On March 18, New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy signed the Clean Storm-water and Flood Reduction Act into law (P.L. 2019, c. 42).  In brief, this law permits local governments to form a storm-water utility and assess a fee to support storm-water management efforts.  The fee is based on the proportion of impervious surfaces on a particular property.  There are provisions for reduction in the fee for properties that implement “best management practices” that effectively reduces, retains or treats storm-water onsite.  The law also permits the state to take 5% of the fees (or $50,000, whichever is less) for deposit in the state’s Clean Storm-water and Flood Reduction Fund. In addition, to the extent there is a surplus generated by the fee, up to 5% of the operating budget of the utility may be transferred to the local government budget.  It remains to be seen how much new infrastructure this bill motivates or whether future bonding of the fee may result.

The District of Columbia water system (DC Water) also has an impervious area charge intended to fund storm-water improvements.  As blogsite “Truegridpaver.com” points out, comparable fees may be called “rain tax”, “drainage fee”, “storm-water fee” or “impervious tax” (and are not really new).  The article details the meaning of these fees as reflected in Houston, Texas.  A quick Google search of “impervious surface fee” reveals other communities that have gone this route to reduce flooding and improve storm-water management.  For example, Allentown, PA is noted here, where the fee  covers government and not-for-profit institutions that have impervious surfaces in addition to private properties.

We have commented in numerous ways on the problems of storm-waters overwhelming local sewer systems and discharging raw sewage into waterways and water systems.  New Jersey has 21 combined storm-water and sewer systems, although heavy flooding can also overwhelm solo sewer systems and treatment plants (and Superfund sites, as we mentioned in Climate Chronicles II).  Combined systems may apply to their states and EPA for permits to overflow raw sewage (affectionately dubbed “combined sewer overflows” or CSO) when excessive water overwhelms the sewer treatment system – but many systems, as we are learning, were not built for today’s storm conditions.

As thinking on this problem goes, land development that paves over natural spillways and absorbent vegetation, exacerbates the problem.  Such development of the Houston/Harris County area in Texas was blamed as one factor that intensified the damage caused by Hurricane Harvey.  Separating storm-water and sewer, increasing pipeline size and treatment capacity are a few solutions  for addressing this problem.  But also underway in many communities are lower cost, lower tech re-greening of open land. (These efforts are not mutually exclusive, of course.)

  • The city of Camden, New Jersey has accomplished several greening projects under the CamdenSMART program. These include: building rain gardens and planting trees as well as separating storm and sanitary pipe infrastructure around Von Nieda Park.
  • The city of Hoboken, heavily hit by Superstorm Sandy, is engaged in re-greening and storm- damage-mitigating projects.   The city received a $230 million HUD grant, supporting their coastal defense strategy. 
  • Elsewhere, the city of Philadelphia has embarked on projects to mitigate the effect of heavy rain and flooding. Some of these include efficient energy programs that lower consumption and costs as well as reduce carbon in the atmosphere, roof greening and tree plantings that cool the streets and other programs detailed here.

For further reading we recommend a look at Watereum (as in Water Effective Utility Management), a coalition which now includes 10 US NGO’s and the US EPA.  The website includes resources such as a primer on EUM for water and wastewater utilities and case studies of EUM, as well as links to the participating organizations.