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On March 27th at 7: 00 p.m. Arlington County will hold a public hearing to discuss the proposed "Sanitary District Tax" which will in essence help to pay for over $8 million worth of stormwater management improvements. While, I am all for helping to pay my fair share to improve our local watersheds and aging stormwater infrastructure. Raising the property taxes system wide by a uniform amount is not an equitable way to generate cash for these improvements. Rarely does charging a uniform tax directly reflect the burden a particular property places on the storm water system. Instead many jurisdictions are instead developing "parcel based tax assessments" which focus on creating stormwater utility fees that are based on the amount of impervious surfaces of a property and then charging them for the runoff that they generate. This "polluter pays" approach is exactly what the City of Rockville is currently voting on and similar to what the District of Columbia is proposing.

In Rockville, charging a tax would place a heavier financial burden on residential properties than on commercial properties. About two-thirds of property tax revenue comes from residential property; the other third from commercial property.

The approach used by most communities with a SWM Utility is a user fee that is based on the amount of impervious surface on properties. Since a vast majority of residential properties in Rockville have roughly the same amount of impervious surface, single family houses would pay a flat fee, estimated to be about $56 in the first year of the program and increasing to about $89 a year in the sixth year.

Other properties, such as apartment complexes, offices and shopping centers usually have more impervious surface, which varies widely between these properties. The owners of these properties would pay a fee based on the actual amount of their impervious surface. The fee approach would result in commercial and institutional properties paying about two-thirds of the total SWM program cost. This is proportional to the amount of stormwater runoff they produce. 

The fee in Rockville would be phased in over several years, allowing the program and staffing to build up gradually.

Arlington County considered this "fee for service" option rather than a property tax-based funding mechanism. The most serious disadvantage of a Stormwater Utility is the fact that it would require substantially greater cost and effort to modify existing billing systems and to provide public education and outreach. Whereas the sanitary district tax could be more easily and affordably administered, allowing improvements to the stormwater program to be implemented sooner.

The scariest part of enacting this tax in lieu of a utility fee is that once this system is in place it will always be easier to increase the tax rate than to implement a proper "runoff based fee" as ultimately will only continue to add to our stormwater management funding issues. Also, remember that when imposing new regulations you should always offer a well thought out incentive based toolkit that offers property owners alternative ways to help reduce their impervious footprint. Rain Gardens, rainwater harvesting systems, greenroofs, all help to reduce non-point source pollution and reduce stormwater peak flows significantly affecting the health of our watersheds!