A Fair Share From the Federal Government
Monday, February 28, 2011
By Janice Kaspersen
A bill signed in January requires the federal government to start paying state and local stormwater fees, something it has not previously done. This is a huge step forward for local stormwater programs, which have struggled with funding for decades.
Paying for stormwater management in the US has been difficult at best, as you know if you’ve tried to make ends meet in your own municipal stormwater program. In a Stormwater article back in 2001, Brant Keller, the director of public works and utilities in Griffin, GA, identified the basic problem with getting the public to pay for water quality: “You can’t even see it!” Flooding people could understand, but water-quality issues, especially back then, were a much more nebulous concept. Yet as programs became more concerned with water quality and not just with flood control, they became far more expensive to run. When Phase II of the National Pollutant Discharge Elimination System came online in 2003, the requirements—for public education, for illicit discharge detection, and especially for controlling construction-site and post-construction runoff—became overwhelming for many Phase II cities, some of which were starting their programs practically from scratch.
Keller’s 2001 article identified various funding sources available to local programs. Many of them were temporary, or subject to changing economic and political conditions, even though the programs’ responsibilities didn’t lessen as the money did. These funding sources included a share of the general tax fund as well as options like stormwater revenue bonds, which might be issued to pay for building new infrastructure; a special purpose local option sales tax, which is collected for a given period of time and intended to fund specific projects; impact fees charged to developers; and various types of grants. But the biggest funding source by far, for the cities that had one, was the stormwater utility: a dependable source of revenue and an equitable one, because the properties that pay are the ones who put the greatest burden on the system.
That’s precisely why the longstanding federal property exemption was unfair. It allowed facilities—including very large ones, like military bases, prisons, and large office complexes—that contributed to the overall runoff management problem to avoid paying their share for dealing with it.
What has changed in the 10 years since Keller’s article was published? The number of utilities, for one thing. Early stormwater utilities often faced legal obstacles—numerous lawsuits charged that the user fee was not a fee at all but in fact an illegal tax—but today they’re widely accepted. From only a few in the 1970s and about 100 nationwide in the mid-1990s, their numbers have grown to perhaps 2,000 or more today. And as they increased in number, the federal exemption became a serious problem in more and more locations. Around the country, the federal government owns half a million buildings—none of which, under the old rules, paid local fees.
Among the new law’s provisions: the fees federal facilities pay must be “based on some fair approximation of the proportionate contribution of the property or facility to stormwater pollution” and must be used only to pay for stormwater management. Both of these are already requirements of just about any stormwater utility fee.
How much local programs will benefit from the new law depends on amount of federal property in its jurisdiction and on the utility’s rate structure. You can find the full text of the law at www.mygov365.com; search for S.3481. How do you expect your program to benefit from the new law? Let us know at sweditor@forester.net.
Author's Bio: Janice Kaspersen is the editor of Erosion Control magazine and Stormwater magazine. |
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