How do we pay for clean-running streams?

During last Friday’s town board retreat at the Renaissance Centre, Monica Sarna, the town’s stormwater engineering manager, took the commissioners and mayor through a lengthy description of how the town deals with the water that falls from rain, snow and ice.
Town Manager Kip Padgett introduced her by saying that the rain storms are becoming more intense here and everywhere and the town officials are now discussing a stormwater utility and fees that would pay for improvements mandated by the state and the Environmental Protection Agency.
Sarna restated what most of us know, that sediment is the number one pollutant in North Carolina streams, the red clay from construction sites and other sites that turn Smith Creek and Richland Creek orange and opaque. The town has the responsibility of assuring that any construction uses the right controls to keep the dirt onsite during any precipitation, but red clay is everywhere and easily finds its way to water.
Stormwater control is a large and complex subject because all that rain/snow/ice is not collected and treated like the wastewater in Raleigh’s sewer pipes. Some of it is collected from streets with the roadside drains and goes out into our streams through outfalls – and that includes all the oil, cigarette butts, fastfood wrappers and other junk in the street. In high density areas, like the downtown or apartment complexes, only 15 percent of the rain gets into the ground, as her PowerPoint presentation said.
“The state tells us how to manage our stormwater,” Sarna said. She added that it is an unfunded state mandate. The town is audited every five years to see how it is managing its stormwater.
But now EPA is telling the State of North Carolina it is not doing enough to manage stormwater, Sarna said. “We had plenty of warning. There are lots of things we need to do and do more.”
In 2015 the town did authorize and find funding for a study of 30 miles of Smith Creek and was able to correct enough problems to get it off the list of impaired waterways.
Sarna said the town has options in how it plans to meet the new requirements of its permit. It can use green infrastructure – overflow ponds with trees or water plants or the native plants that attract bees and butterflies the Neuse River Hawks planted around a retention pond in the Porto Fino – along with traditional methods or only traditional methods.
The engineering department will also have to monitor how dumpsters are cleaned.
The town has begun the process of determining whether, how and how to fund a stormwater utility by asking town residents their opinions about stormwater and its consequences last year.
There were 98 people who responded, the majority of them living in the Smith Creek watershed. To the question of their biggest concern about stormwater, 41 percent said flooding followed by erosion 20 percent, turbidity 13 percent and clogged drains 8 percent.
Seventy-six percent do not believe the town is adequately addressing erosion, 73 percent say the town is not adequately addressing flood protection, and 66 percent say the town is not adequately addressing turbidity, which is described as “. . . the cloudiness or haziness of water caused by large numbers of individual particles that are generally invisible to the naked eye, similar to smoke in air. The measurement of turbidity is a key test of water quality.
Over half the respondents, 59 percent, said the town has a stormwater utility fee, which it does not. However, the towns of Morrisville, Apex, Fuquay-Varina, Holly Springs and Wendell do, as does the City of Raleigh.
A criticality study has been done, town officials have discussed the idea of a stormwater utility fee and will further consider and refine it through 2023. By the winter of 2024 the plan calls for the program to be approved in the budget, a public education program will be unfurled in the spring of 2024 and it will be part of the 2024-2025 budget in June of 2024.
What we residents can expect about the fee?
** Businesses will have a different rate than homeowners.
** Homeowners can expect a typical fee of about $100 per year.
** The fee would be calculated based on the existing impervious surface in each parcel.
It has not been determined how the fee will be collected.
The money raised will pay for the staff budget for engineering, public works and GIS for work done on the stormwater utility, which will have to have its own budget charting how many projects it can complete in a year and the new equipment required, such as street sweepers, storm cameras, riprap and other items.
The result will be cleaner streams, fewer to no flooded streets and confidence that a long neglected part of the town infrastructure is being addressed.
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