The Calm Before the Storm (Season)

Episode Blog

INTRO: this week’s episode of CACM chat HOA life to hear exclusive insights and expert perspectives on community association management from leaders across California. This podcast is about the hard work that managers do to positively impact the lives of more than 15 million residents living in over 50,000 homeowner associations across California.

ALIA: Hello, hello, this is Alia Saouli. You’re SoCal Rep with CACM. I am sitting in for Tom this week and on this week’s episode, we have Shawn Hill with Stormwater Innovative Solutions or Swiss, like the hot cocoa, but with one “S”, not really like the hot cocoa. So, we are excited to have him on as a guest.

I know that last year we had, you know, quite a bit of rainfall and we’re going into storm season soon. So, I thought it would be appropriate. And I also actually got to see Shawn last week. Two weeks in a row, Sean, here you go.

SHAWN: Here we go.

ALIA: So, I got to see him last week at a disaster preparedness event we did for Coachella Valley, cause they’re in the peak of their monsoon season. So, Shawn, take it away. Will you do a quick little introduction, sir.

SHAWN: My name is Shawn Hill. I’m with Stormwater Innovative Solutions, Alia said, Swiss with one S. We do stormwater maintenance and compliance, which is somewhat new to a lot of you, but it’s something that’s going to pop up eventually on your properties. So, something to look at. I’ve been in the industry for 23 years. I’ve worked on the manufacturing side, the maintenance side, the design side. So pretty much anything in stormwater we’ve tackled.

Our company is a general contractor, so we’re lucky enough to dig holes and bury a lot of stuff for stormwater. So, a lot different than most of the companies out there. We kind of handle the back and the front of the stormwater industry.

ALIA: OK, 23 years. One fact I love about Shawn, have to share this. He has dogs and they’re all from the Little Rascals. Will you explain that for me, please?

SHAWN: Yeah, so we have we have three dogs right now. Spanky passed away, which he was the leader of the rascals. But we have Bucky, Alfalfa and Froggy. So, they’re all named after The Little Rascals. And if you guys know The Little Rascals, either from the 90s or from the 50s, either one, they are they are definitely our little gang. They run around and cause havoc. But they are our family when I’m a kid. So that’s our- That’s our family is our little dogs.

ALIA: I love it.

SHAWN: Yep.

ALIA: And you and your wife both travel a lot, right?

SHAWN: We do. My wife does sales. She handles the West Coast. So, she travels often. She handles major corporations. So, she’s often in different states. I travel all through California. We handle California. But I also consult for stormwater. So sometimes I do have to leave the state, you know, Washington, Texas.

I travel all over the place. I do consult internationally too for stormwater, which is somewhat of a challenge, not really language barrier, but when you’re speaking English in a country that speaks a different English, it’s funny.

ALIA: Every state has its different culture for sure. you and I are so Californians. Let’s be real. It would be an adjustment.

SHAWN: I’m a Southern Californian for sure.

ALIA: For sure. Well, you were born and raised here like I was, right?

SHAWN: Yeah, I was born in San Diego County, right in Oceanside. And I’ve pretty much been in North County, San Diego my whole life. I’ve lived in Northern California, up in the Eureka area for a couple of years, but I could not, not come back down here. This is the best place ever.

ALIA: So quick question. I feel very ignorant. So actually, let’s backtrack. I digress. Well, first question I have for you is how the heck did you get into this industry? Cause we all have such interesting stories. It’s not like you raise your hand in kindergarten. You’re like, “I’m going to be in the HOA world.”  And then my second question for you is my ignorance. I didn’t know a company like yours existed and I’ve had basins in my communities when I managed- used to be on the management side. So, I’d love to hear kind of how that plays in the HOA world. I always thought it was the city. So that’s two parts. So, I’ll let you take it away.

SHAWN: Okay. Perfect. Yeah. So, I started in this industry basically 23 years ago and one of my best friends’ dads had a company that was environmental. Not stormwater based, but we kept on seeing on plans stormwater that was on plan. So, we decided we wanted to get into that area of water, we’re general contractors. We eventually worked our way up in the industry to where we became a manufacturer of stormwater filters. So, on a lot of properties, you’ll find proprietary filters on them.

So, I helped design, work on, and then start maintenance companies over 23 years ago to work on stormwater. But that was like the kind of like the forefront. The industry was very new. Nobody knew what they were doing. Cities didn’t know what they were doing and they’re requesting things that would change yearly. It was very, very different than it is now towards a little bit more regiment.

Some of the older properties you can get away with not doing any stormwater work, but nowadays properties are 2000 and newer. You’re going to find some type of stormwater device on them. So, I started with this company, and we basically grew large enough to where we were sold off to a larger corporation and then eventually got sold off to QuickCreate, which is a, you know, if you ever go to Home Depot, the bags of concrete.

We got sold off to them, which they don’t just do concrete. They actually own businesses that do building products. So that business got sold to them eventually and for a large price tag. And I came into helping start this company, which is maintenance, just the maintenance and compliance with stormwater. So, for 20 years, I watched the company grow from starting in a basement with a Toyota truck, $60,000 a year to you know, selling it eventually, quick rate for, you know, too much money, let’s just say. But –

ALIA: taking care of taking care of the rascals for sure.

SHAWN: Yeah, exactly. So, it was it was it was a nice ride watching a company grow from, from nothing, having worked in a basement with just a mom and a pop, literally a mom and a pop to growing it so large and then starting on my own company and kind of doing this.

ALIA: And that is- Again, I’m going to my ignorance with this is stormwater, just stormwater. Or is there other water?

SHAWN: No, it’s just it’s so stormwater is specifically stormwater. What you would find kind of on the East Coast in some places you might have commingled sewage and stormwater. But this is just stormwater water that runs off the streets, off your roofs, off your landscape, water that was supposed to have gone into the ground because originally, that’s where water would have gone. There’s no building there. So, water would just soaked into the ground, whether it soaked in and flooded or actually soaked in. That’s what its job was.

So, anything that runs off of a property is what stormwater is, you know, comes from the rain. So, you’re not allowed to put, you know, you’re not washed cars and have that runoff into a storm drain. You’re not allowed to have a sprinkler system runoff too much into a storm drain. You’re not allowed to have the evaporated coolant from your AC run into a storm. All those are considered not NSWDs or non-stormwater discharges and they’re illegal.

ALIA: A lot of people don’t know unless you are in the building of commercial residential buildings, you probably wouldn’t see those plans, correct?

SHAWN: You never see those plans. And I have to see those plans work with the engineers before those plans were built. You know, lot of projects were worked on three to five years before they even broke ground, you know, and only take like a year to build, but you’re in the process for like six years of planning. Yeah.

ALIA: So, you know, going back to our HOA managers, all levels, by the way, not just community managers and GMs. What are things that they should look for? Because we had our disaster preparedness last week. What are some things that they should look for when they’re preparing or like, If they if they’re ignorant like me and they didn’t know that you’re supposed to service those areas like what should they be looking for?

What is it? Only a basin like is it would high rise and mid-rise be associated with that? Like can you kind of describe that for me?

SHAWN: So, stormwater is it’s so large and there’s so many different type of BMPs as we call them best management practices and best management practices could be anything from like sweeping your property or putting signage out to having a basin, a detention basin or a retention basin, or a proprietary filter on the site for stormwater. So, it can be a multitude of things and basins will touch on a little lightly there. Those are meant for properties that have a little bit more area to use as a store.

ALIA: an IE or a Coachella area.

SHAWN: Exactly, where it’s less dense because there is a little bit more square footage that you can use as a filtration base. So, the reason why they use those is they’re less expensive to build originally, but if you don’t maintain the stuff upstream, then they can become really expensive to maintain the base. So, it’s always a preventative maintenance to keep those going. But they’re all based off of like the size of your property. So, you see these basins that are really huge only because they have the square footage to put them out there. The high-rises will probably have something that’s more on site and is captured in a smaller area. You don’t see a lot of the stormwater.

You see them in the basins because you know, the detention retention basins because they’re obviously visible. But a lot of these other ones that are in, you know, these non-rural areas, I’ll call them, you know, they’re denser in population or basically confined in under an underground. So, you don’t see the filtration devices. So, managers don’t realize when they either take over properties or they have a new property that they assume.

You know, like the HOA has just started. They don’t get the paperwork from the developer that says, I put the stormwater system. It has to be maintained. So, we work on properties where they don’t know they have anything. And I’m talking about for 10 or 15 years.

ALIA: Out of curiosity, because we always go up by our budgets and our reserve study, right? What would your advice be if they’re not aware of it and now they’re getting some flooding because the rains have come in super heavy?

Obviously, you want to add that reserve line item if it’s not in there already. Could it be under a different name if it is on there and they just aren’t aware of it?

SHAWN: Well, thing is reserve studies oftentimes don’t really evaluate the full stormwater program. And it’s not the fault of the reserve studies. It’s just they’re unaware of the actual area of stormwater, what it really does. Sometimes they just look at a preventative maintenance program and they give you the most simple basic thing. They don’t realize there’s a bigger maintenance or bigger schedule to it.

So, reserve studies is one thing that I like to say, let’s know your property before we know anything. Whether it was built in 1979, 2000, 2020, they’re all different. Every property is individual. So, if we can evaluate those, we can tell you, you know, this is how your stormwater program works. And then you can talk to whoever’s doing your reserve studies and say, we do have a filtration device out there. It’s called a CDS or a detention basin. You know, we talked to an expert on this and he says, yeah, there’s a preventative maintenance annually, but every 20 years I might have to rip it up and put $100,000 into it, you know? And that’s a big shock to a lot of people.

But honestly, it’s not anybody’s fault because nobody’s aware. And that’s really what it is. It’s education out there is really not happening for stormwater.

ALIA: Well, you’re so niche too.

SHAWN: We are a niche, and we don’t, we don’t, we don’t actually. The reason why people find out about stormwater is one or two reasons. Either they’re having a flood so it’s something that happens on their property or they’re required. So, it’s actual requirement and they can get fined for not doing stormwater.

ALIA: Is that city specific?

SHAWN: City specific, also time. When was the property built, size of the property and who built it. all of them kind of come in at once. The state gets involved as well as they come up with something called a WQMP usually for your property is a water quality management plan. So, there’s a plan that you sign on to when you build these properties. But the HOA doesn’t usually know about them until the city comes back five, ten years later and be like “why haven’t you done maintenance?”. You know we’re going fine you. So, then we have to hop in really quickly usually because it’s we usually normally come in- I mean obviously you want to be prepared and we do maintenance and preventative maintenance is obviously majority of what we do.

But you normally come in when it’s messy. The city is involved, and they’re being fined. There’s a massive flood and you got to clean it up.

ALIA: Like, do you do the clean up too? Just out of curiosity?

SHAWN: Yeah, we do the full cleanup. So, we have hydro excavators, so big vacuum trucks usually that do the cleanup. we’re doing basins, we’re usually using, you know, like a loader or a dozer and we’re getting rid of like usually a couple hundred yards to thousands of yards of dirt basins because the basin is the filter. So, we do all that to all that cleanup, all the disposals. We dispose of the filter.

ALIA: How big is a filter?

SHAWN: Well, filters can range in size, the largest proprietary filter I built was about, I’m going to say about three quarters of an acre. But that was for a place called Madrona Marsh, which is the last marshland for Los Angeles.

So, we built a huge filter for that specifically, but I built one out in Whittier that was 128 feet by 68. I think it holds like a thousand yards of media.

ALIA: That’s how ignorant I am. I’m thinking it’s like this little box.

SHAWN: They can be. That’s the thing is like little. Example wise, you know, this is this is a stormwater filter. It’s a little tiny box, right? Little tiny thing. Capture waters.

It’s a stormwater filter, but it’s really used only in places that are you can’t use something that’s larger or it’s not feasible to put in a lot better filtration device. So, you have like a grate or something in your parking lot. You’re like, well, I got a filter that great. That’s the only thing on my property that conveys water, but I’m not going to put this huge detention basin in for like right. Because back in 79 when they developed it, that wasn’t the idea of stormwater, but we can retrofit it with a smaller filter, still filter out trash and oils and debris from our stormwater without this big crazy filter and having to, you know, do a bunch of construction.

ALIA: For flood prevention, what are two things that we can share with managers in our industry that they can prep for? Like at the end of the day, we can’t prep for natural disasters, or we can’t prep for- but we can kind of be preventative in some things, right? Like I can’t prep for an earthquake, but I can have an earthquake kit in my garage kind of concept. What are the two things that you can share with them? Because this is like speaking a different language to me.

SHAWN: It is to a lot of people, you know, and again, education is the biggest thing. So, we do offer lunch and learns, you know, for individual properties, you know, evaluate 100 percent so you get everybody’s aware. But it’s for this exact reason you don’t know. So, one of the things I would say would be look for water that’s standing for over 72 hours, and that’s not just a stormwater thing. That’s a vector control thing in California where we have mosquito breeding, and that is also a fineable offense.

So, I look for standing water. That usually tells me something’s not draining. You know what I mean? That’s the first thing I look for, whether it’s after a rain event or after you rain your sprinklers for a long time. You really want to look at that, because that’s really going to kind of tell you is there going to be a backup at some point.

ALIA: Is it irrigation or is it a bigger issue?

SHAWN: Exactly

ALIA: OK

SHAWN: We evaluate a property, we’ll walk a property and sometimes we’ll walk across grass and see it soaked, you know, really mushy. And we’ll note that in our notes is like, hey, get with, you know, your landscaping team, you know, they may be over irrigating this area because that’s part of stormwater to. You want to reduce the amount of water we use, you know, that’s just the nature really is. So, I understand everybody has like water grass, but like overwatering is the same thing as underwatering, you know.

So, look for those standing water after 72 hours. And that’s a typical time period for stormwater, 72 hours. That’s a big thing for us. And then the second thing I would say is, look for anything that’s basically a lot of debris standing. So, when I say debris, it could be sand and dirt, and it’s pooling in one area. It could be an opening on your curb or a graded opening. It could be in the basin.

You actually see where the inlet is and there’s a bunch of debris out there but look for those things. Those are just like precursors to you having to do a major maintenance on your property. So, I say, look for those two things and it’s really going to help out. The other things too are pumps. A lot of properties have pumps, and a lot of times people don’t realize they have to maintain them. You know, they have to inspect them and they, and they usually only last five to 10 years. You typically don’t find a manufacturer that has more than a five-year warranty on a pump.

So, there’s a lot of pumps are involved in stormwater too. And that’s going to get the water off the property. So also look for maintenance on your pumps and inspecting those annually. That’s like, that’s like something that people really don’t think about is we do have pumps. Okay. Then we put them in. People are very good at putting stuff in, never looking at them ever again, you know? So, look at your pumps because that’s definitely a part of your systems.

ALIA: Okay. What can you- with that? And, you don’t have to answer this one, but minus giving me names or cities or HOA names, is there an example you can give us that you recently worked on or that would be more of a common thing that people wouldn’t know?

SHAWN: Well, I mean, we’ve worked, we work on everything in stormwater from installations of products for cities and municipalities to, again, high rise, low rise and then inland empire, large developments that are gigantic. I mean, they’re just gigantic.

You know, what we see that people don’t really realize, like I said, is like the underground stuff. Almost every property since 2000 has some type of stormwater filtration or type of WQMP associated with that property. And we like to address that because that usually will be your first line of defense. So, like the properties that we looked at, we had one that’s only five years old. It’s a, it’s a midrise apartment with a commercial on the bottom.

So, they have three filtration devices connecting to these underground storage chains called cisterns. And those cisterns power the irrigation for the property. So, all the water that’s supposed to go onto the property basically stays. So, what happened is they didn’t maintain the filters that were connected to them that were on the fore end. Well, looking at the cost, they probably were somewhere around, and I can look at the numbers, somewhere around, I’d say four to $5,000 to do maintenance.

Preventative maintenance annually. They’re five years into this and now they’re having to do actual repairs now because they didn’t do maintenance. So, their property is now at about $80,000 what we’re looking at to just do the repairs.

ALIA: Oh no.

SHAWN: That’s not the continuing preventative maintenance. If they would have done the preventative maintenance, which is inspections, which is literally just opening up and making sure there’s nothing in it, filter, nothing’s in the filter or, then cleaning it one time a year, they could have prevented all of that repair work, all of the repair work.

 It’s just inspections, inspections, inspections. So preventative maintenance, inspections will kind of save the days. And that’s for any property.

ALIA: How do we know when it’s, and obviously this is property specific, this is city specific, right? But how do you know if it’s the city versus the HOA?

SHAWN: Well, typically anything that’s on your property, that’s HOA managed. And sometimes it gets very weird with HOA.

ALIA: I mean it’s easy when it’s a mid-rise or high-rise, right?

SHAWN: It is, everything encapsulated on that one.

ALIA: Well, when it’s like a large-scale community, how do you know?

SHAWN: It’s different and it’s again, everything site specific or basically it’s per development. So sometimes you’re responsible for your storm drain lines that run through your property. And that’s fairly rare, but sometimes they require you to take care of that infrastructure because you built it though. So that’s a little bit odd, but anything that runs off of your property boundary lines, I would say, like in your development is the cities. So that’s the city’s problem. Anything that happens on your property or inside your boundary lines is yours.

 And I’ll say excluding some catch basins or where the water enters, because again, it gets a little bit. I wouldn’t say dicey, but it gets a little bit different for each HOA just based on what the municipality wanted you to manage at the time and what they thought the process should be, because every engineer every city manager, every state manager is different.

So as soon as you combine multiple different ones, they have a different idea for every problem. That’s why it’s very site specific. So, when we go evaluate them, we look at a couple of different things. We look at the state water board might have your stormwater plan on it. And that’s the first thing.

ALIA: Oh, okay

SHAWN: So, it’s public.

ALIA: Is there a website they can look at?

SHAWN: They can look at Smarts for California, which is if you just Google Smarts California Water Board, it’s our state water board.

We’d have to go into like a couple hours on me to tell you how to kind of use it, but it’s a public user forum so you can go on there and try to find your property. So that’s the first thing I do because that puts me right in line with what you should be doing legally. And that’s what we recommend is always what you should be doing legally first. And then if there’s add-ons to it, you know, maybe we do more maintenance or we find cleaning your catch basins is again, going to help you with, with your funding for repairs on your basin, we’re going to find the best way to make your property and stormwater work for you.

And sometimes it’s a little bit of maintenance here, so you don’t have to do the heavier maintenance later.

ALIA:  I don’t know if this is like taboo that I’m asking this. Again, this is the ignorance. I feel like every time we talk, I learn something new. So, we’re going to use the desert as an example. Last fall and last winter, we had more rain than we normally do in Southern California. Maybe this is my ignorance is it It rarely rains out here. Let’s be real. So could we have prevented- there was so much rain and so much flooding. Could we have prevented that?

SHAWN: I’d say yes and no. It depends again. It depends on the property. You know,

ALIA: Obviously not the rain, but the flood part.

SHAWN: the flood part.  That depends on your property, really. I mean, how is this set up? How is it located? You know, roadways and even on everybody’s property aren’t designed for cars. They’re actually designed as flood control channels.

So, they’re designed to move water away from properties. So how was your property designed? Was it designed for what certain rainfall we’d have to look at? know, honestly, it comes back to how was that property engineered originally when the development happened? It’s usually a property’s flood. You know, sometimes there’s some great ideas that are put in there in the past that weren’t great for getting water away but are horrible for filtering stormwater. So, the opposite way of looking at it now is we like to filter the stormwater and keep it on property as much as possible when 50 years ago, it’s just get it away as fast as possible.

So, there’s two different trains of thought for stormwater. So how is your property kind of developed? We can look at that, that, you know, could be something as simple as you have some dry well filters and a basin that’s plugged up. And that’s why you guys flooded or maybe our pumps weren’t working. We didn’t know we had pumps, or it could just be this the way the drainage is designed on the property. You know, the catch basins weren’t big enough to hold the volume of water that comes through.

ALIA: What’s the worst one you’ve seen

SHAWN: The worst property I’ve seen.

ALIA: The worst, like, I guess, stormwater issue where you came to do cleanup.

SHAWN: So, like the come to do cleanup parts, always the one where it’s always nasty. You know, it’s truthfully always nasty. I always talk about some of my earlier days when we were asked, you know, to design filters for municipalities. And one of my crazier events is when we went to the Long Beach Channel.

And we were there with a bunch of manufacturers and all of our competitors there. We’re doing a bid walk. And one of questions asked is like, what are we trying to filter? What’s the largest thing you want to filter out here? Well, they’re like last year was a VW bus, you know? So, stormwater doesn’t mean it’s small. It doesn’t mean it’s dirt or like floatables. It’s like everything. So, it’s a, it’s a multifaceted industry to where you think it’s just like, one little, small area that’s taken care of, but everybody takes care of it. Everybody takes care of it in a different way. And that really hit home to me just being like, we’re trying to filter out a bus. Like I see all my trash on my street and that’s why I think we’re trying to filter. I didn’t realize it was so large, you know?

ALIA: Wow

SHAWN: And if you even look at our oceans, like you can obviously Google this because it’s- go look up the floating islands of plastic. So, our water currents basically circulate water to certain areas three areas, I do believe. And basically, all of our plastic and all of them are the majority of our plastics float to this one area. And you can hop off a boat right off these floating islands of plastic. So that was, that’s also something that hit home for me, but that was more going to trade shows.

ALIA: This is your public service announcement. If you do not recycle, you need to start now.

SHAWN: You need to start now, you know.

ALIA: If you live in Irvine, they do it for you. If you live anywhere else in the city of California, your public service announcement, recycle time.

SHAWN: Recycled time. It’s also- it was said, and I don’t know if it’s true, but it was also said that every time it rains in Southern California, one inch that’s equal to the Exxon Valdez spill. Why is that? Because how many millions of cars do, we have dripping one drop of oil? And then that rains and goes out of drain. That goes to a river, goes to a creek, goes to an ocean. So, what we do is we’re always polluting. You know, that’s like the…my big thing I tell people to take away from stormwater is like only rain down the drain.

You know, like everything’s a pollutant to us as humans. We typically just create pollutants and that’s what we do. If you stop it from happening, that will protect our generations that are coming up. You know, we don’t have as much heavy metals in our fish, and you know, we won’t have floating trash and we won’t have the stuff that’s really contaminating our environment really just taken kind of care of at home. You know, and we’re fortunate, you know, here to be in California where we can do that. But it’s, you know, we’re basically fighting the one. You know we don’t pollute that much because we are very, very, very well house kept state. You know, our communities are really well kept, but you’ll find some of these other countries that don’t have the wealth. You know, the poorer countries are going to having more polluting. So, we’re really trying to solve, you know, part of a pollution problem that really is not created by us.

But we’re trying to like to make that little inch you know, step in the right direction with stormwater every, every place that we go.

ALIA: So, my mom teaches my niece and nephews how to recycle and I was with them last week and this is totally kind of on the, on the topic, but kind of not. And he’s like, Aunt Nan, I need some cash. We got to go recycle. And I’m like, I love that he, I’m like, that’s not- this is not the purpose of that. Like we need to recycle to save the environment. I had like a whole conversation with him. He’s like, I just need cash. I’m like, okay, how am I going to weasel with a six-year-old? We’ll get there. We’ll get there.

SHAWN: Make a machine that captures all that trash, you know what I mean?

ALIA: Take the machine you just showed me and take it to his house.

SHAWN: Yeah, exactly. I mean, our company does lot of different things too. So, I mean, we do education. Our biggest thing is education, you know, even if it’s a school. So, I work with manufacturers, and I’ll try to work with manufacturers, but we can put in smaller filters like the one I showed you, like on a school property even. But we try to educate even kids going forward, you know, so they see what stormwater really looks like, but they see what there’s honestly, there’s a stormwater program in every city and there’s, you know, there was a lot of engineers-

ALIA: Are they all different or are they all pretty similar?

SHAWN: So, it all starts from in 1972, the Clean Water Act came out. And that was because there was a fire that happened in 1969 on a river in Ohio. And the fire happened, and it couldn’t be put out. And it was all from industrial waste running into our streams. So that’s where the Clean Water Act came out with. Well, that eventually came down to every state and every state has their own regulations, their own NPDES, so National Pluton Discharge Elimination System.

So, they’re eliminating the pollutants. Each state is different. Our state is a little heavier than everybody else’s just because we’re at the forefront. Not saying that we care more. It costs money to care more. And we make a lot of money in California as far as per capita. So, we’re able to address the situation a little bit better here, but we’re at the forefront usually. And we usually help other states with their programs for storm.

So, it’s a good thing for us because we like to educate the kids because this is something that not only affects their lives, but they can be involved in. know, like if you want to be an engineer, a lot of the people I work with are engineers, environmental engineers. They work for the city or the state. They have police badges, just like a sheriff. They’ll show up to my job sites with a police badge. And if you are not complying, they can put you in cuffs. Just like, you know, Humane Society has cuffs too, you know.

But it’s the same thing as if you’re doing something wrong, I work with, they’ll, they’ll take you away for it, you know, but it’s teaching these kids what’s the right way to do things and education of what they’re pulling out. So, when we put in like a filter, they can look at the stuff that’s going into the filter and see that their classmates may be thrown trash away, you know, like really hits home for them that, we are the cause, you know, so.

ALIA:  What do you think is the overarching like number one thing that you want managers to remember. Because, you know, I always thought and going backwards, but I always thought it was like the plumber or the city or landscape in the basin or, you know, backflow, you know, upkeep for a high rise. Like, so that’s where my head always went. Now, there’s not always been a ton of rain where we grow up. I was going to say me, but we.

So, it’s like, I don’t think we’ve ever had to get to a point where this was a conversation until last year when I was talking to some of our managers in the desert in Ventura and they’re like struggle busing because of all the flooding. So, what’s the one thing you want them to walk away with?

SHAWN: Well, know your property. I want you to know your property. The biggest thing is, like you said, is I didn’t know what I had on it when I had it on. Address the situation early get into a reserve study and make sure you have a budget that’s on hand for your property. Education is the biggest thing. Get out there and we offer the service to come out there, doing lunch and learns. Like I said, we’ll visit properties for free and let you know what you have. And just for you to have that on a file to show a stormwater map of like catch basins or what possibly could happen. And maybe we have a budget for it for the future.

It’s just to have it on your property. It doesn’t mean you have to do it; you know I mean? But it’s something to approach your boards with, saying this is possibly a problem for the future.

ALIA: If they don’t have access to their plans…

SHAWN: They can ask. The first thing is I will look for them. So, we’ll go on the State Water Board, or I’ll go on the State Water Board. We’ll look at their property. If there’s something out there that’s awesome, we can present it to them. I highlight it. What it calls out for them to do is maintenance, preventative maintenance.  Then there’s usually our suggestion because sometimes the preventative maintenance they suggest is like an inspection. Well, that just means I look at it and what’s the point of me just looking at it. So, I charge you and then charge you to go clean it too. You know, let’s just clean it once a year. So, I try to tell them like this is the best, most appropriate cost for you and the type of service that you should have for your property. If we can’t find a WQMP and you don’t have one, it’s not a big deal. Properties usually before 2000 don’t have them.

If you want to find out if you do have them, then we just go contact the city. And that’s the first thing we do is to say, hey, you know we’re looking for a WQMP for this property, this HOA, this track number, whatever it was called originally. I’ll try to find what that was. You as HOA can ask for, but I can’t from the city. I can find the public stuff that’s available, but I can’t ask for your, cause it’s an actual legal contract with, with the city when you sign up for your WQMP.

So, I technically unless the state wasn’t involved, I can’t see it. So, we’ll ask. We’ll just have you ask the city if you want to. Sometimes that may trigger something else where the new hat are on required maintenance and they’ll come inspect you annually. But we don’t find that often. Usually, the city is happy to know that you’re trying to do your due diligence, you know, make your property safe. So, we’ll work and try to find anything we can for your property. But that’s pretty much our job, educating you. And that includes finding your WQMP.

Finding anything that has to do with your property that involves stormwater so you are educated, and you can make those judgments for the future, you know.

ALIA: What’s the busiest area for you like in the state of California? Is there like a general area you find yourself always at?

SHAWN: Well, Southern California is extremely busy just because inherently there’s a lot more that has been developed down here. So, you know, the Bay Area and areas like that, you’ll find like more rural, some rural stuff out there.

But because we’ve developed so fast in Southern California, it is a large area. And also, you’ll find a lot of municipalities have done a lot more work down here. So, for us, again, we cover industrial, commercial, residential, which includes municipalities. So, we do public works contracts. Those are huge. I mean, you’re talking about millions of dollars annually for a city, millions and millions of dollars annually in stormwater.

And just maintenance. It’s not even installing. So, it’s just because they themselves don’t have the funding to hire crews to do the work that we can do in the same amount of time. So, it’s less expensive to hire us to do the work. Plus, we’re certified in like confined space so we can go underground. We can do a lot of stuff that they don’t do legally for liability. But yes, I got a point is that.

Honestly, how’s the most stuff? But I’ve traveled all around the country and each state’s a little bit different. If I went up to Washington, I would say Washington is probably, you know, one of the busiest states that I’ve been in. Like every property has a – I mean every property. I don’t care if you’re the port of Washington, you have like there’s something up there. It’s crazy.

ALIA: Well, they rain. I mean, it rains so much up there, too, right? Does it factor in for snow, too.

SHAWN: No, it doesn’t factor in for snow because snow melt isn’t technically stormwater. Okay. You know, so although it affects stormwater, because the runoff, you know, goes through it.

ALIA: That’s I was thinking of.

SHAWN: Yeah. But it usually is not a requirement because you can’t, yeah, you can’t plan for the amount of snow melt. A lot of properties have developed off a hundred-year rain event, which is pretty significant, but we’re finding that’s getting more and more intense every time we talk about it. So, it gets pretty crazy.

ALIA: Outside of, you know, routine maintenance and knowing your property and plans and understanding the way it’s laid out. Is there any last-minute tips for H.O.A. managers that you want to share?

SHAWN: You know what? think the only thing I have to share with H.O.A. managers is I know it’s difficult trying to see these different industries. You know, stormwater really isn’t in the eyes of an H.O.A. right now because a lot of properties don’t have the need for a stormwater maintenance provider. And that’s- the only thing I have to say is taking the takeaway is you may not need us, you may not know us, but we’re there for you. If we evaluate your stuff, you know, it’s there because we’re trying to give you the education.

So, the only thing I try to say to take away from this is again, just education, education, education. Only rain down the drain is my own other thing is, you know. Everything is considered a pollutant except for rain. So only rain down the drain, you know, that’s my, the only other thing I have for you to take away from this one.

ALIA:  I appreciate your time. I know you’re always on the road like I am. So, I appreciate your time and partnering, you know, last week’s natural disaster education preparedness panel brunch was great. So was good to see you and your time here today. So where can people find you?

SHAWN: So basically, you can find us at info at SwisCorp.com. That’s I-N-F-O at SWISCORP.com. You can also give us a call, 760-688-4910. I’m sure you guys can look us up in the CACM website. So, we’re out there to help you really educate you guys. We don’t really have to fight a service here property, but we really want to help you know what you have on.

ALIA: Absolutely. And you know, the coolest thing is as an industry, we’re supposed to know so much, like a little bit about everything. So, wearing all those different hats and exchanging them all day long, we’ve talked about that on the podcast before in a previous episode. But I think things like this, it’s like planting the seed, having it in my pocket in the day that there’s a flood, I know who to call, right?

So, I think that’s my thought process is we’re coming into storm season. How are you preparing? And if you feel like your area needs disaster preparedness with the city to come speak, and that’s something you think your area needs, please reach out to me as well because I’m always here to educate, build community, and make sure that we’re bringing the resources to you guys to make your jobs easier. So, thank you again, Shawn. It was good to see you. Tell the wife and the rascals I said hello.

SHAWN: I will. I will. You have a great day. It’s a little bit cooler now, so we’re not going to suffer so much.

ALIA: I know. It’s, we’re getting into that cooler fall season. Did you get your pumpkin spice latte yet?

SHAWN: That sounds like a lot of sugar for me. You want me to like bounce like a squirrel all over the place? Sugar and me, that would be like another adventure for people.

ALIA: It was good to see you, Shawn. I’ll see you soon.

SHAWN: It’s good to see you too. You have a great one.

ALIA: You too. Bye.

OUTRO: And that concludes this week’s episode of CACM Chat HOA Life. Have questions you want answered? Send them to podcast@cacm.org and we’ll address them in an upcoming episode. Make sure to regularly check out our website at cacm.org and don’t forget to join our rapidly expanding social media community. Just follow @CACMchat on LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, and X. Thanks for joining me.