Green Infrastructure Toolkit

Regulatory Tools

Regulatory tools include requirements set in zoning or building codes or stormwater retention ordinances, mandating action by private property owners. In many jurisdictions, stormwater retention ordinances establish retention requirements and then lay the foundation for other regulations that mandate green infrastructure as a specific set of practices to meet those retention requirements.

Regulatory tools, because of their inherent nature as requirements (as opposed to options or incentives), get surer results than programs that rely solely on capital improvement projects on publicly owned lands or voluntary measures for private land.  Private property owners must meet regulatory requirements to obtain a permit and, therefore, they must change their landscaping and building practices to comply. As a result, regulatory approaches may result in some political pushback. Many of the regulatory tools below may be more palatable to local developers if some flexibility is built into the system. For example, Seattle’s stormwater ordinance allows some retention offsite if retention is not practical onsite,^{See footnote 1}  while the District of Columbia’s ordinance allows for payment of a fee or purchase of stormwater credits as alternative methods of meeting its retention obligation.

Last, because of the nature of regulatory requirements as things mandated in laws such as zoning codes or other ordinances, many of these strategies may require legal changes to incorporate those requirements into that particular legal framework. These legal changes can be administratively complicated and time-consuming.

Zoning Codes

Zoning codes can create green infrastructure requirements for new construction and sometimes substantial renovations. Zoning codes are particularly suited to tailoring those requirements to particular land uses such as industrial, residential, etc, and for addressing the entire site under development, including landscaping (in contrast to building codes, which generally focus more specifically on the buildings. Zoning requirements can either set retention requirements that property owners can meet by choosing green infrastructure practices themselves, or can enumerate particular green infrastructure practices that qualify to meet the regulatory requirement. Each local government will need to look at the authority given by its state government to enact zoning regulations in order to determine how strong that local government can make green infrastructure requirements.

Building Codes

Building Codes can similarly create green infrastructure requirements for new construction and sometimes substantial renovations. In contrast to zoning codes, however, building codes are particularly suited to tailoring requirements to particular building types regardless of the use – for example, single-family residential, office buildings, etc.  Different states grant different authority to local governments for building codes; some states require local building codes to conform to state standards, while other states give local governments wide latitude to create their own standards.^{See footnote 2} Each local government will need to look at the authority its state government has given it over building codes in order to determine how strong that local government can make green infrastructure requirements.

Stormwater Ordinances

Stormwater Ordinances can directly require green infrastructure practices, as Binghamton, NY’s, ordinance does, or can serve as a foundational regulation to encourage green infrastructure to meet retention requirements. Stormwater ordinances can link these practices to reductions in stormwater fees (see incentive-based approaches), or can simply require retention and/or green infrastructure practices. Like zoning and building codes, stormwater ordinances best reach new construction projects, although they can impact existing buildings when those buildings are undergoing substantial renovation. Unlike state-level authorizing statutes for zoning and building codes, authority delegated to local governments to enact stormwater ordinances can be found in any of several sources, including authority to enact zoning codes, erosion control ordinances, and subdivision regulations.