Review past actions

Reviewing your management actions regularly will help you identify any issues that need immediate action. It will also help you improve or revise your strategy to deal with activities that may pose a risk to your water supply.

You can conduct a simple check-in or a more thorough assessment of your management strategy.

Whoever is responsible for implementing a management action should be asked to review and report regularly on their progress. This kind of review will focus on the status or progress of management actions. Essentially, what you want to know is whether any regulatory policies you developed and put in place are being complied with, and/or whether any non-regulatory policies have been adopted. This may also include regular tracking to ensure that the management actions have not failed.

Example: If you have built a fence to keep cattle away from a drinking water well or have upgraded storage facilities for fuel or other chemicals, these installations should be inspected regularly to ensure they continue to provide protection.

Environmental monitoring

Source protection is based on preventing contamination, rather than restoring a source that has already been contaminated. Tracking the implementation of the management activities, rather than sampling and testing water, may give you a better idea about whether your source of water is being protected.

Environmental monitoring, which includes taking samples and testing water in your area, may only provide beneficial information about how effective a management action is in a small number of situations.

Example: Environmental monitoring may be appropriate if testing of the raw water in your drinking water system over time has shown that your current source is contaminated. For these situations, monitoring can establish a baseline, if unknown, and measure improvements in the water quality as a result of the management actions. This type of monitoring should be linked to a specific property(ies) or activity within the protection zone; otherwise it could be very difficult to show a connection between specific activities and concentrations of contaminants in the watershed.

If there is no contamination identified in the raw water, sampling raw water would not provide information about management activities.

Regulated drinking water system operators are required to test water regularly. Reviewing the data collected by the drinking water system’s operating authority may help you identify whether there are any changes in the quality of your drinking water source. You can request test results from the drinking water system owner/operating authority directly. In addition, information on previous years sample results are available in the open data drinking water datasets.

For municipalities

For ideas on how to track the implementation progress of management actions, see the table below.

Management tool Who implements What to look for How to find it
Land use planning (for example, official plans, zoning by-laws) Municipalities and planning authorities Changes to official plans or zoning by-laws to map and establish policies that recognize the drinking water source protection zones Contact the municipal planning department or clerk
Municipal by-laws and Building Code Municipalities and planning authorities Changes to municipal by-laws (for example, downspout disconnection by-laws, sewer use by-laws, household hazardous waste by-laws) and septic inspection programs Contact the municipal public works or building department, or clerk to identify any new by-laws and the results of compliance programs (for example, inspections, surveys, testing)
Education and outreach, incentive programs, best management practices Municipalities, conservation authorities, Local Services Boards, communities, social agencies, health unit, private owners New or revised programs created and delivered over time, number of people participating in the programs, impact of programs Contact the municipal clerk, conservation authority communications specialist, or any other local agencies that may be involved in environmental or public health initiatives

Update your management strategy and communicate progress

Continuous improvement is an important part of taking action to protect your drinking water source.

Update your management strategy as new information, such as technical data, new activities or updated land use planning documents, becomes available. You can use new information to update your inventory, reprioritize activities, and evaluate the appropriateness of your current management tools.

If local actions are not working, you may want to consider source protection planning under the Clean Water Act.

For municipalities and communities

Regular progress reporting identifies implementation challenges so that they can be addressed through changes to your management strategy. A report is a good tool for tracking and communicating your progress to the people who live in your municipality or community. Annual reports, like those required under the Clean Water Act, may be suitable to track progress and success of local programs/policies. Local source protection authority websites have examples of annual progress reports that you can refer to. You can change the frequency of the reports depending on your local needs and resources.

To create a report, begin by listing the management actions taken. Then, identify whether the action has been completed. For each of the actions, take the time to contact the person or organization responsible, and talk with them to identify:

  • whether the action has been implemented
  • whether any problems were identified
  • whether anything needs to change

If your municipality or community has multiple drinking water systems and you’ve identified several protection zones, you may decide to create a report for each zone, or one report for all. It is up to you to determine the best way to organize and present the information.

A simplified report can be formatted and graded like a school report card, listing the effectiveness of the management activities, progress, and areas for improvement. Conservation authorities use report cards to grade watershed health in order to target management actions to address specific issues.