How Stormwater Fees are Affecting Rural Property Owners in Pennsylvania

- Welcome, everyone, to our webinar today, "Stormwater Fees in Rural Pennsylvania." My name is Danielle Rhea, and I'm mostly just gonna be taking a background seat today, monitoring questions and things like that.

Today, our presenter is Andy Yencha, who is a water resources educator in Cumberland County, and I'm just gonna turn it right over to him to get us started for today.

- All right, thank you very much, Danielle.

And let me just confirm with Danielle that you're seeing my full PowerPoint slide, title slide, stormwater Fees in Rural Pennsylvania, and you're hearing me okay.

- [Danielle] Yep, everything sounds.

- All right, thank you, thank you.

So, well, I'm excited to give this presentation, although I must admit up front, I'm a little bit nervous about it.

I was joking with Danielle.

I hope there's no lawyers in the audience because this topic of stormwater fees in rural areas can be a bit controversial and we'll talk about that as we go along.

But sort of making my task a little more challenging is that there's been a couple of things happening that have maybe altered the playing field a little bit on this topic, and we will get into those, but one of them is the way, the EPA in, depending on census bureau data, classifies what is and what is not a rural area.

So we'll talk about that.

And then maybe, well, I think that's actually the most altering of the playing field factor.

But then there's also a recent legal ruling that put in question these fees, and we'll talk about that a little bit.

Although I'm not gonna dwell on either of those.

So if you came here looking for clarity on those two issues, maybe I can clear things up a little bit.

But they're both in play, so we're gonna go back in time a little bit to imagine those things never happened and look at this issue from, as it would've been prior to those activities.

So let's move on.

Hopefully my clicker will work.

And it's not, let's see.

There we go.

So this presentation's being recorded.

I guess I should mention that I'm a general water resources educator down in Cumberland County, PA.

So for those of you who are new to us, we are Penn State, and we do a lot of stuff.

We do a lot of water education programming, which is what this series is focused on in this topic.

You can see all the areas we cover here.

I'm in the agronomy and natural resources division, I think we call it.

So we got a lot to cover today.

These are our topics.

We'll define stormwater utility fee.

We're gonna outline why stormwater costs money.

We're gonna talk about why these costs are growing.

We'll look at this fee versus tax issue, which I've already alluded to.

We'll talk about an MS4 is.

We're gonna look at the policies that have got us to this point, as far as stormwater management rules.

We'll see how stormwater rates are calculated.

We will attempt to answer the question, "why are rural areas sometimes involved in these fee areas for stormwater management?" And then we'll talk about maybe what, if you own rural property here, what you're most interested in, and those are your options for reducing your fee or eliminating it.

So we'll see if we can get through all this.

So, first off, what is a stormwater utility fee?

Well, stormwater is probably not a surprise to you all.

I think this is the official state definition, that it is a drainage runoff from the surface of the land resulting from precipitation or snow or ice melt.

That's from Pennsylvania Act 167, which is an important water quality rule in the state.

A utility is a municipal organization that maintains infrastructure to provide a service.

And this is where, if you're new to this topic, you may be wondering what the heck I'm talking about.

But municipalities over the last 20 years or so have begun to look at stormwater management as a service they provide, similar to how they also provide sewer and water service.

So keep that in mind as we go through this talk.

And then a fee is money paid for a public service by those who use it.

And this image there shows a stormwater fee.

I think I got, yeah, there we go, a stormwater service charge for this customer that happens to be me.

I live in a borough where the fee's been in place for a few years.

My quarterly fee is 31.50 for stormwater services.

All right, we'll keep going.

So why are these fees happening?

Is it because our local government is out to fleece us or our local government workers are taking this money and going to a tropical hideout?

Well, of course not.

It comes down to a couple of rules and, well, a couple of things.

So rain and regulation are the two that I wanna really highlight here.

So we're getting a lot more rain in Pennsylvania, or I should say, we get a lot and we're starting to get more.

How much do we get in a typical year?

Well, the average for the state is around 41 to 42 inches, although this does vary a bit.

If you're in the Poconos, you get closer to 50 inches.

If you're in some of our dryer areas, you'll get more around 35 inches.

But on average, 41 to 42 inches.

And climate change is making things worse, which we'll talk about a little bit.

So usually when we talk about this, we just sort of leave it at that.

But I like to throw up this graphic here that hopefully drives home the point that 41 to 42 inches of rainwater is a lot of water.

And even though it comes over the course of a year, it creates some real challenges for our built environment, for the places where we've created structures that don't really like water.

So it takes management.

And what happens to all this rain?

Well, when we look at precipitation, this 41 to 42 inches in Pennsylvania in general, now, this is looking at the whole state, rural and urban, we could say that about 20% or seven inches of the precipitation becomes runoff, which is what stormwater management is all about.

It's about managing that runoff.

But this percentage is higher in developed areas.

And that's the key point to take away, that in the best case scenario, in a very, very non developed landscape, we still get some stormwater runoff, about 20%, but in our built environment, that 20% can easily exceed 50%, which becomes the challenge, how to deal with all that runoff.

And who does deal with it?

Well, stormwater is a local government burden.

Like it or not, the management of stormwater has fallen on our local units of government.

It's not something they can ignore because there are health risks involved.

The costs come from the infrastructure that needs to be built.

And there's other costs as well that we'll talk about.

And if you remember a few slides ago, I talked about rain and regulation, increasingly, and really from the beginning, stormwater has involved, stormwater management has involved some regulations, but increasingly it's coming under new regulations that are an additional burden for local governments.

If you talk to local government folks, they often use this term, stormwater is another unfunded mandate that's been placed upon them.

In other words, it's another thing they have to be in charge of, they have to do, but there was no new money designated for this new work they have to do.

And stormwater management is expensive.

There's planning and design, there's the implementation, which often is super expensive because to get some of this stormwater infrastructure, you need to go through other infrastructure, rip up roads to reach and replace old pipes.

And I don't know if I'm gonna mention it down the road, but one of the challenges communities have with their stormwater infrastructure is it's often very old, 100 years or more and needs to be replaced.

They also have to coordinate these programs, which can be an administrative burden.

Coordinate them with other flood control or environmental programs.

And then they actually in some cases have been mandated to do public education and involvement, which is a good thing, don't get me wrong, I'm an educator by trade, but it does create some unique burdens on local governments that aren't really used to doing that sort of thing for stormwater.

Then there's the inspection and maintenance and all the administration.

So there's a lot of costs, and the costs are growing because of that aging infrastructure often in bad shape, graded a D by the American Society for Civil Engineers.

D is for Pennsylvania by the way.

I think we still get a D, that's from a few years ago.

As we talked about already, climate change, creating some challenges, more volume and intensity.

So even if as a state, we're not getting more rain overall, which some of the data says we are, the rain we are getting seems to be coming in more intense storms.

And this really puts pressure on stormwater systems.

And then the regulations.

We're gonna talk about this term MS4s.

And some communities, in addition to being regulated as a MS4, are also being regulated for water quality purposes.

They're in a TMDL or they're in the Chesapeake Bay TMDL and need to do a pollution reduction plan because of that, just the nature of where they're located, in that very important watershed.

And the health risks.

So governments have been dealing with this for a long time, and fees are relatively new.

So how have governments been paying for stormwater control up to sort of the point where fees appeared?

Well, the bullets sort of list what they've been doing.

They've been going to the general fund and using tax revenue to pay for things.

They've been going after grants.

And of course they're still doing all these things.

Loans are an options, bonds, they can create funds through kind of special assessment areas/districts and other innovative ways of funding activities that involve stormwater management, such as plan review fees.

But increasingly, there's user fees that are paying for stormwater.

So let's talk about those.

And to talk about those, I thought upfront we'd kind of compare a fee to a tax because you've probably heard a lot of people refer to stormwater fees as a rain tax, which sort of bugs some people who put these fees together.

But it also points out that there is a gray area between what is a fee and what is a tax.

So I put this presentation partially together for another talk, not as detailed as this one, prior to some recent legal decisions in Pennsylvania that have thrown into question whether a stormwater fee is really a fee or is a tax.

And maybe we'll talk about that in the Q&A at the end.

But when I put this together, there really wasn't anybody questioning this too much.

So here's what I came up with for why the differences between a fee and a tax.

So a fee, when it comes to stormwater, makes it easy to targets service users because you can base the fee on a standard of impervious cover, which we are really gonna talk about a lot more in a little bit.

A tax, though, is not quite so easy to be as specifically targeting properties that produce stormwater.

A tax would probably be based on property.

And there isn't really an equivalency between the size of your property and the size of your property tax bill and how much stormwater you produce.

So a fee just seems more equitable.

A fee can also involve everyone.

Whereas if you pay for stormwater through a tax, you create a situation where tax exempt organizations are probably going to be excluded.

And some of these tax exempt organizations have a lot of buildings and hard surfaces that produce a lot of stormwater.

So it doesn't necessarily, on the surface anyway, seem fair that they would be excluded, which a tax probably would allow them to be.

There's also this issue of, a fee can be specifically designated for an individual purpose.

So stormwater fees generally can only be used to fund the stormwater program in a community.

They can't get pulled to fund other things like police or healthcare or to build a new road.

They are for stormwater.

But a tax on the other hand, the general fund, can be used for lots of other purposes.

And so you're never quite sure how much money is gonna be there.

So it makes it hard for a stormwater manager to plan long-term 'cause they don't know what their budget's gonna be down the road.

And some stormwater projects really require long-term planning.

And then maybe this is the most important reason right here.

Fees are unpopular, nobody likes paying a fee, but taxes are really unpopular.

So I think communities in the beginning said, the last thing we wanna do is come up with a new tax.

Now in hindsight, they may be thinking, well, we shouldn't have felt that way.

But not too long ago, the feed just seemed like that was the way to go.

And it's still maybe.

Now let's be clear, not all communities in Pennsylvania charge stormwater fees.

There's only a portion that do.

Now that portion is increasing, but keep that in mind as we keep going.

So I use this term MS4 and I thought it would be worth defining it a little bit more because we get a little jargony in this business, and people who aren't in the business, I think, sometimes are missing out because we don't explain our acronyms enough.

So MS4 is a term that has multiple uses, but maybe most important use to understand is that it refers to a Municipal Separate Storm Sewer System.

So the M stands for Municipal, the S4 stands for those four words that start with the letter S.

Now, municipal storm sewer system has components, and some of the most common components are on the slide here, stormwater basins, ditches, and then the inlets and outlets that you've probably seen.

Now MS4s, like I said, have multiple meanings.

So it's a term used to describe this system that moves stormwater around, but it's also used to talk about communities that have these systems.

So you'll sometimes hear people say they're a regulated MS4, that means they're a community that's regulated for stormwater.

Here's where I think it's important to point out two things that MS4s do not include.

MS4s do not include the sanitary sewer system.

So the sanitary sewer system is a system that carries waste from your toilets and your sinks and your showers and those sorts of things.

In most communities, those are separate from the storm sewer system, and the MS4 does not include that sanitary system.

That's a whole separate utility.

Now, however, in some communities, the sanitary and the storm sewer system are combined.

In these combined systems, the MS4 does not include the combined component.

So keep that in mind as well.

A lot for you to keep in mind.

Increasingly, MS4s are utilizing green stormwater infrastructure, or GSI, as a structural practice, if you will, sometimes non-structural, as a method of managing stormwater.

So this term also gets thrown into the mix quite a bit and I think confuses the public on, what the heck are you talking about?

But some examples of green stormwater infrastructure are on the slide here.

Now, Pennsylvania has many storm sewer systems because our state has over 13 million people and we have a lot of census designated places.

These are developed areas that are big enough that the census takes note of them.

But not all of these storm sewer systems are regulated.

The regulated ones, as of the last census, which we'll talk about in a second why the census gets involved, are shown on this image.

So when we look at the history of regulated stormwater communities in Pennsylvania, they follow this pattern of matching up with our urbanized areas.

"So why," you may be wondering, "why are these communities regulated at all?" And this is where we need to look at a little bit of policy, and it's important policy.

So we're gonna talk about the Environmental Protection Agency.

And basically the question, the answer to the question, why are these community regulated, comes down to, because the EPA, under authority granted by federal law, requires them to be.

So it's in the law.

And the law that it really is in, the foundational law, is a clean water act that was passed in 1972 and then amended.

I think the next slide will look at some of those amendments that were important, but I'd like to pause here because it points to a time when the federal government was taking a more active role in new legislation regarding the cleaning of our air and water.

Now, President Richard Nixon, not sure if he was a fan of this law or not, but he did veto it, even though he created the EPA, he was okay with that.

But he did veto the Clean Water Act, but his veto was overridden.

So the Clean Water Act came into effect, and it's the law that really underpins all of our stormwater fees being there.

So here's some of that history I talked about.

You got the Clean Water Act at the beginning of the arrow, back in 1972.

And initially the act focused on point source discharges, the pollution coming out of factories and sewage treatment plants, so-called point sources.

It didn't take long for people in the field, the regulators, to realize that they were making progress, but they were never gonna achieve the goals of the act, the water quality goals, if they just focused on those point sources.

There was a lot of pollution coming from non-point sources, of which stormwater was one component.

So the act was amended to allow for the, the permitting of non-point sources.

In other words, non-point sources could begin to be regulated in a systematic way where they would be required to get permits to manage their pollutant discharges, even though those discharges were coming from nonpoint sources.

This eventually is the change that led to the creation of the MS4 programs in our nation.

The MS4 programs were rolled out in two phases.

The first phase was back in the '90s and it involved very, very large cities in Pennsylvania.

I think that included Philadelphia, I think Allentown and maybe Erie, not Pittsburgh because they had a lot of combined sewer systems, is my understanding, and didn't really qualify.

The phase one program had a little rocky start, as new programs often do.

But after 10 years, the EPA rolled out the phase two program, which addressed the smaller cities.

So that's when things that we're talking about really, really got started.

So these phase two MS programs began, and they've been rolling out ever since.

In 202, Pennsylvania issued their first permits.

So these are permits for these communities to discharge stormwater legally.

And then there were some important changes in state law that happened in 2013 and 2016 and one that's kind of, I think, in limbo right now that allowed municipalities to form stormwater authorities and then also to charge for stormwater services.

So these are some of the major milestones in the history that got us to this point.

So I talked about how these MS4s follow the urbanized areas.

And those urbanized areas are defined by the Census Bureau.

Every 10 years the Census bureau takes a new census.

That census gives them data where they can define how growth has been happening in our nation.

And then they produce maps of urban versus rural areas.

Well, the Census Bureau just wrapped up their 2020 census, and they have changed the way they classify urbanized areas.

We won't get into the minutia of it, but they no longer use the term "urbanized areas." They just use the term "urban areas." Now, EPA, with their MS4 program, has always had an automatic enrollment of municipalities that are classified by the census as falling into an urbanized area.

So the fact that the census bureau has just changed their definition and thrown out the term urbanized area, it puts into question the EPA's basis for enrolling new communities, and to some extent, it also calls into question whether older communities are still in the program.

So it creates some big question marks.

The EPA, as I understand it, has passed a policy for dealing with this, and the policy was put out for public comment and the public did indeed comment on that.

And it's got EPA back at the drawing board.

EPA had basically proposed just keeping things as they are and replacing the term urbanized areas with the new term urban areas, 'cause the definition doesn't vary too much.

But that did not go unnoticed.

And there were some comments, I guess, to the contrary, submitted to EPA.

So they are now, I guess, back at the drawing board a little bit.

So it's unclear exactly what the impact of this will be.

In the policy that EPA wrote, they did say that if you're already enrolled in the program, so if you're a community that was enrolled under the old rules, you're still in, you're now getting out of this, you're still in MS4.

So I believe that will be the case.

But like I said, there's uncertainty here.

But we're assuming that things are gonna move forward and we'll just keep going with that assumption here, although that may not be accurate.

All right.

So let's talk about communities that charge fees.

So we talked about how there's a lot of urban areas in Pennsylvania.

We talked about how only some of those urban areas are regulated by EPA, which designates that authority to Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection, by the way.

So there's only a handful of communities in Pennsylvania that are regulated, a little over 1,000.

Now, of that 1,000, approximately 60, it's probably closer to 70, in Pennsylvania are currently charging stormwater fees.

So that's the current status, although that number is increasing.

And we know that Pennsylvania is a one of the states with the fastest growing number of municipalities, MS4s that charge a stormwater fee.

And the reason we know that is because of work done by Western Kentucky University, where they do an annual survey of communities nationwide to see if they have a stormwater fee.

It's really a great resource.

They admit upfront that, since there's no depository of this information, it's not required that communities report this to any single source.

The only way to find this information is to survey all the municipalities in the country, which is a lot of municipalities.

But that's what they do.

They search a lot of websites, they make a lot of phone calls, and they come up with a list.

So here's a list of some of the communities in Pennsylvania that currently have stormwater fees in place.

This list is from a few years ago, so it doesn't include the 60 plus that are currently active in our state.

So if I haven't put you to sleep already, I may shortly, or if I haven't confused you enough already, I know I will very soon.

So we're gonna talk about how these fees are calculated.

But let me just, I guess, stress a couple of points now to make sure I'm not misleading you.

Not every community in Pennsylvania is charging for stormwater.

Now more are all the time.

And that trend, I mean, personally I don't think it's going to change.

It may slow down a little bit based on some things that have been happening legally.

But I think these fees or tax, if they end up being taxes, are likely to remain with us 'cause stormwater's not going away.

So I think it's still important to know how these fees currently are calculated.

But not everybody's paying a fee.

Keep that in mind.

There's only around 60 to 70 communities that are.

Basically, it comes down to how much impervious surface is on a property.

That's how these rates are calculated.

What is impervious surface?

Well, it's the land cover that impedes water from soaking into the ground.

And common types of impervious surfaces are in the slide here and now, roofs, sidewalks, private sidewalks, not ones that are publicly owned, even though they do impede flow, but they're public, walkways, patios, swimming pools are considered impervious in most cases, driveways, parking lots, alleys, and then this term "compacted surface." So gravel roads often come up and gravel roads don't infiltrate well if at all.

And so they are included as an impervious surface in most municipal stormwater rule books.

So you've got this concept of imperviousness and that's important for what we're gonna talk about next.

Communities by and large, now not 100%.

So not all of those 60 to 70 communities in Pennsylvania develop what's called an ERU, or equivalent residential unit, but most do.

So let's talk about that.

An equivalent residential unit is the average amount of impervious surface on a single family residential lot in a community.

That I think a fair definition of what that is.

Various methods are used by municipalities, by local governments to measure this average imperviousness on a single family residential lot.

They might use aerial photos, they might use more modern technology like LiDAR or they may actually go out in the field and measure it.

So here's a fictional example of how this may work.

I wanna stress it's fictional.

These are not real numbers, in case you recognize this community or maybe live in it.

But a municipality will either determine upfront that they're gonna measure the impervious cover for all of their lots or, not too long ago, they really didn't have the means to do that easily.

So they would do it on a random sample or a semi-random sample.

So we're gonna look at that random sample method and how it might have worked.

They would select a lot and then they would look at the impervious cover, like the rooftop, the driveway, the sidewalk, and they would measure that out.

And in this case, they came up with a figure of 1500 square feet of imperviousness.

So they have one sort of data point there.

And then they would do the same thing for a lot of other randomly selected properties in their jurisdiction.

And then with that information, they could come up with an average amount of imperious cover on a single family lot.

So let's try to work through this here if we can.

So the average impervious surface for a single family residential property in this township, I'm gonna use 1,000 square feet, I'm just throwing that out.

That's a little bit low, but it makes the math easy.

So that average becomes the ERU, the Equivalent Residential Unit.

So one ERU in this township equals 1,000 square feet.

So the records in the township show that there are 10,000, nice whole number, single family residential properties.

Now looking beyond the single family residential properties, the community has to also account for the stormwater produced by larger, commercial, multi-family, just other types of properties.

How much impervious coverage do they have?

So they have to measure that.

And they use similar methods.

So in this community, we're gonna say that those other types of properties, they add 2 million square feet of imperviousness.

2 million divided by one ERU or 1,000 square feet, you come up with 2000 ERUs, at least I hope my math is right.

So when you look at how many equivalent residential units are in this township, you take those 10,000 single family households, which the community is saying each one is an ERU because we know the average imperviousness is 1,000 square feet.

And then we've got this additional 2000 ERUs from all those other types of properties.

That gives the community 12,000 ERUs to work with.

That's their sort of base billing unit.

Now here's what the community has to also know and it's not an easy number to come up with.

They have to also know what their budget is.

How much do they need to spend on stormwater?

And in this community, this fictional example, we're saying it's a million dollars.

So they simply then divide that $1 million annual budget by the number of ERUs in the community and they come up with a annual fee per ERU of $83.30.

If you divide that by 12, it means they're charging people $6.94 a month for every ERU.

Since every single family residential property in this community is considered one ERU, whether they're a little above or a little below that actual amount of imperviousness, that's what they're being charged per month, 83 annually.

But for properties with more impervious cover, those non-residential properties, the bills can go up.

Let's look at that next.

So here's a larger facility.

Once again, this is a fictional example.

I don't know how much the Carlisle Family YMCA pays as a stormwater fee or if they pay anything, but if they're like a lot of larger facilities in towns that charge stormwater fees in Pennsylvania, the municipality is going to come out maybe in the field or maybe using high resolution aerial imagery or LiDAR, they're gonna measure all their impervious surfaces and then they are going to determine how many ERUs are on this property.

So we already learned that this township has got a $6.90 fee per ERU.

When they look at this property, they come up with a number of 40,000 square feet of imperviousness.

So how many ERUs does this property have?

Well, 40,000 divided by 1,000 square feet.

'Cause remember, 1,000 square feet is what an ERU is in this community.

That's 40 ERUs.

So this community, what's their bill gonna be?

Well, one ERU is $83 a year.

So 83 times the 40 ERUs on this property means their bill is $3,320 a year.

So you can see that larger properties with more imperviousness pay more than a single family residential.

I was using Google Maps there, this is what I was able to pull from the website.

A lot of communities, I mean I think it's a tribute to them.

They're trying to be transparent.

They will put their maps that measure imperviousness up, they're publicly available.

So this comes from Susquehanna Township, and it shows the areas of imperviousness.

And I could have zoomed in more here, but I thought this gives you a good idea of how single family residential and commercial properties and other property types, all get measured.

And you can see where the text on the slide, total IA, that's their total imperviousness.

So you can look at these facilities and you can see what their total imperviousness is and then you can also find out what their base billing rate is, how much is a single ERU, do the division and you can find out what their stormwater fee is right away.

So you may be saying, "all right, this is all fine and good, you're showing me examples from urban areas, but I'm in a rural area.

Why do rural areas pay?

Why do you call this talk the rural stormwater fees?" Well, because the fact is that rural areas, if they reside in one of these 60 plus communities that charges a fee, are often getting a stormwater bill in the mail.

And they're wondering, "why should I pay?

I have a rural property.

My land is not anywhere near the city.

There's no stormwater inlets on my property.

Why should I pay?" And so here are the commonly cited reasons for why these properties should perhaps contribute.

It's because, well, even though you don't have a lot of stormwater infrastructure around you, you probably have some, you're probably creating some stormwater.

And we're gonna leave it up to you to prove otherwise.

All properties benefit, I'm on the second bullet now.

All properties benefit from stormwater.

Now, once again, I'm the messenger here.

I'm just giving you the message of what is being talked about out there.

When we say all properties benefit, what we're really saying is that all residents of that municipality benefit from municipal stormwater services.

Even if you live in a rural area, you probably visit the more densely populated areas for services or for other reasons.

You're down there and you're benefiting, even if you may not realize it, by there being stormwater infrastructure.

And in fact, maybe you really depend on being able to access those urban areas.

And so you are taking a benefit by them not being flooded every time it rains.

Then there's a water quality benefit as well as thrown out, managing stormwater improves water quality, and we all benefit from water quality.

And then there's the issue of, well, we don't want to just send this water willy-nilly down the storm sewer system because those communities below us are then gonna have to deal with all of our mismanaged stormwater.

We're gonna be creating a burden on them.

So we all have a role to play in being a good steward of the stormwater.

All right, third bullet is, well, it's a community problem.

I guess I've alluded to that already.

But we can't manage it if we just include some people.

It's such a big problem.

We need everybody.

And one reason why it's such a big problem is the last bullet, time is short.

Like I said earlier, our stormwater systems are getting very old and we're dealing with more rain coming in intense storms.

So we have more stormwater challenges.

So these are the reasons that are given.

Once again, don't kill the messenger.

So many rural properties have extensive impervious surface.

So I wanted to throw this up because I wanted to show how this can really be a very, very challenging, this can put rural people in a very challenging financial situation.

You've been not really thinking much about stormwater.

You've sort of heard this stormwater fee tossed about in your town, in your village, in your borough, but you didn't think it affected you.

And then one day, you go to the mailbox and in the box is an envelope and you open up the envelope and it's a bill for stormwater, and it's a big bill.

Well, why is it a big bill?

Well, it's because rural properties can have a lot of impervious surfaces.

If you look at this one, I just did a little bit of math, I probably underestimated it, but I came up easily with over 26,000 square feet of impervious cover.

So do the math.

If one ERU in this township is 2000 square feet, which is more typical of what an ERU is gonna be than my prior example.

And the ERU fee, the base billing rate is 6.90 per ERU, which is not too far off the average, I would say.

Then this property has 13 ERUs.

They have 26,000 feet of imperviousness, divided by 2000 per ERU, you come up with 13 ERUs.

So their annual bill is 13 times 6.90 or, yeah, 6.90 monthly fee times 12 months, comes up with 83 bucks or something.

You multiply that times 12, you come up with $10,076, over $1,000 in other words.

You probably wouldn't like to get $1,000 bill in the mail, would you?

So this is where I think a lot of the, kind of, I don't know if I want to use anger, but the unhappiness around this issue stems from.

So there have been some heated exchanges, there's been a lot of unhappy rate payers coming to township officials.

And townships have responded, municipalities have responded, boroughs have responded by providing options for lowering those bills.

So I'm gonna close today by highlighting some of these options that are available.

So how can you reduce the water fee?

Well, you can ask for an reassessment or an appeal.

You can earn stormwater credits.

Or you can talk with local staff and elected officials and see if there's some other options available.

It's early days in all this.

So we're still sort of figuring out how to fly this plane while we're on it.

So let's look at these a little bit closer.

So you could ask for a reassessment.

This is sometimes called an appeal or sometimes they're two different forms.

But you might want to file one of these reassessment or appeal forms if you think there's been a billing error.

If maybe your stormwater drains away from the actual community itself and their system.

Although I'm not sure that's always gonna make the grade, but maybe there's some other unusual circumstance where you think you have a case that you shouldn't be charged at all.

More often these reassessments are filed when people feel their impervious area has been improperly calculated.

Maybe it was improperly calculated in the beginning or maybe after it was calculated properly, the homeowner did something, they ripped up a patio or they took down an outbuilding and so they don't have as much impervious anymore and they want their number reduced.

This does require some paperwork, not a lot.

There's oftentimes a fee.

In a few cases, I did some research of those 60 communities.

In some cases, there is no fee.

This typically works with all property types.

I didn't really mention it, but properties do sometimes really divide up their community into different property types, and different property types are charge different rates, all based on that ERU, but different percentages of the ERU.

Or you could apply for credits.

So a credit is a way to lower your bill.

It's a way for a property owner to put in place either structures or activities that minimize their stormwater impact.

And for doing that, they get a credit on their bill.

There is paperwork required when you do a credit.

You have to apply, not to mention do the credit itself.

And eligibility may depend on your property type.

This is a way of saying, "not all property types are eligible for all credits." Many of the credits are reserved for agricultural properties only or for rural properties only, which is good news if you're a rural property owner or a farmer.

And then the BMPs must be maintained to preserve the credit.

So occasionally you may find yourself the subject of an inspection, just a compliance check to make sure that the credit you said you were doing, you're actually doing.

And you'll have to maybe refile on a certain, like, three or four year period just to keep the municipality up to speed with what you're doing.

So these credit categories are sort of a mixed bag.

And there's really a need here, I think, for an organization like Penn State or some of the nonprofits to kind of look at all the credits that are available at all the different municipalities.

But things are starting to standardize a little bit.

And I put them in these categories.

You've got credits for doing conventional BMPs.

You've got credits available if you do education or public participation, believe it or not.

Then you've got credits for innovative actions, sometimes called stormwater partnerships.

And then you've got some credits for just rural ag, active ag properties.

One thing you should do if you do find yourself getting one of these bills or you think you may or you're just curious about this issues, you should go to your municipality that has one and download their stormwater credit manual 'cause it's usually pretty easy to understand.

And it has all the details on what credits are available for that particular municipality and how they work, the ins and outs.

So, in this case, I'm gonna highlight three of the credits that apply to rural properties.

And you can see across the top there how there is max credits available.

I'm in the column almost all the way on the right.

You'll see in some cases, the credit provides up to 30% reduction in bill, although that depends on how much of the runoff the property produces will be managed by the the the BMP.

But in some cases the credits have TBD, to be determined, and that's because some of them can exceed the overall cap.

So communities oftentimes will cap their credits from, like, 20, 30, 40%, some go a little bit higher, but what that means is you can only get so much credit.

You can't get totally outta your bill.

But for rural properties, there is a way to get around that with some of these practices.

If they really provide a huge stormwater management boost, then you can get, you can exceed the cap, and you can reduce your bill to almost zero.

So let's look at these really quickly and then maybe there's time for a few questions.

One is called a low impact parcel.

Now this is something that the community should do ahead of time, and it's sort of automatic, but if they don't do it, this is a basis for one of those reassessments or appeals.

If you feel you're a low impact parcel but you haven't been designated it, you can file that appeal.

In general, these low impact parcels are parcels defined as not having any more than 10% impervious cover.

So a parcel sort of like this one.

And then that imperviousness that is on the parcel is greater, I see a typo there, is greater than 50 feet away from waterways.

So the rooftops and the driveways, they're not close to the streams.

And where the runoff goes, it's not directly connected to the MS4 via a ditch or a storm sewer.

All right, then there's the non-urban parcel.

And so this applies to parcels that fall outside of a designated urbanized area defined by the 2010 Census.

Now this is what's up in the air, I talked about a little bit because of the Census Bureau changing their definition and getting rid of the term urbanized area and replacing it with just urban.

But back in the old days, last year, if you are a property owner and you're not within the urbanized area, your local union of government may have provided for a non-urban parcel credit.

Let's look at that a little closer.

So we're gonna Zoom in on this area, which I think is West Hanover Township.

So you see the green line there and then the more colorful areas within the green line, that's the old census urbanized area definition for this region of Dolphin County, Central Pennsylvania.

And West Hanover Township happens to straddle that area.

So the properties that are outside of the urbanized area, the census designated urbanized area, would be eligible for this non-urban parcel credit.

Those that fall within the urbanized area would not.

So if you feel you fall within that area, you may be off the hook or at least you wouldn't be paying the full fee.

And then finally I'm gonna end with this stormwater partnership credit.

It's for non-residential properties only.

So targeted at more rural properties.

This is one that allows property owners to develop and implement their own strategies for dealing with runoff.

And then the credit is based on the cost benefit.

So if you propose an idea or a practice that really manages a lot of stormwater, that really can be proven to save the municipality a lot of money, then you might get a whopper of a credit that would exceed the normal cap.

And I wanted to pull out this example, wrapping up here, of a special ag partnership credit type opportunity that Silver Spring Township, I believe, still has in place.

I don't think they would get rid of this, it's from a few years ago, but you can see where they're essentially stacking different credit options on top of one another for active agricultural properties so that these properties, if they can put together this type of package, can get up to a 90% credit on their stormwater bill.

Now I'm gonna leave it at that, see if there's any questions out there.

There's a little more nuance to how these credits work than I got into, but I guess the point is that municipalities are trying to minimize that impact of a homeowner or rural property owner getting a ginormous bill in the mail that then sort of creates a lot of tension that makes it hard for cooperation.

And property owners don't like to get bills.

But don't forget, municipalities are in a tough bind themselves because they've got the federal government sending them essentially an unfunded mandate to manage this stormwater, which is a national issue.

Ag use is sometimes separated out as a separate credit.

And I'm gonna leave it at that.

There's some other resources I can highlight here.

This little booklet here that PEC put together a while ago is just excellent.

Shout out to PEC for all the great education they do.

I wanted to highlight that.

Penn State Extension has a fact sheet on what is a municipal stormwater fee that I think is good reading.

And then EPA has got some older literature out there as well.

These are all a little bit older resources but still very useful if you wanna learn more.

And let me stop my share and see where we're at with questions.

- Yeah, so we got a handful of questions and I guess I'll just say for those of you that, Andy breezed through those links pretty quickly, but I'll gather those from him and send them in the follow-up email so you can all get those.

But first question, "shouldn't the community budget be driven by the number of ERUs and the amount of impervious area they represent rather than what appears to be some arbitrary budget number?

Are the budget numbers that communities use reasonably representative of the need?

And how are the budget numbers determined?" - All right, good question, and I hope I didn't mislead people, but the first part of that question I think is how things are being done.

So communities don't willy-nilly put together their stormwater budgets.

I think I mentioned, it takes a lot of prior thought to determine how much money they're likely going to need to spend.

And so once they know how many ERUs they're likely to have, they have a good budget to divide those ERU into to come up with their base billing or ERU charge, and then they can figure out the fairest way to distribute that charge.

So I think I've been, going on Andy's opinion here, but what I've observed, and I've got about 10 years in Wisconsin on this issue as well, communities are very sensitive when they put together one of these programs.

They wanna make sure everything is equitable and fair.

And they spend a lot of time thinking about it.

Did I miss the last part of that question?

- I think you got it 'cause it was mostly just figuring out how the numbers were calculated.

Next question, "since the number of rain events and rain intensity is increasing due to climate change, why not create fossil fuel use fees to contribute to the cost of stormwater management?" - Yeah, I think we're gonna be hearing more about innovative ideas like that as we struggle to manage our stormwater and pay for it.

So, yeah, that's a great idea.

- So this question I think maybe you addressed kind of towards the end of your presentation, but I'll just ask it just in case for clarification.

"Shouldn't rural properties get credit for stormwater that doesn't leave their properties?" - Right, I think that, not only are we not producing stormwater, we're actually managing it.

And I think, in some cases, they do.

So a couple of thoughts there.

Oftentimes people think their property doesn't produce stormwater, but it actually does.

So you really need a professional to come out evaluate your property to determine if you're sort of a net sink for stormwater or if you do contribute some to the community stormwater system.

But if it does turn out that you're not producing stormwater, you're actually a place where stormwater comes, rest, infiltrates, then by and large, it appears to me that communities have enough flexibility in their credit programs that while they may not pay you money for doing it or who knows, maybe they may, but they're probably gonna be able to reduce your bill to very low amount.

So I hope that gets at the question.

Like I said, it's early days.

So maybe in some point where, like, if you produce extra power, if you've got a solar system, you could sell it back to the electrical utility.

Maybe one day we'll have a system in place where if you can store enough stormwater, you can sell your stormwater credits back to municipality.

We're not there yet, but I wouldn't rule that out down the road.

- So I don't know if there's a way to know this or not, but do you know how many municipalities are given credit to property owners with stormwater mitigation practices like rain barrels and others?

- Well, I think if you look at, like I said, there's 60 plus communities in Pennsylvania that have fees in place.

The reason we don't know the exact number or I guess the reason I don't know the exact number is because in some cases, there's collaborations of municipalities, like the Wyoming Valley, I think the area over in Williamsport, maybe around Altoona.

This is where multiple communities have a consortium or a partnership and they manage a single utility that includes municipalities.

In just about every case, I mean, there may be a few exceptions, although I guess I'm not aware of one, they all have a credit program.

And I think one reason they have a credit program is it protects them from legal challenge.

This is a fee, a fee is for a service.

If you use a service, you should be able to minimize your use of that service and get a benefit.

So you have these credit programs in place because they help protect the legal definition of what a fee is.

Although maybe that's not working.

But anyway, to get back to the question, I think they about all do.

And I think they about all will allow a credit for that particular practice.

Now the amount of the credit will vary, but they all have it.

- Yeah, and so there was a, like, I guess a question/comment later on asking if tree plantings could be worth a credit..

- Yeah, they are, yep.

- So I know we're kind of, we're right at one o'clock, so I don't know, Andy, do you have time to answer?

- Oh, yeah, yeah, I can stick around, absolutely, happy to. - Okay, perfect.

So I know our close captioner might have to jump off, so if you are in need of those close captions, just know that the recording that will be sent out to everybody will also have those captions in place.

And there are also Zoom generated captions as well.

But I will jump to the next question.

So shouldn't the fee be dedicated only to regulated MS4 projects, I think that's regulated or required to comply with the state and federal regulations or for projects identified in the PRP?

- Yeah, I think I understand that question and it actually was something I was scratching my head about.

I just sort of assumed when these fees started being placed that they would just apply to the urbanized areas, those areas that fell within that census map.

But that is not the case.

Municipalities are not limited who they can charge.

And in fact the municipality doesn't even have to have a regulated MS4 to have a stormwater fee.

Although I don't think there's any non-regulated municipalities that charge a fee.

So those limitations aren't in place.

Whether they should or not, whether there should be a limitation like that, I guess, comes down to your point of view.

I tried to address this a little bit when I said, why rural areas, why are they charged?

And one of the reasons is that even if you're outside that urbanized area, oftentimes your stormwater is flowing into the urbanized area, and that's where it has to be managed.

Then there's the issue of, well, we're all in this together.

We all live in the same town or borough, so shouldn't we all collaborate on this community-wide issue?

So those kinds of reasons are why municipalities I think just set up a fee system that includes everybody in the community.

They also need the money.

Let's not overlook that.

So that's a factor as well.

And I think they also don't wanna deal with the issue of, well, some people pay and some don't.

That could create headaches for them as well.

- Thanks, so the next question, "do you know where someone could get a map of the imperviousness in their community?

Is there an EPA website with a map?" - I don't think the EPA has a website, but if you looked at that map I threw up from Susquehanna Township, and other municipalities have this, it's becoming increasingly more common, they put their maps of imperviousness up.

If you happen to live in Harrisburg, you can get a copy of the map.

I don't know if some of the older communities in the eastern part of the state, they're actually playing a little bit of catch up 'cause they implemented their fees a while ago.

But I think the first place to look is call your municipalities, say, "Hey, I'd like your map of impervious cover in the community if you have it." And if they have it, they should be willing to provide it.

- Great, I guess this is an opinion question, "but do you think that businesses will pass the fee onto customers that are coming to use their services?" - Well, I think that's how business works in our country.

I mean, they're gonna have to pass the fees on.

So, yeah, yeah, yeah.

- Next question, "in your example, why was there only a 90% credit for the property that may have eliminated offsite stormwater impacts and why not pay a property owner if that property captures stormwater from an uphill property, but contains that stormwater as well?" - Well, I think I addressed this a while ago, and I mean, maybe a little quicker answer this time is, basically, municipalities are in a bind.

They have this large cost managing stormwater and they only have a limited number of potential rate payers.

And so if they all of a sudden were to create a program where rate payers would get paid for doing the management because they happen to have a large rural property, it threatens their budget.

Now having said that, maybe I just went too far out on a limb.

I think municipalities, and I think you saw this in Silver Spring Township, are increasingly recognizing that they can't just overlook the stormwater benefit rural properties provide.

And I don't think there's any examples of where a community is paying a resident above and beyond what their stormwater fee would be to manage stormwater.

They are discounting the fee that property owner would've otherwise paid so that their fee is greatly reduced.

I don't know about the zero, but it's greatly reduced.

You may say, well, why not zero?

And I think it's because there's built in costs that the community shares or that's the argument that would be made.

I was thinking about this the other day when I looked at my electrical bill.

If you look at your electrical bill, there's like two charges.

One is for your actual electrical use, and that varies depending on how much electricity you use, but the other part is for the fixed network, the transmission lines.

That fee sort of stays the same or it goes up every year.

I think the stormwater system is kind of like that transmission system.

That system is always in place.

We all rely on it to some extent, I'm going out in the limb here again, but the community might argue that we need everybody to pay to help us maintain that, even if you're not putting a burden on that system, you still benefit from it.

- Great.

I feel like maybe this is sort of along the same vein, but maybe not.

So the question is just, "will they help pay for rural property owners in putting these practices in use?" - Well, if you're an ag property user, you can often turn to a variety of programs where cost sharing assistance, funding is available, partial funding to help you put in these practices.

And there's nothing then that stops you if you also happen to be a regulated customer for stormwater to then claim those practices to get a discount from your stormwater bill.

So when you say, will they pay you, rarely will it be the municipality that will pay you, but other levels of government may be interested in helping you get those practices in place for water quality benefit, not so much, they're not worried about your stormwater fee, but they're worried about other things.

And then you can take advantage of that.

So you have to unfortunately play this game of being informed and knowing what programs are out there, and not always easy to fit that into a busy life, but if you do do that kind of ground truthing and searching and work, you often find there are opportunities out there to pay for some of these BMPs.

- So the next question is, "when I build in my township or my county, we are required to do stormwater management, which includes huge fees, and these are huge fees done by engineers.

This should also be a huge credit." I guess it's a comment.

- Yeah, yeah, that's sort of the work that takes place prior to when the fee is implemented.

And yes, it's not easy building 'cause of the stormwater rules and I don't know enough about that to comment anymore really.

- The next is just another comment, just mentioning that "Stroud Water Research Center has modeled my watershed that people can use to draw a map of their property and determine how much - There you go.

- is coming from their property." So that might be useful to some folks.

And then just another comment that sometimes rainfall can be, or runoff can be generated from grassy areas as well, - Yeah, to that point, well, one thing I forgot to mention is there's also a BMP many communities have for turf management.

So if you're a rural property owner and like where I live, a lot of people have, like, 3, 4, 5 acre or larger lawns.

If you can convert some of that to repairing habitat, upland woodland, or if you can just implement a fertilizer plan where you work with Penn State to develop nutrient recommendations, you can get your bill discounted as well.

So that's another way rural people who get hit with these big bills can get some credit.

- And then the final question is, "would the new Waters of the United States ruling influence service fees for agricultural properties?

- From what I know about that, which isn't a heck of a lot, I don't think that's gonna have much effect at all.

- All right, well, thanks so much, Andy, for answering all questions and a great presentation today.

That's all of the questions, so just put us at about 10 minutes over.

I put a message in the chat, but in case you didn't see it, as you exit today's webinar, you should be directed to an evaluation.

Pretty quick, I would say, takes you a minute or two just to let us know sort of how much you learned today, if you plan to do anything based on what you learned, give us some feedback if there's future topics that you are interested in.

But thanks so much for your attendance.

Thanks again, Andy, for your presentation.

This concludes the webinar, everyone, and have a good day.