AWWA SRC57781

The US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) issued a contract to the Environmental Finance Center Network (EFCN) to pilot a unified or resource-based approach to source water protection. This approach involves bringing together multiple water systems who share the same or similar water source or some other unifying feature, such as a political boundary, to develop one source water protection plan rather than one plan for each system. This project involves work in 8 different states. Based on this work, and a previous pilot project using this approach, the EFCN has developed some lessons learned for this approach. In general, the approach appears to offer several benefits for the participants and provides a good, sound approach for source water protection. However, the approach also requires considerable time and effort to achieve the benefits. Overall, the EFCN believes this is a good means to try to protect source waters from contamination. Includes figure.