Committee recommends extending stormwater fee

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CHARLOTTE – The Charlotte City Council’s Environment Committee voted 3-1 Wednesday to recommend that the full council extend by five years a stormwater mitigation fee program for redevelopment projects across the city.

The only member of the committee to object to the extension of a program letting redevelopers pay a fee in lieu of installing onsite stormwater controls, Chairman John Autry, a Democrat from District 5, said: “The best way to deal with pollution is at the source of the problem.”

David Howard, a Democratic at-large member of the council, was joined by Republicans Kenny Smith of District 6 and Ed Driggs of District 7 in supporting the extension.

Howard, however, gave his support only on the condition that the staff update the committee with a “halfway report” after 2½ years.

The city’s post-construction controls ordinance, enacted in 2008 in response to federal stormwater requirements, originally allowed this option only to transit areas – predominantly in uptown and along South Boulevard to the south and U.S. 49 to the north – and in what the city calls “distressed business districts,” areas immediately around the center city except for just south of center city.

The idea was 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 as the country began to slowly recover from the recession. In transit and distressed areas, the fee is $60,000 per acre.

The amendment was scheduled to sunset on April 30, when the regulations would return to what was allowed by the original PCCO. But the City Council voted two days before the deadline to extend the program by six months while the city evaluated the pros and cons of a five-year extension.

The city staff in May held a stakeholders meeting attended by environmental groups and developers. At Wednesday’s Environment Committee meeting, Daryl Hammock, Storm Water Services division manager, presented four recommendations based on the input.

Most of the stakeholders, Hammock told the committee members, supported continuing the mitigation fee program. That’s largely because, he said, encouraging redevelopment in urbanized areas is in itself good for the environment for two reasons: It’s a more efficient use of land than sprawling new development along the city’s fringes; and old and often abandoned development creates more environmental problems than does new redevelopment.

Hammock also presented research showing that of the 105 redevelopment sites that were eligible to take advantage of the program, less than half – 44 percent – chose to do so.

That, Hammock told the committee, is evidence that “the current fee is high enough to discourage overuse.”

The staff also recommended that a stringent case-by-case process of qualifying projects for the program not be added to the amendment. Instead, Hammock said, the staff believes its current qualification process, which does look at individual projects, was sufficient.

A more rigorous process, Councilman Smith commented, could discourage redevelopment because developers like to stick to their construction budgets, and a case-by-case evaluation of projects often leads to costs fluctuating.

Finally, in response to some concern expressed at the stakeholders meeting about oil, gasoline and other pollutants being washed off redeveloped parking lots, the staff recommended that in addition to paying the fee, developers be required to install three relatively inexpensive filtered storm drains per acre of new asphalt, at an initial cost of $3,000 per acre and $1,000 per acre per year for maintenance.

But Howard, Smith and Driggs all said that while the idea might have merit, they were not ready to vote on it because they had not seen the proposal before.

Howard and Smith said they worried about possible flooding problems if the filters got clogged; Smith and Driggs said they thought it was unfair, and would discourage redevelopment, if developers had to install the filters and pay the full mitigation fee. They said the fee should be reduced by the amount the developer paid for the filters.

“It’s on-site mitigation, right?” Driggs said.

After the vote, Hammock said the extended amendment would go to the City Council for a public hearing, probably in September, with a vote likely to follow in October.

Also after the meeting, Hammock said the mitigation fees allow his department to take stormwater control measures for a much broader area than more costly and less broadly effective onsite controls.

Over the past two years, the city has collected $898,000 in mitigation fees from 10 redevelopment projects for which developers chose to pay the mitigation fee. The revenue was used to fund six public storm water projects that might otherwise not have been completed.

“There’s a huge economy-of-scale at work here,” Hammock said, noting that the federal Environmental Protection Agency supports local fee-in-lieu programs.

“For every $1 we receive, we can do $2 worth of controls, and for a much broader area. My job is to protect all water in Charlotte. Offering a fee mitigation program is better economically and environmentally.”