The project adopts Washington D.C.'s stormwater retention credits (SRC) to show how SRC’s can protect water quality and transfer funding from developed areas to rural communities. With Stillwater, Minnesota, as our study area, we show how SRCs can create a positive cash flow to property owners to plant 100-foot buffer strips, protecting the watershed while paying farmers to take land out of production. We show how green infrastructure offers an economically viable, politically equitable, and environmental responsible way of dealing with declining water quality and aging infrastructure.