Clean water for Armand Bayou: A watershed partnership

Clean Water for Armand Bayou is building a multi-stakeholder watershed partnership in a mid-sized watershed within the Lower Galveston Bay watershed to address runoff pollution. Runoff pollution is much more difficult to address than point-source pollution because it physically flows from a variety of sources, many not easily quantifiable. In addition, many different institutional and non-institutional entities are involved, both in terms of agency turf and in terms of who contributes the runoff. Single-focus programs are thus not likely to have much success in mitigating and abating runoff. Rather than a single focus on nonpoint- source pollution, we are building partnerships that cross the major water and ecology issues in the region: water supply and conservation, flooding and drainage, habitat, and of course, water quality. Low maintenance landscapes, for example, that have a direct impact on water conservation issues also have a positive impact on nonpoint source pollution because of less runoff. We are attempting to build a template on which to explore and forge many more such alliances that cross agency and stakeholder boundaries.