Stormwater: Time To Green Carpet Your Deck

Amusing as it may be to come up with ideas on how to avoid a new tax, the last paragraph refers to non-residential properties.

This is not a new concept. City officials have, in the past, bemoaned the fact that parking lots are unlikely to have any city water installations. Thus the city has no mechanism to charge the owner for the fixed charge element of the recurring water and sewer bill. The city wants to find a way to ensure that the parking lot owner contributes to the recovery of the capital cost of the storm water sewer system and the maintenance thereafter.

Question: will the city tax itself? In Centrepointe there are acres and acres and acres of parking lots on city owned property. A small amount to support the users of the park. The vast majority, and by that I am referencing the roughly 1,600 parking spaces for city employees to park their personal use vehicles. The same city employees who choose not to take public transit to/from the Baseline Station major transit hub. The hub that is less than 600 metres away from the doors to the city office buildings.

Physician – heal thyself.

Voter, the alternative ways of measuring impermeable surfaces you identify appears to be an appeal to the city to be equitable in their approach. Unfortunately, city staff are driven by ease of administration. One size fits all policy is always about ease of administration, and ease of administration will always trump equitable treatment. Always.

Prior to the implementation of the current ystem for charging for water usage, the City had a pricing system that was based solely on consumption. As residents were incentivized to conserve water, they did so, very successfully. Unfortunately, running a water treatment system is highly capital intensive and costs are relatively inelastic to water consumption. As such, water rates were going up every year well above the rate of inflation or general property tax increases. The City claimed that this could be remedied by going to a system that combined a minimum fixed cost (regardless of usage) and a variable fee if one’s consumption went above the minimum. As well, unlike electricity, the cost of treating water is pretty much the same all day and the City has large reservoirs in which to store water (unlike electricity storage) so time of day pricing was irrelevant (even though the City went to these smart meters at some time in its history). My consulting company was commissioned by a City councillor to look at various ways of charging for water and the likely outcome on annual water increases. I looked at several cities throughout Canada and the U.S. that charged based on a consumption, fixed amounts and a combination therein. The conclusion was that regardless of how a City charged for water, rates across almost all North American cities climbed faster than inflation and property tax increases. The issue wasn’t water usage but the increasing costs associated with delivering a modern water storage, filtration and treatment system. Improved water standards cost more money and the rising water rates had little to do with consumption and everything to do with rising costs. My scope of work did not include any review of the costs. Based on the experience of other cities, I predicted that changing the way in which water was priced would not alleviate rising water rates. At the expense of many million dollars, the City implemented a new billing structure and within its first years, rates were increasing well above inflation and general tax rates. Staff and council wanted to be seen to be doing something and all they did was spend a lot of money to change a billing system without solving any problem. I did also recommend run-off charges, however, should be correlated with the permeable surface of a property. Several cities in Canada have now developed models for this, some more exact than others. Given that Ottawa seems to be embracing building the maximum coverage to the lot line, even at the expense of mature trees, hopefully any revised system will reward those people who still see the importance of permeable lawns, gardens and mature trees that suck up run-off.