In March, the UNC Institute for the Environment hosted the Clean Tech Summit, a multi-day event in which students and professionals  convene and foster leadership and discussion among the Southeast’s clean tech industry. Many summit panels incorporated and focused on the … Read more

In North Carolina, there are 305 active local government community water systems serving up to 3,300 people, and 60 active local government water systems serving 20,000 people or more. The large systems outperform the small systems on financial performance, and … Read more

What is the average household stormwater fee in North Carolina? This is a harder question to answer than you might assume. User fees for stormwater management are influenced by many factors, including a utility’s service population, the importance of managing stormwater … Read more

Smart Growth programs—developing urban areas with a variety of building types and land uses in a concentrated space—are touted for their potential to spur economic development through the creation of more attractive, environmentally sustainable, and walkable communities. One underlying theme … Read more

Many of you know us for our Financial Sustainability and Rates Dashboards, but you may not know that these are not just limited to water and wastewater rates: there’s also stormwater! In recent years stormwater has perhaps not received the … Read more

This interactive stormwater fees dashboard is designed to assist stormwater utility managers and local officials in analyzing residential, nonresidential, and multi-family stormwater fees against multiple characteristics, including utility finances, system characteristics, customer base socioeconomic conditions, and geography. The EFC and … Read more

Many of the local governments we assist at the Environmental Finance Center struggle to raise enough money to support their environmental services. Often, we work with these communities to improve the finance and management of their systems through better rate … Read more

Here at the Environmental Finance Center, our key role is to increase the capacity of other organizations to address the financial aspects of environmental protection and service delivery. The majority of our Center’s work focuses on providing technical training and … Read more

Why state and local governments should review statutes governing financing of infrastructure projects and add explicit language to include conservation measures

Here at the Environmental Finance Center we work with a lot of data, but all the data in the world is useless if you can’t convey the story of the data to people who need to understand it. In line with … Read more