Gov. signs stormwater authority measure
With all eyes on the skies Thursday and Friday — and on Connecticut’s electric utilities with Tropical Storm Elsa in the offing — property owners could soon be paying for a new type of ”utility” to funnel floodwaters from streets, and to keep contaminants from Long Island Sound.
Under a new law signed this week by Gov. Ned Lamont, Connecticut cities and towns will be able to levy fees on property owners via municipal stormwater authorities to pay for drainage system improvements, whether man-made like catch basins or natural like rain gardens.
More than 150 people and organizations filed formal testimony in March on the proposal, including Lamont’s environmental chief Katie Dykes, commissioner of the Connecticut Department of Energy and Environmental Protection. Legislators were unable to push through a broad law in a prior legislative session.
Rich Niles assisted New London in setting up a municipal stormwater authority in 2007 under a state pilot program, with Niles now a project manager with engineering firm Woodard & Curran which has consulted to other local municipalities including Norwalk. Niles said it can be done in less than a year, but realistically closer to two years.
According to a 2019 study of more than 1,800 stormwater utilities nationally by Western Kentucky University, property owners averaged $70 a year in fees to fund improvements. The Connecticut law includes a provision that allows municipalities to reduce fees for property owners that have their own stormwater reduction systems installed.
“It takes a lot of political will to implement [stormwater] utilities,” Niles said. “You have to make a really compelling case.”
During a March hearing, Dykes suggested towns will be able to leverage local fees to win matching federal grants to pay for varying improvements, doubling the bang for the buck. The law includes an extra $150 million for the Connecticut Green Bank to provide up-front financing for expensive projects that towns can pay off over time.
New London’s pilot program — later made permanent — was created under legislation led by state Rep. Chris Perone, DNorwalk, and the late Richard Roy, who represented Milford and Orange for two decades in the state House of Representatives.
With $300,000 in funding, New London set up a pilot fee system and identified “infrastructure problem areas” in its words, discovering in the process that it was out of compliance with “MS4” mandates from DEEP, an industry acronym for municipal separate storm sewer systems.
That included streets prone to flooding or icing, whatever the cause, and how much it would cost to install or replace systems. The initial inventory of needs added up to $6.5 million. New London also took a close look at how to minimize runoff from large construction sites.
New Haven, Norwalk and Stonington were chosen as well in 2007 to create municipal storm water authorities, ultimately opting not to though all have comprehensive storm-water management plans in place. Among other measures, Norwalk has three “vacuum” trucks today that in 2020 collected nearly 1,700 tons of debris from eight miles of storm drain pipes.
Decades after passage of state and federal iterations of the Clean Water Act, Connecticut municipalities now have the chance to make meaningful improvements in storm runoff abatement systems — with a funding mechanism in place that did not exist in 2004 when DEEP’s predecessor agency published a 320-page manual to help municipalities and others better manage storm flooding.
“In a state where geography and development patterns are pretty fractured and diverse — and the tradition of local government is strong — this [legislation] is not prescriptive,” said James O’Donnell, executive director of the Connecticut Institute for Resilience and Climate Adaptation at the University of Connecticut, speaking in March before members of the Connecticut General Assembly. “We’re going to be dealing with these problems for decades . ... It is obviously appropriate to make investments.”