The City of Fayetteville’s (City) stormwater program is ever evolving to meet the needs of the community’s tremendous growth over the last few decades. While growth has provided noticeable benefit for the City and its residents, it has also provoked a greater focus on the City’s stormwater program from storm sewer system capacity to new development regulations to plan review processes.
In 2017 and 2018, Raftelis evaluated the City’s plan review process and offered recommendations to make the process more efficient, standardized, and in line with those of peer communities. As part of the same engagement, we reviewed the then-current stormwater rate and its sufficiency to maintain the stormwater program. With Raftelis’ help, the City adopted a rate change to better fund the program moving forward.
The City has engaged Raftelis in the spring of 2020 to review and update its stormwater ordinance and its administrative manual to ensure consistency and fulfillment of their primary purposes.
City Council adopted a Stormwater Control Ordinance in 2008 that introduced specifications for managing stormwater runoff from new development and redevelopment. Since this time, numerous revisions have been made to the ordinance and the companion administrative manual to address new state regulations and various stormwater management processes adopted by the City. The Stormwater Ordinance has always aimed to inform the legal obligations of engineers and developers in the design and development process. However, the ordinance includes several technical details that may be subject to periodic change based on industry best practices. Expressing that the administrative manual is designed to provide technical guidance to engineers and developers attempting to obtain stormwater approval for proposed development, the City aims to contain all technical information about processes, procedures, timelines, and submittal requirements in a comprehensive manual. City staff have observed that the administrative manual should also be limited to technical details of the stormwater permit submittal and review process. Still, that document should be consistent within the broader legal framework laid out in the Stormwater Ordinance.
This work is currently underway and includes the following:
This review includes considerable stakeholder engagement (City staff and management, the Stormwater Advisory Board, and the City Council Stormwater Committee) and will include recommended revisions to the administrative manual and the stormwater ordinance.
