Memorandum of Understanding (MOU)

What is a MOU - Memorandum of Understanding?

A memorandum of understanding is a written agreement between 2 or more parties to agree upon a common action for a shared goal. 

As it relates to storm water, we can structure a MOU to help with managing storm water to lessen flooding by organizing multiple governments' storm water mitigation initiatives. These agreements acknowledge that multiple municipalities will work together as one unit to lessen storm water based around watersheds instead of their jurisdictions, allowing for communication, collaboration, coordination, shared investment, and better results while addressing MS4 goals.

Purpose (of establishing a MOU for your watershed)

Prompt the creation of MOUs where multiple municipalities existing within a watershed coordinating efforts to lessen storm water(and flooding) in our communities while responsibly using funds in these coordinated efforts mindfully investing where we get more bang for our tax dollar buck. This may mean that we pay taxes in our town but that revenue may a project upstream in a different jurisdiction where the effort is more worth while.

Objectives

• Define and understand jurisdictions' watershed(s) 

  1. Watershed Locator

• Coordinate multiple jurisdictions efforts to lessen storm water

• Communicate through monthly meetings

• Share the cost of the annual reporting as one unit instead of individually submitting require Federal MS4 reports, which communicate what each municipality has done last year to mitigate known flooding concerns defined in Federal flood maps through priority flood zones

• Invest in lessening storm water where the most impact could be between the multiple jurisdictions

Costs associated to MS4

• Annual Reporting obligation MS4 Report

• 10,000 annual fed funding granted to local municipalities or cities

• Costs of storm water infrastructure are differed to the local jurisdiction so they would have to tax to fund the storm water infrastructure projects

Organize by Watershed instead of Jurisdiction

Allowing funding to be hedged to focus on most impactful action to lessen storm water in their Watershed which may not actually be in the municipalities jurisdiction.

Have the group of municipalities within a newly established MOU  to collaborate and work together to get the most bang for their buck as it relates to investing in storm water infrastructure to lessen flooding.

This lessens the cost and burden of the annual reporting per jurisdiction into one report based on the Watershed which may encompass multiple municipal jurisdictions.

The is a new method that encourages cost saving, information, resource, and asset sharing to make local efforts in storm water infrastructure and impactfully and inexpensive as they can be.

Usually local municipalities do not have a Engineer on staff with stormwater knowledge so they out source the required federal annual MS4 Report to an engineering firm(where the cost of the report costs the Federal granted $10,000 to each local municipality.)

By creating the MOU it allows for one report to be shared between the multiple Jurisdictions, saving the overhead of the cost of the Ms4 report.

Precedents set in costs associated to mitigation of storm water

Realistic to invest up to half of the value of property to protect that property. 

-1903 Columbia river hydro electric dam between Canada and the US. Flooded the Canadian side. US had to pay for the damage and pay for the construction of digging out more volume on the Canadian side to hold more water to help prevent further flooding.