Public outreach is one of those areas of the NPDES Phase II
permit that stormwater program managers either seem to enjoy or to hate, with
very little middle ground. In places where people already have a good
appreciation of water resources and the need to protect them—places where
recreational activities center around beaches or lakes, or where the local
economy is dependent on fishing, tourism, or other water-centered activities—it
often seems that public education and outreach are almost redundant. In
others—inland communities and environments where rain is infrequent—they more
often seem to be viewed as a chore. And yet many programs are doing them
successfully. The Environmental Protection Agency has set up a sort of clearinghouse to
help stormwater programs find outreach materials. Creating your own materials,
whether for print media, radio and television, or the Web, can be expensive and
difficult to do well. (For an overview of what’s involved see our guest
editorial from the March-April 2006 issue).
For this reason, many adjacent communities, or those under a joint Phase II
permit, have combined resources and money to share public outreach materials,
and the EPA’s Web site (www.epa.gov/nps/toolbox) carries this
idea further by providing a large selection to choose from. You can search by
media format (print, radio, TV, etc.) or by the particular issues you’re trying
to address, such as teaching people to pick up after their pets, stop dumping
motor oil down the drain, or not overwater their lawns.
A program in our area, for
example, has run a 30-second television spot showing a drop of motor oil falling
from an SUV onto a driveway and morphing into a bright yellow plastic duck,
which washes into a storm drain, joined by dozens, then hundreds, of other
plastic ducks from other sources: cigarette butts, dog waste, and so on. A huge
flock of plastic ducks eventually travels to an outfall and then into open
water, startling a real duck and a group of swimmers. It’s a great way to
illustrate the aggregate effect of nonpoint-source pollution. On the EPA’s site,
I learned that the spot was originally developed by the Think Blue program in
San Diego and has been used in the Minneapolis-St. Paul area and in Maine, among
other places.
Some of the materials available on
the site have been developed by the EPA, but most are from local stormwater
agencies. The site includes contact information and terms of use for each item.
How
is your stormwater program handling public education and outreach? Has anyone
used materials from the EPA’s Toolbox?