At MuniCon 2025, Geosyntec Senior Engineer Austin Orr will speak about his work with the City of Tacoma to develop the Watershed Insights tool. His presentation is titled, “Daylight Your Data: How Tacoma Unlocked BMP Asset Data to Streamline and Communicate Stormwater Planning Solutions.”
Below, Austin discusses both how the challenges faced by municipalities like City of Tacoma led to the creation of this successful open-source tool and how the tool can benefit other communities.
About the Speaker
Austin Orr is a Senior Engineer with more than 11 years of experience in urban stormwater management, hydrologic modeling, BMP sizing and performance evaluation, geospatial analysis, and software development. He has led technical work related to stormwater BMP facility performance and been involved in planning stormwater infrastructure related to climate change modeling, long-term pollutant-load reduction, and stormwater BMP asset management.
Q&A
What is an asset management system, and how does a municipality use one?
On a basic level, cities have a lot of stuff, or assets, to keep track of for operation and maintenance. These can include streetlights, stop signs, stormwater pipes, and storm drain outlets.
This kind of system is meant to answer basic questions like, What is the asset? Where is it located? What age is it? Did it get maintained, and if so, how recently? The sophistication of a city’s management system varies widely based on its size and budget. It can range from enterprise software with a centralized database to a collection of spreadsheets, depending on what the city can create or fund.
In the case of City of Tacoma, they have a great GIS team that maintains their inventory of stormwater management facilities. But that team isn’t responsible for figuring out, for example, how much water is each asset capturing, or how much pollutant load is being reduced by these facilities. Despite having high-quality information, asset data alone doesn’t effectively showcase the City’s progress in managing stormwater or achieving goals related to accessibility, livability, equity, and environmental stewardship as they plan for the future.
How does the Watershed Insights tool solve this problem?
This tool combines data sets from several sources into a purpose-built analysis environment to help quantify the benefits of stormwater infrastructure and to support Tacoma’s planning goals. In this case, we used the GIS team’s spatial layers of their structural stormwater BMP facilities and their facility delineations, regional runoff and pollutant-loading data from The Nature Conservancy’s Puget Sound Stormwater Heatmap; datasets from the City of Tacoma about habitat, economics, and equity; and BMP performance data from the International Stormwater BMP Database.
By combining these datasets, we can measure stormwater capture and water-quality improvement benefits. This provides a decision-support platform for prioritizing stormwater investment actions, while also considering community needs identified in the City’s 2025 Strategic Plan, such as accessibility, economy, education, and livability.
The Insights tool lets us analyze the whole City of Tacoma on a sub-basin level and compare different metrics. We worked with the City to create groups of metrics associated with each of their Urban Watershed Protection Plan goals, including clean water, resilient communities, healthy ecosystems, and healthy neighborhoods. We can then run a prioritization algorithm to score each sub-basin based on relative weights for each goal.
The tool then reveals which sub-basins are the top priority for future capital investments according to the City’s planning goals.
How did Watershed Insights come to be?
In 2019-2020, the City anticipated their need for a planning tool and partnered with us to apply for an Ecology Stormwater Financial Assistance Program grant. After securing funding, we started building data connections, reference datasets, the software platform, and the web-based interface. The tool launched in 2023, and since then, the City has been using it to inform their sub-basin prioritization process while continuing to add features and make improvements.
What are the biggest benefits that a municipality gains from a tool like this?
One of the things that’s so great about the Insights Tool is that it helps quantify the City-wide benefits of stormwater BMPs, including difficult calculations like estimating long-term BMP effectiveness and pollutant load reductions. This makes it easier for users to evaluate their stormwater BMPs in a multi-benefit framework and helps planners and watershed program managers communicate the value of their stormwater infrastructure assets.
Effective quantification and communication tools help identify potential partnerships. When the City’s high-priority watershed scoring was complete, they found several of their sub-basins fell within Puyallup Tribe lands, overlapping with the future USEPA Tribal Waters Stormwater Permit. They also identified synergies between high-priority sub-basins and other City planning efforts and internal initiatives, creating opportunities for both internal and external partnerships.
All of this helps secure funding. As these partnerships form and project opportunities arise, the tool can again help program managers assess alternatives to maximize project benefits by evaluating stormwater BMP scenarios for the site. The tool is ideal for assisting with grant proposals so that a potential funding source can see direct, tangible outcomes.
What excites you about the future of the Watershed Insights Tool?
Asset management, benefits quantification, and prioritization are common challenges for municipalities. This tool is designed to be flexible and extensible, allowing us to collaborate with other municipal partners adjacent to Tacoma and throughout the Puget Sound region. Many of the underlying data layers can be readily shared between them. Additionally, the tool is open source and can be deployed and adapted to other regions that have their own unique priorities and data.
I’m excited about enhancing and expanding this tool as we problem-solve for different municipalities’ needs. I feel like we’ve only scratched the surface of the possible layers of data we can add and solutions we can provide. The more we use this tool, the more opportunities will arise for identifying partnerships, finding excellent stormwater management project locations, and jointly planning their construction. There is tremendous potential benefit for adjacent communities to share insights.
