Stormy water

CHARLOTTE – For the past two and a half years, developers have had the option to pay a fee to the city to avoid installing stormwater mitigation on redevelopment sites across the city.

This alternative was available to developers through an amendment to Charlotte’s post-construction controls ordinance, which requires stormwater mitigation on development sites to protect water quality in the area.

The ordinance originally allowed this option only to developers working in disadvantaged areas and near transit stations, hoping to encourage redevelopment in those areas; but the city amended the ordinance in 2011 to include sites all across the city in an attempt to encourage redevelopment in tough economic times.

That amendment is to sunset on April 30, when the law would return to what was allowed by the original PCCO.

But at its meeting Monday, the Charlotte City Council will vote on whether to extend the amendment for six months.

Proponents of the amendment say any redevelopment is a good idea, while others say developers shouldn’t be allowed to pay their way out of dealing with stormwater on their properties.

The ordinance was adopted in July 2008 by the city in response to a federal mandate that aimed to improve water quality. Charlotte’s ordinance requires developers to do things such as build buffers, detention ponds and rain gardens, as well as leaving some undisturbed natural areas on the site, all in an effort to reduce the amount of the sediment and pollution that stormwater runoff often carries to streams and rivers.

Under the amendment, which passed in November 2011, developers in all parts of the city – not just in disadvantaged neighborhoods and transit-station areas – could pay a fee that would make them exempt from doing anything on the site to deal with stormwater runoff. The fees are $60,000 per impervious acre developed. In the nondisadvantaged and nontransit areas, the fee is $90,000 per acre for anything more than the first acre.

Money received from those fees is used by the city to fund stormwater treatment facilities and initiatives in the same watershed where the exempt project was developed, according to the city. Developers can use this program only for redevelopment projects, not on new greenfield development.

“The fee is based on the cost of the city to do mitigation projects elsewhere,” said Daryl Hammock, Charlotte Storm Water Services division manager. “The developers are paying for the city to comply for them in other places.”

Since the amendment was passed, 10 developers have paid fees to the city to avoid funding stormwater mitigation measures on their properties. The city has collected $756,660 in fees from those 10 developers, city information shows. Two of the highest-profile projects developed under the fee-in-lieu program are the Bank of the Ozarks on Park Road and the McDonald’s on Wendover Road.

Joe Padilla, the executive public policy director for the Real Estate and Building Industry Coalition, a local lobbying group that supports the fee-in-lieu program, said the amendment was originally introduced to support redevelopment in urban and suburban infill areas, which he says is always a positive for the city.

“It’s important because if we can encourage and incentivize redevelopment, we are doing a good thing,” Padilla said. “Anytime we can increase the redevelopment opportunity for a small infill piece of property – suburban or urban infill – and find a way to comply with stormwater regulations in an alternate way, we are encouraging businesses to stay in Charlotte.”

Stormwater mitigation is expensive for developers working in urban and suburban infill sites, Padilla said. Costs to build buffers and detention ponds, which sometimes are required to be built underground, can be prohibitive and in the past have caused developers to look to develop on the fringes of the city or in surrounding counties, as opposed to redeveloping a Charlotte property, he said.

“The costs can be hundreds of thousands of dollars to mitigate stormwater on a site,” Padilla said. The ability to pay a fee “can keep a property from going vacant, keep a retail center from going dark.”

But the cost of skipping stormwater mitigation is paid by the waterways downstream of those development sites, according to the Catawba Riverkeeper Foundation.

While the city of Charlotte uses the mitigation fees to battle water issues in a wider area of the watershed, it does little to help the streams immediately surrounding the development that is exempt from onsite mitigation, said Rick Gaskins, the executive director of the Catawba Riverkeeper Foundation.

“The way you get the most bang for your buck is to locate those facilities where you have the most stormwater,” he said. “So what that means is if you’ve got a site that is on the upper part of the creek, where there isn’t a lot of flow, that water is going quite a ways before it hits (the city’s mitigation).

“There’s no guarantee that if you’re on Irwin Creek, they’ll be using your fee to clean Irwin Creek. The upper parts of the creek are getting trashed by stormwater.”

Gaskins said that an acre of land that’s covered in trees accounts for minimal, if any, runoff. However, every acre of asphalt parking lot – with no mitigation measures – accounts for 26,000 gallons of runoff. That means between last Friday and Saturday in Charlotte, in which some parts of the city got 5 inches of rain, the storms would have produced 130,000 gallons of runoff per acre of impervious parking lot, Gaskins said.

Hammock said the city realizes handling mitigation this way may not be perfect, but said city staff feels it’s the best possible way to balance the equation.

“Ideally, if money was no object, we would prefer (the mitigation) to be onsite,” he said. “But sometimes those costs skyrocket. They can be four or five times higher to do this onsite. When the economics do that, the benefits of allowing them to pay us to do offsite mitigation are greater than the downsides.”

John Autry has been caught in the middle of this age-old tug-of-war between the protecting the environment and allowing development. Autry, the District 5 representative on the Charlotte City Council, is the chairman of the city’s Environmental Committee, which has been reviewing the fee-in-lieu issue.

Autry’s committee this month recommended that the City Council on Monday approve the six-month extension of the amendment that allows the fee option in any part of the city.

“We’ve got nothing without developers,” Autry said. “I want every member of the real estate community to get filthy stinking rich because that means this city is growing and prospering.

“But all that growth and all that prosperity means nothing if you can’t go outside.”

Autry said he’s not in favor of a fee-in-lieu program in the PCCO, or in any other city ordinance, but said he understands that sometimes redevelopment might require such a program.

In the long term, he said, he’d like to see the city adopt a system of approval in which developers apply for the fee-in-lieu program in nondisadvantaged and nontransit areas on a case-by-case basis. City officials would review any redevelopment proposal seeking to skip stormwater mitigation and accept fees only if a to-be-determined set of standards are met.

When the City Council meets Monday night at the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Government Center, at 600 E. Fourth St. in Uptown, council members will be voting on only the six-month extension of the amendment to the PCCO. State law requires that any municipality vote on environmental issues must be unanimous in order to pass.

If that vote passes, Autry said the six-month period will be used to find a permanent solution to the fee-in-lieu issue. If it fails, the amendment will expire on April 30, meaning only developers working on redevelopments in disadvantaged or transit-oriented neighborhoods will be able to pay to skip stormwater mitigation.

“I’m willing to go along with it if we have some administrative process in place to see if there’s enough of a hardship that the project wouldn’t go up unless they could pay the fee,” Autry said. “But we’ve got to protect the water in our creeks and streams.”