The City of Tampa, Florida, is updating its long-range comprehensive plan to reflect the city’s growing focus on integrated water management. Formally known as the One Water Chapter of the City of Tampa Comprehensive Plan, the document is set to be approved by the Tampa City Council in the coming days. Among its changes, the proposed new chapter includes a greater emphasis on equity, resilience, green infrastructure, and regional collaboration.

New way of thinking

By 2045, Tampa expects to have gained more than 108,000 new residents and 77,000 new homes. To prepare for these developments, the city is updating its comprehensive plan as part of a process known as Live Grow Thrive 2045. The new One Water chapter is the first element of Tampa’s long-range plan to undergo revision as part of the Live Grow Thrive 2045 campaign.

The water-related portions of Tampas’s existing comprehensive long-range plan include “three distinct sections” dedicated to potable water, wastewater, and stormwater management, says Melissa Dickens, the strategic planning and policy manager for Plan Hillsborough, a planning organization that serves the cities of Tampa, Temple Terrace, and Plant City, as well as unincorporated Hillsborough County. 

“The language in those particular sections probably dates back, most of it, to the early 2000s, maybe the late 1990s,” Dickens says. “It's definitely something that was a little long in the tooth and needed a comprehensive look.”

To a certain extent, the siloed nature of the water-related sections of the long-range plan limited their effectiveness, Dickens says. The different sections were “probably not working together as well as they maybe could,” she says. “That's one of the reasons that we wanted to pursue this [One Water] approach.”

Revamping the plan to reflect a more integrated approach to water management only makes sense, Dickens says. “Water is not separated and siloed,” she notes. “So, we've wanted our plan to both literally be connected in terms of having all of the water resources language together, but then also have it illustrate a new way of thinking about water.”

At the same time, updating the water-related section of Tampa’s comprehensive plan offers an opportunity to “expand our focus and think about” what “we need to focus on for Tampa out to 2045,” Dickens says.

Important input

The process of updating the water chapter of the long-range plan began in 2022 with a public survey that generated about 1,500 individual comments, Dickens says. Plan Hillsborough also held community meetings to gather additional input. “We really appreciate the feedback and input that we got from the community on our vision, because we were able to incorporate a lot of those themes into the One Water chapter,” she says.

Plan Hillsborough also worked “very closely” with various city agencies to develop the draft language for the new One Water chapter, Dickens says. “From the get-go, we were coordinating hand in hand with” representatives of Tampa’s Water, Wastewater, Stormwater, and Innovation and Resilience departments, she says. “We wanted to make sure that we had the people who would be charged with developing projects or updating specific regulations in the development process, so that we could get their feedback early on.” 

This departmental input was critical to ensuring that the different agencies were confident in their ability to implement the policies outlined in the chapter, Dickens says. As a result, the new One Water chapter “is not going to be a plan that just sits on a shelf,” she says.

For the city’s departments, updating the comprehensive plan offered an opportunity to reflect more of what they already are doing, rather than charting a new direction, says Chuck Weber, the director of the Tampa Water Department. “I don't think it was really wanting to do something different, because we were already headed down the path with a couple of projects that we were working on,” Weber says. “It was more about aligning the old language to the way we're doing things now. And that really is a One Water approach.”

Expanded goals

The proposed One Water chapter of Tampa’s comprehensive plan includes the following five goals:

• “Protect, enhance and sustain water resources.”

• “Construct, manage and maintain water resources infrastructure and projects in a fiscally, socially and environmentally sustainable manner.”

• “Increase water conservation in the City.”

• “Pursue opportunities for integrated water resource management.”

• “Implement innovative approaches to connect water resources with other aspects of planning.

Each of the five goals has various supporting objectives and policies, some of which reflect a more explicit commitment to equity and resilience. For example, the second goal — which calls for Tampa to construct, manage, and maintain water resources infrastructure and projects in a fiscally, socially and environmentally sustainable manner — has three objectives. 

One of these objectives states that Tampa will “ensure water resources services and infrastructure serve the current and future City population in a sustainable, inclusive and equitable manner,” according to the proposed language for the new One Water chapter. One of the policies that is intended to achieve this objective calls for proactive public engagement having a “special focus on underserved communities and groups as well as neighborhoods directly impacted by projects.”

A separate policy under the same objective declares that the city will “[c]onsider historic gaps in water resources infrastructure and historically underserved communities when prioritizing new services, facilities, or maintenance.”

Another objective related to the second goal says that Tampa will “[p]ursue resiliency strategies to meet water supply, wastewater and stormwater management needs in a changing climate.” Under this objective, one of the policies calls on the city to identify “future adverse climate change conditions, such as increased precipitation and sea level rise, and incorporate into long-range water resources planning.”

Although equity is not a new goal for the city, incorporating the concept within the One Water chapter represents an increased focus on the concept, Dickens says. Equity in water is “something that we should be talking about,” she notes.

The same goes for resilience. Whereas the city used to focus on resilience mainly in terms of its coastal management operations, now the focus includes the water supply infrastructure as well. “We don't just need to focus on resiliency along the coast,” Dickens says. “We want to focus on the resiliency of our water supply as well. And so the One Water chapter was a way for us to integrate all of these community ideas in the vision and include some of those new topic areas within the updated section.” 

Greening infrastructure

Green infrastructure and low-impact development also receive greater emphasis as part of the new One Water chapter. Two of the objectives under Goal 5 — implement innovative approaches to connect water resources with other aspects of planning — specifically mention the concepts.

For example, the second objective calls for Tampa to “[e]xplore opportunities to incorporate green infrastructure or other Low Impact Development (LID) principles in public projects and on publicly owned land.” Along with creating demonstration projects to illustrate the value of green infrastructure and LID principles, the objective commits the city, where feasible, to designing green infrastructure projects that “serve multiple functions.”

Encouraging greater use of green infrastructure and LID on private property also is a focus of the fifth goal. Its third objective calls for evaluating “incentives and regulatory modifications to enhance the use of green infrastructure and/or LID principles in private development.” 

Among the policies to support this objective, one says that Tampa will update “parking codes, design requirements and downtown design standards to reduce impervious parking surfaces and increase the use of green infrastructure and LID in the Downtown area.”

Collaboration is key

A key difference between the new and old chapters is that the new version has “more of a proactive flavor to it,” Weber says. If an issue arises that does not necessarily have a direct bearing on the city’s stormwater or wastewater departments, “I'm going to go out and ask them anyways” for their input, Weber says. By contrast, the existing chapter merely calls for the departments to work together “where you have overlaps,” he says.

The new chapter also includes a greater focus on regional collaboration, Weber says. He notes that regional collaboration will be needed for the city to address two key challenges: ensuring adequate water supplies during dry periods in a manner that does not harm the environment and complying with a state law mandating the beneficial reuse of treated wastewater by 2032. 

“The new language that's in the One Water Plan really promotes this concept of regionally looking at how we solve” these problems, Weber says.

The Tampa City Council is scheduled to vote on the final adoption of the new One Water chapter on February 23. If approved, the new chapter will be sent to the Florida Department of Economic Opportunity and will take effect 31 days after the department indicates that the process of modifying the chapter has officially been completed.