When Kathy Roecker joined the City of Kyle, Texas, the city had just been brought into the TCEQ MS4 program the year prior. There was no dedicated coordinator before her or stormwater team of any kind. Just Kathy, a brand-new position, and a deadline. She leaned on her years as a TCEQ investigator, filed that first report, and got to work building the program from the ground up.
For the next eight years, she ran the program as a team of one. She’d drive around the Kyle, spot a construction site tracking sediment into the street, pull in, and tell the contractor what needed to be fixed. Then she’d swing back a few days later to make sure it was completed.
The work was happening. Keeping up with the paperwork was another matter.
“The reality was I was doing a lot of inspections, but they were not documented,” she said. “And if it’s not documented, you didn’t do it.” On top of that, Kyle was growing fast. From around 28,000 residents when she started to more than 65,000 today.
Managing a fast-growing city on paper checklists
Before coming to Kyle, Kathy spent years inspecting industrial facilities and MS4s for TCEQ. That experience helped her shape how the city would meet its new stormwater obligations.
In her first few years, she submitted multiple Notices of Change to bring the program in line with what was feasible for a small but fast-growing city and get them formally on record with the state.
For day-to-day work, though, the tools still made things harder than they needed to be. The city had an enterprise system that other departments used, but running stormwater inspections through it took longer than using paper. Kathy eventually went back to printed checklists. When she needed a notice of violation, she opened a blank Word document and typed it from scratch.
With her TCEQ background, she knew what the program needed. The problem was time and documentation. “It limited the number of inspections I was doing,” she said. And even when she did get out to sites, many of those inspections never made it into the record. Come annual report time, she couldn’t take credit for a lot of her work.
As Kyle added more people, subdivisions, and commercial projects, the inspection workload kept growing too. Kathy kept things moving as the city continued to grow, but sustaining that pace on paper wasn’t realistic forever.
Adding stormwater software and a second inspector
At the start of 2024, Kathy got her first team member: Stormwater Inspector Brycen Arnold. By then, Kyle had also adopted dedicated stormwater software from SwiftComply (originally CloudCompli), which was already changing how inspections were done.
Brycen came from a state regulatory agency where inspections meant juggling spreadsheets and using lots of paper for documentation purposes. Stepping into Kyle’s program with dedicated stormwater software felt different. “The end user experience as the inspector really can’t be beat,” he said. Within a few months, he’d taken the lead on construction inspections while Kathy focused more on facilities, ponds, and overall program management.
The day-to-day workflow shifted. Instead of paper checklists, manual data entry, and end-of-day emails, Brycen could pull up a site on his phone, see prior notices of violations, complete the inspection on-site, and email the report before he left. “I have it emailed at the end of the inspection. The turnaround time is really quick,” he said. “I couldn’t imagine having to do the volume of inspections that are required in our permit on paper.”
Doubling inspections without doubling the workload
For Kathy, the impact showed up in capacity. “The software has allowed us to do all of those inspections in a more expeditious manner,” she said. “We’re in the process of doubling the number of inspections we’re currently doing because the software allows us that ease of use.”
Between them, they now cover construction sites, city facilities, detention ponds, and a growing share of illicit discharge investigations as new permit requirements take effect.
The data behind that work is easier to surface too. They can track when inspection reports and notices are opened. ‘I’ve caught someone with that once,’ Brycen said. They also use the built-in analytics to answer questions from management with end-of-business-day turnaround.
With Kyle’s population projected to reach 77,000 by 2030, having inspections and documentation in one place is what keeps a two-person team ahead of a city that isn’t slowing down.
