In 2006, the stormwater management utility in Northern Kentucky (NKY), Sanitation District No. 1 (SD1), initiated a comprehensive stream monitoring program that included biological, habitat, water quality, and geomorphological components with goals of better understanding baseline stream conditions and how streams might respond to modernized, science-based management decisions regarding stormwater runoff. The first decade of monitoring identified several key NKY stream characteristics, such as degraded biology, habitat loss, and accelerated erosion rates, and how they responded to development and the associated hydrologic changes. This led SD1, in October 2015, to require new developments to comply with a stormwater discharge rate aimed at limiting excess downstream impacts. Based on trends observed at an array of regional monitoring sites, this discharge rate is both geomorphically and biologically relevant – flows that mobilized the streambed not only contributed to chronic channel downcutting, degradation, and enlargement, but also created an unnatural disturbance frequency for benthic macroinvertebrates. The new “Qcritical criteria” limited the discharge of the 2-year design storm to not exceed the regional critical discharge for streambed erosion. Since the adoption of Qcritical criteria in 2015, several hundred new development sites have been permitted to incorporate stormwater control designs with the updated criteria. During this time SD1 has continued its monitoring across its 3-county service area, creating a dataset with nearly 20 years of macroinvertebrate data. Prior to the implementation of the Qcritical criteria, the Kentucky Macroinvertebrate Bioassessment Index (MBI) and total impervious area in the sampling site’s watershed (%Imp) had a strong negative relationship. Since the adoption of the Qcritical criteria, the coefficient between MBI and %Imp has become sequentially less negative compared to prior years. This presentation will attempt to unpack whether the positive trend in macroinvertebrates can be reasonably attributable, at least in part, to the Qcritical criteria.