Coming Next Year: Your Own Conference & Exposition

This issue of Stormwater marks the magazine’s first anniversary. In the last 12 months we’ve forged some tremendous relationships within the stormwater community and the industry as you have lent your voices to the magazine, sharing with us and with each other your technical expertise, successes, frustrations, and insights on an array of surface water-quality issues. The dialog has been animated by the diversity of challenges you’re facing; readers in communities across the country are at widely varying stages of “managing stormwater.” Many of you work with programs that–spurred on by the Phase II stormwater rule–are just coming into their own, while others have a long-established history of success. In communities of every size and stage, though, stormwater managers, engineers, and designers are torn by competing priorities: Examining diverse funding options. Building a stormwater utility–or not. Deciding how best to comply with federal and state regulations. Finding and evaluating BMPs that will work under local conditions. Achieving water-quality standards that support the activities people want to carry out on local waterways. Maintaining flood control in rapidly developing communities that are becoming increasingly impervious, or, conversely, holding together and augmenting stormwater infrastructure in older communities. And winning understanding, acceptance, and cooperation from the public to whom you provide services.The common thread among all these concerns, which is reflected in your articles, editorials, letters, and questions, is the fact that people are hungry for knowledge, eager both to share hard-won victories and to learn from the successes and the occasional wrong turns of others. The dialog that you are carrying on is an important one, and we’re happy to announce an event that will allow it to continue face to face.

First of Its Kind: StormConNext summer, Stormwater‘s publisher, Forester Media , will produce StormCon, the first annual North American Surface Water Quality Conference & Exposition. Just as the magazine serves as a kind of virtual meeting place, the conference and exposition will be a real-time, hands-on opportunity for more of the same. The growing community of stormwater professionals deserves a highly focused forum to serve its needs exclusively: a gathering place to share ideas and information (the conference) and to examine and compare products (the exposition) all in one place. There are large, nationwide conferences and expositions that deal with stormwater management and surface water quality as one component among many, but too often stormwater tends to get lost in the mix–diluted, so to speak, by the many other important water-related issues that these conferences present. There have also been many excellent regional seminars and workshops dealing with various aspects of stormwater, from pollutant sources to TMDL development to meeting local permit requirements. StormCon will bring together, for the first time, the best and most relevant of these larger and smaller gatherings, specifically for our field and our industry. We plan to have a wide array of vendors showing their products, equipment, or services at the exposition, and a comprehensive slate of conference presentations in four tracks: monitoring, evaluation, and modeling; effectiveness of BMPs; public education and outreach; and financing the stormwater program. A call for papers will go out soon, and more information will be available on-line at www.stormcon.com. We’re grateful to you, our readers, for your open-armed acceptance of the magazine and for your many excellent suggestions and contributions, as well as to our advertisers for the support they’ve shown in our first year. Thank you all for making our first year a great success. The growing public awareness of the importance of stormwater management, the rapid growth in the industry, and the swell of support for the magazine all point toward greater things ahead. We welcome your continued contributions and suggestions for the magazine, and we hope to meet you in person at StormCon 2002.