Strategies for Financing Water Quality Restoration in Delaware
- Published:
- June 30, 2017
Delaware has affirmed that “clean water is essential to [its] future, its economy, its environment, and the health of its citizens.” Yet, state and local efforts to reduce water pollution have not kept pace with the need, and today more than 85% of Delaware’s waterways do not meet federal and state quality
standards. Further, the state has experienced more frequent and severe flood events over the last several decades, highlighting Delaware’s vulnerability to the damaging costs of extreme weather.
To address the state’s water quality and flooding challenges, in 2015 the Delaware General Assembly established the Clean Water and Flood Abatement Task Force. This bipartisan group – comprised of state agency staff as well as stakeholders from the state’s agricultural and environmental communities – was charged with investigating these issues and making recommendations for improvement. After a yearlong inquiry, the Task Force presented to the General Assembly a set of findings and recommendations. Its chief recommendation was to “significantly increase the annual investments in upgrading and maintaining Delaware’s water infrastructure, promoting water quality, alleviating flooding and providing flood control, and preventing or responding to stormwater damage.”
Meanwhile, the US EPA Chesapeake Bay Program Office commissioned the University of Maryland Environmental Finance Center (EFC) to identify options for Delaware to sufficiently and efficiently finance water quality restoration practices, in order to achieve pollutant load reduction targets for the Chesapeake Bay and to clean up waters in the 70% of the state that does not drain to the Bay. To conduct this analysis, the EFC interviewed Delaware state agency staff and reviewed the Task Force findings as well as the state’s existing funding streams and financing mechanisms for water quality restoration. Through this analysis, the EFC identified opportunities for Delaware to both narrow its water quality funding gap as well as change the way in which it finances restoration so that investments are made as efficiently and effectively as possible.
It is the EFC’s hope that the ideas presented in this report will inform the Delaware General Assembly as it considers the Task Force’s recommendations and advances the state’s goals of (1) increasing revenue flow for water quality restoration so that it is sufficient and stable, (2) harnessing all public, private and philanthropic resources to achieve clean water, and (3) maximizing the impact of state water quality and flood abatement investments so they achieve the greatest benefit for current and future Delawareans.