Lexington, KY - In 2010, Lexingtonians will begin paying the price for decades of laissez-faire storm water policies. The first fees are set to appear on water bills in January, and the money collected from home owners, businesses and other property-owning organizations will fun a new vigilance in managing what the community allows to wash into its waterways.
But in addition to the almost $300 million that the city expects to spend over the next 10 years to improve its sanitary and storm water systems and wastewater treatment plants, the new EPA-mandated initiative will require a change in Lexington's overall attitude about water. It is everyone's responsibility, and it's time to foot the bill.
When Lexington's Commissioner of the Department of Environmental Quality Cheryl Taylor and Director of the Division of Water Quality Charles Martin launch into any conversation about their work to improve Lexington's water quality, it usually starts with some clarification about exactly what system they are discussing.
Their job encompasses both the sanitary sewer system and the storm water system. The former moves and treats the city's sewage, and the latter collects water from the streets and directs it to local waterways. They are meant to function as separate systems, but according to a recent public survey by the city of Lexington, that crucial difference is lost on roughly three-quarters of Lexington's citizenry.
As the city faces a decade of EPA-mandated improvements with a $300 million price tag to put it in compliance with the Clean Water Act, the biggest challenge that Taylor and Martin face may not be fixing the pipes. It may be repairing the mindset of thousands of Lexingtonians who, starting in January, will be assessed an extra fee on their water bill to manage a water issue that typically has not been a matter of much concern.
In terms of its sanitary sewer system, the city currently has roughly $70 million worth of capital improvements and field analysis underway, according to Martin. The city is nearing completion of $35 million in pump station replacements, and two additional replacements are planned for the next year, at a cost of about $16 million.
But while people generally can grasp the need for a well-functioning sanitary sewer system, many assume that storm water essentially takes care of itself. Lexington has never really addressed storm water as a separate utility, Taylor said, which has led to some confusion as the city looks to initiate its new fee assessment, officially known as the water quality management fee.
"We had to decide as a community what was the water quality standard we were trying to reach.
How would we define what a person would owe?" Taylor said.
The city set up a storm water fee task force earlier this year, chaired by Councilmember Linda Gorton, to decide how the fee would be assessed. The group established a standard of 2,500 square feet of impervious surface, also known as an equivalent residential unit (ERU), for every single-family home or duplex, with a fee of $4.32 per month for each ERU. Businesses will be assessed based on the number of ERUs on their property, including rooftops and impervious parking lots.
Although the water quality management fee is new for Lexington, it is not unusual. More than 900 communities across the country currently have a fee in place for storm water management, Taylor said. And Lexington is also not alone in its noncompliance with the national Clean Water Act. One advantage that Lexington has over many other cities sanctioned by the EPA for violations of the Clean Water Act is storm water and sanitary sewer systems here were designed to operate separately, Martin said. Other systems, including those in Louisville and northern Kentucky, were built as combined systems, sending excess sanitary discharge untreated into the region's waterways.
That doesn't mean the city's task won't be a challenge. The consent decree sets strict, measurable performance standards that carry hefty fines for noncompliance, Martin said. As Lexington continues to organize the billing procedures for the water quality management fee, the city's work on storm water system improvement has been focused on the development of enforcement protocols, Martin said.
"That was the number-one thing that the EPA was focused on (in relation to) our storm water program," Martin said. "They felt like our enforcement was so lax is that we didn't have the mechanisms to keep things under control."
The city has also started the sizable task of mapping its storm water system.
"The sanitary system maps are actually quite accurate and we have good information there," Taylor said. "But the storm system has evolved piecemeal over decades, and there was never a central mapping program for that."
Building a solid base of knowledge about the system, including the size and condition of pipes and basins, is a critical first step in managing the system, Taylor said. The city is also working to develop a new incentive program designed to encourage citizen-driven improvements that will begin after the first of the year, Taylor said.
The committee initially considered offering a credit against billed fees to reward those who initiated projects aimed at water quality improvement and storm water abatement. However, after checking with other communities that use credit programs, including northern Kentucky and Louisville, they found that such programs were highly underutilized, with only a small percentage of customers taking advantage of them.
"We wanted a program that was more robust than that," Taylor said. "We wanted something that people would actually use."
The incentive program will help qualifying applicants upfront with the cost of making improvements that will enhance the community's water quality and reduce burdens on the system, Taylor said. In the long term, such improvements might also help to reduce the property's water quality management fee assessment by converting impervious surfaces into pervious ones, Martin added.
"We think that's going to be a much more aggressive way for people to take advantage of opportunities to improve water quality," Taylor said.
Martin and Taylor both see community outreach and education as an essential component of the city's water quality program, with the potential to save both money and manpower in the long run.
"The storm sewer program is so people-intensive," Martin said. "It's inspect this, document that, enforce against this, collect fines.
Ö The best way for this community to be able to keep its cost low in the storm water program is to police themselves."
In addition to changing the mindset of its citizens, the city is also making changes to the way it has operated in the past. Under the Newberry administration, oversight of the city's storm water and sanitary sewer systems has been combined within the city's Division of Water Quality, which will allow better coordination of capital improvement projects, Martin said.
"I'm sure there are many people in this community who have seen the city come in and do a sanitary sewer replacement and then, three years later, come back in and do the storm sewer.
And they said, 'What gives with this?'" Martin said. "Now capital construction for both (sanitary sewers and storm sewers) are in the same group, and we're going to pave that street one time, ... and that's certainly going to save us money."
Martin is also looking to take a more large-scale and proactive approach to flooding problems in the coming years.
"In the past Ö we've been going out and dealing with individual, localized projects where these houses flood, so we tear them down," Martin said.
"There's not been any real look toward what's the downstream capacity."
The $30 million supplemental environmental project required by the EPA as part of the consent decree essentially will involve a reevaluation of the city's existing flood project priority list, Martin said, which will require public discussion.
The Division of Water Quality also plans to develop an RFP for one or more engineering firms to develop a master plan for the city's storm sewer system, which the city currently does not have, Martin said. Martin said he hopes a master plan will offer the opportunity to approach flooding problems from a larger perspective, as opposed to the localized, reactionary approach of tearing down chronically flooding homes, which has been Lexington's primary solution in years past.
"I don't think it's really been good for anybody," Martin said.
"It's been the only mechanism that has been available to the storm water folks over the years, but I'd really like to turn that on its ear and look at it from the watershed approach. Is there a larger regional project that we can do that has a similar footprint, that is located in one place and has a broader impact for what developing or existing properties drain to that area?"
In addition to the mapping that the city is required to complete, Martin said he also hopes to initiate limited-scale modeling in areas that have a large potential for redevelopment to predict how changes in property characteristics and the possible use of green infrastructure will affect storm water capacity.
As part of the consent decree, the city will also be expected to conduct more rigorous inspections and enforcement of best practices management at commercial properties and construction sites. According to Martin, local builders have come a long way in terms of recognizing and addressing environmental shortfalls at building sites, but implementation can still be a challenge.
"I think that most of the development community and the home builders are fully aware of what the requirements are, and I think they do their best with trying to make sure that they hold their contractors or sub-contractors accountable for it," Martin said. "But it really gets down to the guy driving the truck."
The costs of the storm water and sanitary sewer improvements will ultimately fall to local community members and consumers, Martin said. While some have raised concerns about the disincentive it creates for new and relocating businesses to set up shop in Lexington, Martin said that although it is a concern to him, businesses would be hard-pressed to find another urban community that is not facing similar circumstances, in terms of its storm water fee.
As the city looks to make important development decisions in the coming years, Taylor said she sees an increased need for interaction between the city's planning department, local developers and the Division of Water Quality to ensure the city has the capacity to accommodate growth in different areas of the city.
"It is not our intention at all to stifle growth," Taylor said. "Growth is vital to this community. Infill and redevelopment are highly desirable for all of us, and so it is our intention to make sure that we work closely with the business community to look out into the future, to plan for what they may want to develop and prepare for that."
In addition to policing themselves, local businesses can get a jump on the changes to come by taking a critical look at their own systems and considering greener options they might want to implement in the future.
"We're very interested in working with the business community, because essentially a lot of the improvement in this community's water quality over the next decade is going to be led by our businesses," Taylor said. "We want to make sure that as a city we're providing all the resources we can, we're planning ahead and that we're enabling businesses to take that lead for us."