How do you propose that the city pay for its stormwater program?

By Jimmy LaRoue

Published: May 5, 2008

Responses from Waynesboro’s At-large City Council candidates to the following question asked by The News Virginian:

Frank Lucente: Right now, people don’t realize this, but the city has borrowed $6.2 million to do the first eight projects, high-priority projects for stormwater and they’ll be contracted out. We’ve borrowed $500,000 for equipment to run the stormwater, so almost $7 million we’ve got in it. So what we’ve got to do now is figure out how we’re going to pay for the annual maintenance of the stormwater, finish 20-some other projects that can be done in-house. I was initially for the fee, but after nobody compromised on that - and taking a lot of abuse from citizens and businesses - I decided that the best way to do would be to take it out of the general fund. I applaud what the City Manager did by cutting it in half. I found out recently that we’re going to employ another crew of prisoners - an eight-man force - for a five-month period. Hopefully, we can use this force to work on the stormwater. That’s an eight-man working crew that we can work on stormwater maintenance, cleaning out some of these boxes and pipes and brush out of these streams. We’re going to get something done. Now the disadvantage of the stormwater being in the general fund is you’ve got to do it every year, figure out what you’re going to do, but I just, at this point in time, am very strongly opposed to any fees or taxes on the citizens to do this. There’s pluses to both sides to the issue, but right now we can’t do the utility without doing the fee, but we can take it out of the general fund without raising taxes. My overriding thing right now is no more taxes and fees.

DuBose Egleston, Jr.: First of all, I was very disappointed that we couldn’t come up with an answer after 16 months of discussion. I think that gave the city a black eye. I think Charlottesville initiated a stormwater fee. Staunton did. And we still haven’t done it. I was in favor of a utility fee. I think the average fee for the homeowner was $7 a month. And I don’t like fees because they don’t come off. I would look at the I&I [inflow and infiltration] fee and see when it’s coming off, and then I would look at the utility fee. I think we’ve got to have it fair for all people, including industry and commercial people. To that end, I would get the top 10 industries - impervious surface people - that have the greatest impervious surface, and I would get them in a conference room and we could have a discussion for two hours with two or three engineers, the city manager and two council members. And in two weeks, I would bring them back together. We’ve got to have some discussion and some outcome of what’s fair for the industries. Nobody wants to pay a utility fee. Nobody wants to pay for stormwater, but these are problems that have affected Waynesboro for years and years and years. They’re getting worse. There’s no stormwater beyond King Avenue in the Wayne Hills section. We’ve got problems on Chatham Road. We’ve got problems along the river. Now none of this is addressing the river problem. This is all interior flooding. I think we’ve got to figure out a way to pay for it. I would not put it into the general fund, because every new councilman, every two years, is going to come up for debate, and it’s like having a reserve fund. If you don’t have a strong council - and thank goodness we’ve got a reserve fund, because we’ve used it this year - but if you don’t have a strong council, you’re going to say, ‘well, let’s get rid of stormwater in the general fund.’ I would not raise taxes. I think there’s some places we can cut money, but I don’t see that there’s a lot of fat in the budget either.

Jeremy Taylor: I believe that the fee-based utility is the better way to go rather than fund it from the general fund. The general fund does not provide any certain source of revenue for our stormwater fund if we commit it to the general fund. It does not provide us a sustainable source of revenue that can be used to operate the system. My fear if we commit it to the general fund is that we’re going to have maybe a year or two that goes by where we don’t have any major storms and we know how people are, and council may well be tempted to take the funds that were earmarked in the general fund - just throw the money in the general fund and hope that you’re going to have it there when we need it. The funds that we put into the general fund thinking that we were going to use for stormwater for something else, when the situation doesn’t arise, that stormwater is at the front of our consciousness. The problem is that, a couple of years down the road, if we’re faced with a situation where we have to make immediate improvements, or accelerate the improvements, it’s going to take a lot of money, and a lot of money which we didn’t have because it was just put in the general fund without a sustainable basis.