City of Austin’s Rain Catcher Pilot Program
Overview
- Category: Governmental
- Organization Location: Austin, Texas; Travis County
- Activity: Financially incentivized rain gardens, cisterns, and rainwater-irrigated street trees on residential properties.
Background
The City of Austin’s Rain Catcher Pilot Program is a collaboration between Watershed Protection, Austin Water, and Development Services. The program installed 117 cisterns ranging from 500 gallons up to 6082 gallons on 40 different properties. This created a network of many small-scale features distributed across multiple locations on diverse properties rather than one centralized stormwater system. Not only did this give the project a participant-centered focus but also helped reduce runoff across the area by capturing much of the stormwater and allowing it to soak into the ground.