City staff brief committee on Department of Ecology stormwater audit, outline mapping and record-keeping fixes

City staff summarized findings from a recent Department of Ecology stormwater audit and outlined a multi-year plan to address required fixes. The audit, staff said, focused on three of the nine elements of the city’s NPDES stormwater program — asset mapping, illicit-discharge detection and the city’s decant (decan) facility — and resulted in both compliance items and recommendations that staff will carry to council.

The presenter told the Utilities Committee the state visited in mid-September, produced a findings letter in November and the city responded in December. “They took like 500 pictures,” the presenter said, and staff are working through recommendations that will be implemented over the next couple of years. Several items the state flagged were classified as compliance-related and require specific action; others were recommendations to implement existing policy or improve record keeping.

Why it matters: Ecology enforces the NPDES stormwater permit that governs local pollution-prevention activities; compliance items can require corrective work and, in some cases, lead to fines if not addressed. The audit therefore sets a near-term list of tasks that will shape project and staffing priorities.

Staff highlighted a backlog of stormwater assets discovered since 2018 that are not yet in the city’s GIS mapping. The presenter described the current state as largely paper-based and said the city has set a goal to finish mapping outstanding assets by 2029, with potential consultant support and grant funds to accelerate work.

“Right now we’re still in a paper and Excel spreadsheets world,” the presenter said, adding that the city moved to mobile asset-management for catch-basin inspections in January and is rolling out software to let technicians record conditions directly into GIS.

The audit also identified record-keeping gaps at the decant facility. Ecology asked the city to update its pollution-prevention plan for the facility and to keep related records for five years; staff said some decant records could not be located for the previous five-year period and that the city will create a formal process to retain and manage those documents.

Staff described several small housekeeping fixes Ecology documented during the site visit: unlabeled drums, an old dump truck with a minor oil leak and minor tracking from a soil pile. Those items, staff said, were corrected or surplused, and the city will raise or rebuild decant walls where necessary to meet site constraints.

On staffing, the presenter said the city currently relies on roughly one full-time-equivalent staff member plus the recently hired GIS technician to make mapping progress, and that the council has already signaled support for hiring a stormwater source-control position. “We have a bunch of grant money,” the presenter said, adding the city intends to use some of those funds to speed mapping and asset-management work.

Committee members asked whether Ecology supplied an authoritative data dictionary or GPS standards; staff said state regulations likely define much of the data standard and that GPS augmentation and mapping methods will be part of forthcoming work. The presenter also noted the state did not review every NPDES element — Ecology looked at three specific areas — so implementation will be phased.

Next steps: staff will finalize a slideshow and submit materials to the full council in March; they plan to implement the compliance items, adopt a five-year retention practice for decant records and prioritize mapping through a combination of in-house work, grant funds and potential consultant contracts.