CMRSWC & MassDEP : Stormwater Management Educational Materials for Central Massachusetts Municipalities
Designing Stormwater Management Educational Materials for Central Massachusetts Municipalities
The Central Massachusetts Regional Stormwater Coalition started as a collaborative of 13 towns working together to confront municipal stormwater management in those community. It has since grown into a 30 community large organization that continues to address stormwater management among its members through sharing of resources and building of easy to use templates.
The Massachusetts Department of Environmental Protection is an agency of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts that works to maintain and preserve the state’s environment, ensure clean air and water, and manage cleanup of environmental hazards.
In collaboration with these organizations, we will work to create educational materials that the Coalition can distribute to towns to raise awareness of the dangers of stormwater runoff. The materials we create will help satisfy control measures of the 2016 MS4 permit including: 1. Public education and outreach, 2. Public involvement, 6. Good housing keeping and pollution prevention. We will also deliver a video that can be used to introduce the concept of stormwater, and can be aired on public-access TV.
Students: Alex Legere; Anthony Perullo, Amy Toscano, Justin Waters
Sponsors: Central Massachusetts Regional Stormwater Coalition and Massachusetts Department of Environmental Protection.
Advisors: Prof. Corey Dehner and Prof. Purvi Shah
Goals and Objectives of Our Project
The goal of our project was to assist 30 town municipalities in Central Massachusetts in compliance with the 2016 Municipal Separate Storm Sewer System (MS4) permit while also educating residents on stormwater and its management. We worked in collaboration with the Massachusetts Department of Environmental Protection (MassDEP) and the Central Massachusetts Regional Stormwater Coalition (CMRSWC). In order to achieve our goal we accomplished the following nine objectives:
- Objective 1: Understand stormwater runoff, as well as its causes and impacts in addition to the MS4 permit and its control measures.
- Objective 2: Identify potential difficulties municipalities face in complying with the MS4 permit.
- Objective 3: Identify the desired target audience and learning outcomes for a stormwater mitigation educational campaign for the Central Massachusetts area.
- Objective 4: Identify and examine the effectiveness of different methods used by various outreach and educational campaigns that could achieve the learning outcomes identified in objective three.
- Objective 5: Determine branding recommendations for a campaign for the Coalition with the guidance of the USEPA (US Environmental Protection Agency), MassDEP and of the Coalition.
- Objective 6: Develop materials for an educational outreach campaign that achieves the findings from objectives one through four.
- Objective 7: Pilot these materials in a local school and public event.
- Objective 8: Assess the success of our materials in achieving the learning outcomes identified in objective three.
- Objective 9: Provide recommendations on future methods and materials for the educational outreach campaign to the Coalition.
