Challenges in Stormwater Best Management Practice Maintenance Tracking: An Assessment of the Virginia Department of Transportation's Stormwater Maintenance Tracking Database

Best management practices (BMPs) are widely used to mitigate non-point source pollution from stormwater discharges. However, long-term operation and maintenance of stormwater BMPs had long been an afterthought prior to becoming a compliance requirement of the Municipal Separate Storm Sewer Systems permit. Additionally, there is limited information available on the actual cost of maintaining BMPs. The objective of this research is to analyze the stormwater maintenance tracking database created by the Virginia Department of Transportation (VDOT) to 1) quantify the costs of routine and non-routine maintenance with respect to VDOT district or practice type and to 2) identify challenges encountered when processing the data for analysis and provide potential solutions to address the issues. The cost of routine maintenance was found to average $375 per task, whereas non-routine maintenance tasks cost around $812 on average. The major repairs were found to cost about $63,000 per event. Routine maintenance tasks of Basin BMPs were found to be the most expensive, averaging $400 per task, while Infiltration BMPs’ non-routine maintenance cost was the highest at $1,123 per task. The BMP basins cost the most for the upkeep, averaging $1,100 per year. Recommendations are made for improving VDOT’s current database design to address issues regarding data completeness, overloaded work orders, and lacking controlled vocabulary. Extensions to the current database design are proposed to resolve these issues so that more robust cost estimates of BMP maintenance can be derived in the future.