Millis Stormwater Funding Proposal Would Separate Stormwater Management from General Fund

New stormwater regulations will soon affect Millis, and the town is considering creating a utility to pay for compliance and maintenance costs. Voters will decide if that’s a good idea at the town meeting on November 6.
Betsy Frederick, a client account manager for Kleinfelder, an environmental services consulting form, led an informational meeting on the stormwater management program and a few regulations on October 19 at Town Hall. Also in attendance were town administrator Michael Guzinski, selectman Jim McCaffrey, public works chief of operations Jim McKay, and about twenty residents.
Stormwater runoff is precipitation—most often rain and melted snow—that flows over impervious surfaces that prevent the precipitation from draining into the ground. A single-family home in town has impervious surfaces like rooftops, driveways, and patios, while commercial parcels include the same, along with parking lots and outbuildings.
The town regularly performs stormwater management services like catch basin cleaning, street sweeping, leaf litter cleanup, construction site inspection, and constructing and maintaining the town’s sewer and drainage systems. New regulations will force the town to strengthen best practices in these areas.
There are about 4,000 land parcels in Millis, and each of these, whether they’re residential, commercial, municipal, or belonging to an organization, would pay into the proposed utility. Ms. Frederick showed how geographic information system (GIS) mapping calculates the rough square footage of impervious surface for each parcel of land in Millis. She also said GIS data would be verified for each parcel.
Mr. Guzinski and Mr. McCaffrey detailed why the town has recommended the creation of a new stormwater utility to fund compliance and activities. Millis currently funds stormwater management activities through the General Fund via taxation, but with the new regulations increasing the amount of activity to comply, the town needed to look at different funding methods.
Transitioning the program to a stormwater utility, a fund solely dedicated to the cost of stormwater management, is the town’s attempt to ensure that all parcel owners contribute monetarily in as fair a way as possible.
Since a stormwater utility is unrelated to property value or taxes, all property owners with developed land in town would receive a quarterly or annual bill, like the current water and sewer bill.
Exact costs for a new utility will be set if the warrant article passes at town meeting. Early estimates put the cost at three to five dollars per month for each 1,000 square feet of impervious surface per parcel, rounded to the nearest 1,000. Town leaders said that the typical single-family home in town would generate an annual stormwater utility bill of less than one hundred dollars.
Ms. Frederick and attendees also discussed credits, which could partially offset a parcel owner’s annual fee. Until the utility is adopted, the specifics around what would constitute a credit, and how much the credits would be, are theoretical. However, other locales with stormwater utilities offer credits for best practices like rain barrels, or installing rain-sensing sprinkler systems.
Several residents brought up interesting questions. If a contained community like Rockville Meadows has its own stormwater retention system, would they automatically get a credit? If one’s driveway sloped down from the street instead of into it, thus keeping runoff on one’s own property, would that deserve a credit? How about gravel driveways instead of asphalt driveways? Mr. McCaffrey said credits will be developed with public input after the town meeting if the utility is approved.
The Clean Water Act of 1972 significantly strengthened earlier legislation concerning the discharge into and cleanliness of all US waterways. Millis is operating under a permit, called the Municipal Separate Storm Sewer System, or MS4, issued in 2003. That permit covers about 260 MS4 towns and other municipalities throughout Massachusetts. Millis’s permit has since expired, but the EPA has kept the permit valid by renewing it while they’ve finalized the new requirements.
The new MS4 permit and increased regulations go into effect on July 1, 2018. All of the affected towns, including Millis, have to decide how to best fund their stormwater management to meet these new regulations. The legislation is an unfunded mandate—with no money provided for fulfilling those requirements.
A stormwater management area of concern high on Millis’s list is phosphorus—specifically, runoff into the Charles River and the tributaries feeding it. Millis must either decrease the amount of phosphorus entering the waters, or keep more stormwater out of the waters by shunting it to undeveloped land, which naturally filters phosphorus.
Phosphorus in waterways contributes to algae blooms, which lessen the quality of the water and negatively impact wildlife and the health of people living near areas of bloom.
If the warrant article to create a stormwater utility does not pass at the November town meeting, Millis will revisit the town budget. Because the program is an unfunded mandate, it will have to be paid for—the question that town meeting attendees must answer is if a new stormwater utility is the best way to do that.