AWWA CO50851

In the last three decades, the Clean Water Act and Safe Drinking Water Act havedone a lot to clean up America's waters by focusing mainly on contamination frompoint sources. However, current information suggests that most contamination isfrom nonpoint sources. Furthermore, traditional proactive environmental planninghas involved pollution prevention, public education, and several other concepts.While these efforts have had some positive results, smarter land use managementbased on risk evaluation is needed to protect limited natural resources andreduce contamination impacts from point and nonpoint sources. Well planned landuse will include developing and using pollution risk maps. This paper focuses onpromoting Pollution Risk Maps (PRMs) and Proactive Land Use Management (PLUM).The goal of this paper is to present some economic benefits of proactiveenvironmental planning (specifically PRMs and PLUM) so that these principlesbecome a priority rather than a back burner issue. The economic benefitssuggested herein are general ideas and are not intended to be a detailedfinancial analysis. Includes 9 references.