The fee will be in place for 30 years, financing a $251 million drainage improvement program.
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They’ll never get rid of it, or keep it from growing.
Just like we’re still paying a nickle a month on our phone bill that financed the Spanish American war.
As some one who had to deal with this “issue” twice in my career, once as the Public Works Director for a city and again as the Public Works Director for a county, I can tell you my experience and perspective.
First, prior to enacting these ordinances and fees, the city and county already had maintenance crews clean the system and make repairs where needed, and those works tasks were budgeted out of their regular fund revenues. What these new ordinances do is monetize the work so that it has it’s own revenue source.
Second, I always set my fees as low as possible and they were based on average impervious area of the average residential lot. In the case of the city the average lot was 10,000 square feet and had 3,000sf of impervious surface (house, sidewalks around the house not the ones on the street, patios and driveways). This is called the “Equivalent Residential Unit” or ERU charge. I set my fee at $2.75 per month for all residential property (10,000sf/ERU). Commercial and Industrial were charged on the size of their lot divided by 10,000sf so that if the lot size was 40,000sf they were charged $2.75 X 4 or $11/month. This gave them a built in offset for building their own stormwater systems separate of the city system regardless if they had almost 100% impervious site coverage they were only charged for 12,000sf. At the county I worked for they did just the opposite in that they charged for every 3,000sf of impervious and that required the county to survey each individual lot and determine the fee and it did not allow any credit for stormwater site improvements.
Third, at the county when I came on board they were charging $5/ERU (3,000sf/ERU) but the county wasn’t doing anything for money for the two years prior. No additional maintenance improvements, just collecting a boat load of money. I was able to convince the powers that be to reduce that fee to $4/eru for 6 years which by then we would have drawn down the money in the bank and then it would require an increase to $4.75 for the foreseeable future to sustain the program . We used that money to purchase equipment and hire 2 staff that would only work on cleaning and repairing the system.
Fourth, once the county residents saw we were committed to actually doing things with the money by responding to complaints and fixing these issues the community accepted the program without much complaint, but we still had few folks that were not happy about it.
Fifth, before anyone replies that people should not be happy about, let me say that I was never thrilled about it either but I was not in the position to fight the Dept. of Ecology, my elected officials, or the EPA.