A stormwater rate fee increase was postponed at the Unified Government Commission meeting on Thursday night.
Unified Government officials announced in advance that they would not vote on a new stormwater rate proposal at the meeting – it was placed on the agenda earlier this week. The reason for the postponement was to discourage crowds from gathering because of the COVID-19, according to an earlier statement from the mayor.
During the past year, UG staff has made presentations stating that there are many stormwater projects that need to be done, and the current flat fee of $4.50 per address doesn’t cover the costs. The proposal to set the fee according to the amount of paved or hard surface of the property was opposed by some businesses and residents.
UG Administrator Doug Bach read a statement from Mayor David Alvey at the March 12 meeting that recommended the commission table the item. It was tabled, unanimously. Commissioners did not offer comments on the proposal Thursday.
“I feel that this further discussion is vitally important,” Mayor Alvey wrote. “We as a governing body must get to a place where we all understand and can explain to our constituents the scope of the deterioration of our stormwater infrastructure across all areas of our city.
“We need to get to a place where we can understand and can explain to our constituency the urgency of addressing deterioration before failures increase and create greater risk to the safety and welfare of our residents, or even greater damage to private property, and to our budget,” Mayor Alvey wrote. “We need to get to a place where we all agree and can explain to our constituents the need to allocate costs to our stormwater utility based upon the amount of hard surface the property contains. We need to get to a place where we all agree and make the case to our constituents that we increased rates because we understand that our responsibility is to take care of our utility as a public service to our residents and our businesses.
“We need to get to a place where we balance the urgency of repairs to our stormwater utility with the cost to users of that utility, so that we do not increase our risk in the future, but do not overburden users,” Mayor Alvey wrote. “As a commission we are not at that place, and we’ll be devoting more special sessions to each of these needs over the course of the year. We need to engage this issue, and we need to engage our public, and we need to move forward to invest in this utility for the sake of our residents and businesses across the city.”
Also on March 12, the special session discussion on municipal ID was postponed, in order to discourage crowds from attending, to try to prevent the spread of COVID-19. UG officials stated they plan to address the issue at a later time.