forest Service, the paper was developed with input from experts in stormwater engineering and urban forestry. This paper further augments a robust ...

The Green Infrastructure & Health Guide provides some general principles, best practices, and experiences about how best to use green infrastructure to promote better health equity. It is designed for use by managers, engineers, community organizations, planners, and others who are siting, designing, building, and stewarding green infrastructure in urban areas and rural towns across Canada and the United States. The guide is a product of ...