How would you do things differently if you were building your municipal utility from the start? The City of Tega Cay, S.C., had exactly that opportunity with stormwater management.

Regulatory changes required the city to get a formal permit for its stormwater utility just five years ago. It set up its first fee structure less than three years ago. The first stormwater ordinance was signed in March 2009. “So this is all relatively new to us,” says Tim Gillette, who as stormwater manager must carry out the terms of that law.

Tega Cay is part of the fastest-growing area in York County, itself the fastest-growing county in the state. As the city booms, Gillette and other officials are learning on the fly what it takes to run a modern stormwater program that is friendly to the environment and to ratepayers.

You could say the city is building its operation from the ground up — or the ground down. It’s done with careful planning and a heap of public education.

Young city

Located 20 miles southwest of Charlotte, N.C., just over the state line, Tega Cay is a former gated community that hugs the shores of Lake Wylie and the Catawba River. The city was founded in 1984. The stormwater system consists of more than eight miles of pipe draining about six square miles and serving a population of 7,500. The system will grow to about 10 miles once some development projects are finished in the next three to five years.

Stormwater pipes range from 8 inches to 4 feet, most in the 16- to 24-inch range. They include older galvanized steel pipe, reinforced concrete, and newer high-density PVC. “We like the newer stuff better,” says Gillette. “It lasts a good bit longer.”

Until 2006, the stormwater collection system was basically unregulated — just a simple line item in the general fund budget. Starting that year, new EPA regulations required Tega Cay to obtain NPDES permits. With that it became clear that the community would have to find an alternative way of funding a program previously covered by regular property taxes.

Step One was an evaluation of the storm sewer program. For that, the city hired the international consulting firm AMEC, which has an office in Morrisville, N.C.

Two-level billing

AMEC evaluated Tega Cay’s system and operation and helped the city set its first separate stormwater management budget, including a mechanism to pay for it. Several factors came into play. Because two separate water systems serve city residents — one municipal and one private — the stormwater charges couldn’t simply be tacked on to the city’s water bill. And York County, which collects property taxes for the city, declined to add it to the annual tax bills, says Charlie Funderburk, operations director for the city.

State law limits how much communities can raise taxes each year, based on the consumer price index and population growth. That ruled out simply adding the cost on to the property tax. “AMEC showed us that the most equitable way to fund this new program was to charge the customer based on what they were contributing in the way of impervious surface,” Funderburk says. “Therefore we have a utility fee. That way the customers are paying their fair share.”

The city settled on a two-tier payment plan. Residential property owners pay a flat fee of $96 a year — $8 a month billed annually. “Otherwise, that $8 a month bill might end up being $15 a month, or more, to cover postage, billing, receivables, payables, things like that,” says Funderburk.

Commercial customers pay on the basis of an Equivalent Residential Unit (ERU). For Tega Cay, one ERU is 3,600 square feet of impervious surface on a commercial property. A property’s total number of ERUs is multiplied by $96 to derive its annual stormwater fee. Some commercial properties have 50 or more ERUs.

When people don’t pay, late fees are added and, if necessary, the city takes delinquent payers to court. “Then that $96 fee ends up costing them significantly more,” says Funderburk. “And that’s unfortunate. Everyone’s battling the economy and hard times with layoffs and things like that. Tega Cay is not immune to that. But at the end of the day, we have mandates that we have to meet as stipulated by the state and the EPA. We’ve tried to work with folks that have contacted us. Requiring residents to pay late fees and in some cases court costs on top of that is not an ideal situation by any means.”

Educating the public

AMEC’s report was important not just to help the city decide how much to charge for stormwater management, but to make the case to the people who would pay for it, and determine what needed to be done to be in compliance with mandates stipulated in the permit.

“We wanted to have hard data that showed not only us but residents and customers why the fee is what it is,” Funderburk says. “And it’s not just some arbitrary fee. If somebody did choose to fight it with legal means, we had background data that shows this is scientifically how we arrived at this fee — it wasn’t just some abstract number that we pulled out of thin air. We need to be able to show that this is what it will cost us to have a compliant storm sewer system that addresses every mandate.”

Education was important early on. “A lot of people were confusing storm sewers with their sanitary sewer, with their water bills, things like that,” Funderburk says. “We did get a lot of questions.”

The education paid off. Unlike water or electricity, there is no way to cut off stormwater service for lack of payment. “Our consultant told us to expect probably a 92 percent collection rate,” Funderburk says. “In our first year, we achieved right at 97 percent,” even though there was still some public objection.

How did Tega Cay do so well? Funderburk credits a lot of meetings, many with a consulting firm representative, well before even the first bill went out. There were pamphlets to each home and business, question-and-answer sessions, and a prominent Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs) page on the city’s website that grew as city officials logged repeated questions from citizen callers.

The city has also promoted monthly stormwater tips on the Web to advise residents what they should and shouldn’t do that can affect the stormwater flow. “We are also very fortunate to have a large number of residents who are environmentally conscious and understand the importance of this utility,” Funderburk adds.

Building awareness

“Most people when they think of stormwater, they think of massive pipes with tons and tons of water flowing through them,” Gillette says. “But they don’t think about their grass clippings that they blow out into the street getting into the storm sewer system, washing out their paint brush over a street drain, or having unmulched or unvegetated areas of their yard and dirt running out into the street drain. They weren’t geared to think, ‘Oh that’s affecting stormwater.’”

Now the city is ramping up its education by expanding public participation. “We’re partnering with the local school district to get information to students at the elementary and middle-school level in science classes,” Gillette says. Boy Scouts are enlisted to stencil warnings on street drains to keep people from dumping toxic materials like paint. And an annual river sweep encourages people to clean litter out from around the watercourses and keep it out of storm drains.

Education also extends to teaching developers how to build and landscape to maintain the integrity of the land and prevent erosion, which can clog storm lines and waterways over time.

From reactive to proactive

As stormwater manager, Gillette meets monthly with the city’s stormwater committee. “One of the key objectives right now is updating the goals of our Minimal Control Measures (MCMs) as part of our stormwater management plan,” says Gillette. “The new NPDES permit is still in draft phase, but once it comes out, there are potentially a host of new regulations that the city will have to address, and pretty quickly.”

Maintenance now tends to focus on immediate and urgent matters, as when a resident complains of a sinkhole in the backyard, a stormwater discharge pipe flooding a property, or a clogged catch basin. The response in turn requires evaluating what needs to be done to fix the situation. It may also involve teaching property owners not to do such things as covering a stormwater outfall.

Typically, the city has identified 12 to 15 major stormwater-related capital projects at any one time. Many of those involve repairing inlets or reworking outfalls. In other cases, the staff is replacing old lines that have become corroded or otherwise damaged. For now the city primarily uses open-cut methods, but there is interest in exploring trenchless methods, such as cured-in-place lining.

Keeping it simple

Many of the city’s methods are basic. Equipment is shared, from the city’s backhoe to the DinkMar Curb Runner trailer vacuum unit typically towed behind a light-duty Ford F450 dump truck to collect loose leaves from gutters to keep them out of the stormwater lines. The city has no jetters, no TV cameras and no combination trucks — not yet, anyway. When the service is needed, “We just rent one, or we contract it to come in,” Funderburk says.

A few years ago employees map-ped the stormwater system over a 2 1/2-month period simply by walking around with GPS units, identifying outlets and inlets, and recording their findings in a CAD file integrated with York County’s GIS to make a map.

“We haven’t yet gotten into smoke testing or dye to trace things, but we probably will over the next couple of years so that we can capture the remainder of the inventory,” Funderburk says. And when newly developed areas are added to the city, developers are now required to provide a digital map of the stormwater system that can be added to the city’s file.

Bit by bit, the information is becoming more complete. Gillette, for instance, has identified every stormwater line that crosses under a road in the city. “We feel like those need to be our number one concern, especially in the older sections of town where we’ve got galvanized steel pipe that may have rusted,” says Gillette. “We don’t want to end up running into road failure or something like that.”

While the city is building its knowledge and systems, it strives to take the longer view. “Being new to this, a good bit of what we do is reactionary,” Funderburk says. “A problem has presented itself, let’s remedy the problem. We’re just now starting to develop a capital improvement program and starting to forecast projects for the future. We’re trying to become more proactive.

“Hopefully, over the next year to three years, we’ll get to the point where we’ve identified future problems and get those targeted on a list to remedy before they become serious.” So as Tega Cay keeps its eye on the future, it has made good use of the fresh start. It’s a start that helps ensure that future will be built on solid ground.