Three Powerful Tools for Tracking Water Infrastructure Investments
Following historic investments in the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA) to improve drinking water infrastructure, it’s crucial that we’re to able track the flow of funding in an accurate and timely fashion. Knowing where money has been invested and where it is expected to go in the future allows us to hold decision makers accountable, ensure funds are being used to meet the greatest needs, and support underserved communities—all while making the most of the incredible opportunity we have to maximize these investments for a more sustainable future.
At EPIC, much of my work has focussed on analyzing State Revolving Funds (SRFs), including, most recently, the EPIC SRF Dashboard. Related efforts include using service area boundaries to compare funding with health-based violations and CEJST disadvantaged status in Texas and collaborating on ways to further enhance New Jersey’s SRF program. In each of these projects, EPIC places an emphasis on evaluating how equitably and effectively these funds are being utilized. Thankfully, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Office of Research and Development has just released a pair of powerful tools — the State Revolving Fund Public Dashboard and State Revolving Funds Public Portal — to help us do exactly that, complementing the parallel work EPIC’s done.
Below, I’ll break down when to use which tool to create a more complete picture of how funds for drinking water infrastructure are being allocated, and who stands to benefit.
Three Powerful Tools for Tracking Water Infrastructure Investments
While EPA’s new tools and EPIC’s SRF Dashboard both look to answer questions about the flow of drinking water infrastructure funding, each has their own scope and purpose(s). You can see the specific breakdowns in more detail below.
The EPA SRF Public Dashboard is for analyzing state-level funding stats and looking at more than 20 years of summarized data for both Drinking Water and Clean Water projects.
The EPA SRF Public Portal is for project-level funding that only considers official agreements - it answers where the money actually went or is currently going for both Drinking Water and Clean Water projects, but only goes back to 2021. Additional reports include granular funding source details as well.
The EPIC SRF Dashboard looks at who is applying for funds and where funding is expected to go before the agreements are formalized, offering an opportunity to conduct analysis before the funds have been officially allocated, but only for Drinking Water projects.
Summary of SRF Tool Features
| Resource | Data Granularity | Temporal Coverage | Scope | Use Case |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| EPA SRF Public Dashboard | State | 2000-2022 with years added annually | All Drinking Water and Clean Water SRF assistance agreements | To see state funding over time with interactive filters for DACs, system size, and more. |
| EPA SRF Public Portal | Project / Borrower | 2021-2022, with years added annually | All Drinking Water and Clean Water SRF assistance agreements | To see breakdowns of different funding categories by states as well as a comprehensive list of projects funded in years past after the agreements have been made |
| EPIC SRF Dashboard | Project / Borrower | 2022, with more years added in the coming months, then projects added as states release their annual Intended Use Plans in near real-time | All* Drinking Water projects that applied and those that are designated to receive funding | To see a comprehensive* list of applicants and projects prioritized for funding in recent and current funding cycles. |
*The EPIC dashboard aims to be as comprehensive and all-inclusive as possible, but is limited by the availability of data released. Coverage varies on a state-by-state basis.
With this high-level overview in mind, let’s take a closer look at each tool.
EPA SRF Public Dashboard: Best for high-level questions about funding and project trends over the last 20 years
The EPA SRF Public Dashboard is an interactive set of data visualizations that allow the user to explore state-level summarized funding data for all finalized assistance agreements dating back to 2000 for both Drinking Water and Clean Water projects.
The tool’s interactive filters allow for looking at specific states/regions, years, and to filter assistance by whether it went to state-defined disadvantaged communities (DACs) and water systems of varying sizes. In only a few clicks, we can narrow down the universe of data to a particular region and time period of interest and explore several summary statistics. Then, each pane of the dashboard allows for exporting the generated plots as images or the underlying aggregate data as an excel spreadsheet.
Let’s look at an example. Say we’re interested in evaluating the assistance provided in Texas since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic. All we need to do is select “Texas” — and the relevant years — in the dropdown menus and the dashboard filters our results:
The Dashboard enables customized views using robust filters.
Immediately, we glean some valuable insights about projects and funding in Texas. For instance, in the last three years, Texas has signed 89 assistance agreements for a total of $934M with about a third of those projects and $126M impacting state-defined DACs. The user can then break down these projects by the system’s size, noting that systems serving between 500 and 3,000 residents have received the most projects at 25, whereas systems serving more than 100,000 residents have received half as many since 2020.
The tool also shows these high-level stats over time, shown below:
Stats are displayed at a high level over an extended timeline.
EPA SRF Public Portal: Best for finalized project-level data beginning in 2021
The EPA SRF Public Portal is a more detailed look at project-level data, starting with 2022, with a distinct tool for drinking water projects and clean water projects. There is also a third tool that combines the two.
Within each portal, there are three separate subsets of data:
The State/National Report includes a wide variety of categories of funding and other financial data aggregated annually. For instance, these reports break down federal grants, state contributions, set asides, assistance terms, and fund information by year and a number of features seen in the breakout reports. This is best used when wanting to analyze the distribution of how federal and state funding have impacted a specific state or region with an emphasis on filtering the data by the category of funding over time.
The State/National Report Breakouts section offers several variables by which projects can be grouped to see aggregate data about funding based on those filters. This allows the user to conduct a similar analysis as the State/National report, but grouped by the size of populations impacted, disadvantaged status, or other features.
The Assistance Agreement Report includes the underlying and cleaned project-level data in a purely tabular format. This table includes a wide variety of variables, including many of those EPIC includes in our own SRF Dashboard. The Assistance Agreement Report can also be searched and filtered by a number of loan and borrower characteristics such as whether the borrower meets the state’s definition of Disadvantaged community, population size, and project categories.
Arkansas-specific projects are displayed for the year 2022.
In the screenshot above, for instance, we can examine all of the projects provided assistance in Arkansas in 2022 with a fine detail of granularity. This database includes details about the borrower, the city affected, the agreement and financing details, as well as a number of other categorical indicators.
EPIC’s SRF Dashboard: Best for real-time project-level data beginning in 2022
Prior to the release of the EPA tools, EPIC developed and released its own SRF Dashboard for tracking project funding, but our tool differs from the EPA tools in a number of ways relating to both timing and content.
In relation to timing, while the EPA’s tools look at historic data about assistance agreements that were approved and awarded, our dashboard considers where states plan to spend funds before the grants and loans have actually been finalized.
In relation to content, at this time, EPIC’s SRF Dashboard also only considers drinking water projects, while the EPA’s tools include clean water projects as well. Also, the EPA tools present information only on projects that were funded. EPIC’s SRF Dashboard, in contrast, presents information about projects for which SRF assistance was sought, but which are not expected to receive assistance in the funding cycle examined, as well as information about projects expected to receive funding.
Using states’ annual Intended Use Plans (IUPs), EPIC’s SRF Dashboard tracks which water systems are applying for grants or loans as well as which projects are designated as receiving funds. This distinction allows us to more quickly analyze how states plan to allocate the influx of federal dollars for drinking water infrastructure, and can empower advocates, residents, and community-based organization (CBOs) in states to respond in public comment periods or other communications on the use of these funds in near real-time. In addition to presenting data on which projects are expected to receive funding, EPIC’s dashboard also links state IUPs and provides further information tailored to each state to help users interpret and understand key information in the IUPs.
We are currently in the process of adding historic data from the last two years, but the dashboard will soon provide real-time updates as states release their annual IUPs. These updates will empower advocates and analysts with crucial information in a more accessible and user-friendly format than ever before.
Aggregated stats in EPIC’s State Revolving Funds Dashboard.
In this example, the EPIC SRF Dashboard shows a number of aggregate statistics about projects in Alabama, including those specifically designated for Lead and Emerging Contaminants and the funds going to state-defined DACs.
Users can also view the cleaned project-level data in the application and view data visualizations highlighting how funding has been allocated in a given state.
Users can also download cleaned data—as well as a data dictionary detailing how we transformed the state’s documents—into a standardized table.
Empowering Advocacy with Data-Driven Solutions
The EPA’s new SRF Public Dashboard and Portal are powerful new tools to track where funds are flowing to improve water infrastructure across the country — and each of these tools will only become more valuable as IIJA funding continues to be allocated. Taken in tandem with the EPIC SRF Dashboard, we’re encouraged by the potential for all kinds of new analysis and advocacy in this space — and we hope those efforts ultimately ensure that these historic funds get spent equitably and effectively.