Melissa Bailey File Photo
Starting as soon as next summer, homeowners might be getting an extra bill from the city. It’s a part of a plan designed to spread the cost of stormwater removal more equitably among property owners.
The plan would create a stormwater authority for the City of New Haven. Initially, it would be a new enterprise fund that can set up fees for the removal of stormwater in the city. Property owners would pay proportionally to how much stormwater runoff their property creates, with large impermeable parking lots costing the most.
It would mark a change from the current system, under which stormwater removal is paid for through property taxes.
Since a large part of New Haven comprises non-taxable property belonging to not-for-profits and schools, taxpaying homeowners and businesses have been footing the city’s whole stormwater removal. The new stormwater authority is designed to change that situation, according to Rob Smuts, the city’s chief administrative officer.
At Monday’s meeting of the Board of Aldermen, an ordinance amendment to create the stormwater authority was introduced. Smuts said he expects the authority could be in place by the start of the next fiscal year, July 1, 2011. The average homeowner would probably see an annual bill of $40 or $50, Smuts said.
A stormwater authority has been in the works for some time, Smuts said. In 2007, the state general assembly authorized creation of such authorities, and paid for four towns to study the issue. New Haven did such a study and found the plan would make sense.
Stormwater authorities are “pretty common in other parts of the country, but this would be the first in Connecticut,” Smuts said.
He offered four reasons a stormwater authority makes sense:
First, it will efficiently consolidate stormwater operations, which are currently shared by several departments. Smuts compared it to the city’s creation of the Solid Waste Authority, which saved the city hundreds of thousands of dollars, he said.
Second, the authority would make it easier for the city to comply with new and future environmental regulations. As a further environmental benefit, property owners would have a “direct incentive to improve their operations.” They will pay less if they mitigate their run off, he said.
Third, the authority would create a more equitable system. Currently, homeowners pay 59 percent of the cost of stormwater removal but have only 23 percent of the city’s impermeable surfaces. “So homeowners are essentially subsidizing the rest of the city,” Smuts said.
Fourth, the new fees would free up about $2 million from the general fund, Smuts said.
Paying for stormwater removal is “a significant liability on our books,” Smuts said. “This is a way of taking it off the books, having it so the average homeowner shoulders a much smaller part of the burden.”
Smuts said the city would not need new hires to run the authority; a staffer would move over from the engineering department. Fees would be assessed based on satellite imagery and on-site inspections of the impermeable surface area.
Stormwater removal is now a “hidden cost borne by taxpayers,” Smuts said. “What we’re doing is calling it out and saying theses costs exist. We’re making the people causing the costs pay for it.”
Ever since this plan to tax the rain was hatched a couple of years ago, I've been waiting for the shoe to drop. It's about as welcome as a cow pie in church.
Mayor DeStefano's rain tax is nothing but a new revenue stream for the city. This will not save any money but it will allow the city to institute a back door tax on all the non-profits who pay nothing, and for those who do make a PILOT payment, to increase it. It is also a back door tax on homeowners who already shell out more than $200 million in property taxes to the bloated mess that is City Hall.
What is now paid for with property tax dollars, we will in the future, have to pay separately with no off-setting amount on our property taxes. Why is this being done now? It's being done because the mayor needs the money to keep all the balls in the air so that he doesn't have to make the kind of cuts he should have started making five years ago, 3 years ago..hell's bells, last year instead of proposing his irresponsible 9 - 18% tax hike.
As for the solid waste authority, Mr. Smuts may want to check his math. This hasn't saved us a dime I'm told. All it did was borrow $10 million against our credit and the last I heard, the vaunted Solid Waste Authority couldn't even pay its own employees and owed city taxpayers hundreds of thousands of dollars in payroll costs that we fronted. Correct me if I'm wrong. Of the $10 million borrowed, the new Authority kicked back $6 million to balance the city's books that year. The big question is whether authority is even servicing it's own debt or are we, the taxpayers?
The storm water authority is a scam just like the solid waste authority, just like the parking authority, just like the parking meter mortgage deal. They are shell games and it's time to just stop it. If you want to tax the non-profits for their storm water, do it. The rest of us are already paying and if this goes through, there will be no stopping the future increases to satisfy the whims of whatever government employee is running it.
What's up next? Taxing the air we breathe? Or the gas we expell?