How-To Guide: Part Four
Budgeting & Resources
Learn about resources available to states that want to develop
water service area boundaries.
Developing the data is not particularly costly, but it can take time.
EPIC estimates the cost of initial service area boundary development between $150 and $300 per water system, i.e. from initial outreach to a set of quality-controlled, standardized maps available to the public. For a state with few community water systems, like Wyoming, this would be $50 to $100 thousand, while a larger state like Florida would require $250 to $500 thousand. Long term maintenance cost is more difficult to estimate and depends on the frequency of boundary updates and the ability to integrate updates into other programs, such as site visits for sanitary surveys.
Regardless of the method, ongoing maintenance is an essential part of ensuring the service area boundaries remain accurate and useful over time.
Estimating Maintenance Time and Cost
The marginal cost of updating depends on frequency of change at the system level, but an annual update could be accomplished for 10% of the time and cost of development, or approximately $5,000 and 12 hours of staff time annually (for a state with 600 systems). This assumes contacting every system’s appropriate point of contact and that 5% of systems per year experienced changes in their boundaries that need to be reflected in the digital boundary map.
In addition, ~ $2,000 annually would be required to maintain the IT resources involved in managing an integrated data submission, validation and publication system securely on a public cloud provider. Costs may be lower if combined with existing spatial data infrastructure providers in use by the agency, or higher if the agency is required to procure services through state government central IT offices.
In other words, these costs can be easily accommodated into state agency budgets.
Some states we interviewed used existing state funding to support this work, while others secured federal grant funding or partnered with universities that secured external funding.
With increased federal funding for water infrastructure coming down the pipeline, we expect more grant funding to be available for more states to develop these data.
Build work into existing state budget line items
Seek state appropriations
Apply for a federal grant from State Revolving Funds, Water Use and Development Research Grant / U.S. Geological Survey or WaterSmart Grants / U.S. Bureau of Reclamation States
Seek other federal grant opportunities from this list
Work with a third-party non-profit to seek philanthropic support (one to two years maximum).
Options for Funding Include
However, funding data development is only half the battle for states that do not have the technical expertise or human resources to actually develop the data. While some states relied on the agency’s internal GIS team to do the work, others contracted with external consultants to develop water service area boundaries; still others worked with universities.
Long term maintenance cost is more difficult to estimate and depends on the frequency of boundary updates and the ability to integrate updates into other programs, such as site visits for sanitary surveys. Regardless of the method, ongoing maintenance is an essential part of ensuring the service area boundaries remain accurate and useful over time.
