Rain bounces off rooftops, washes down buildings and races off driveways and parking lots into the street, joining hundreds of gallons more rushing for storm drains and a new home in nearby rivers and creeks. And it carries all manner of dirt and disease with it.
Forty years into a national crusade to save the Chesapeake Bay, attention centers on this most difficult of targets: stopping the pollution that washes off with the rain. Maryland’s answer has been to tax property owners for their rainwater runoff, based on the amount of impervious surface, and reward those who take remedial action. And after years of bitter resistance, the so-called rain tax has settled into an accepted fact of life. The debate now focuses on how to broaden the base of property owners who pay stormwater fees. The complaint is that not every property owner is treated equally. And government properties don’t have to pay at all.
Patrick Donoho, president of the Maryland Retailers Association, says that’s neither fair nor practical. “Stormwater run-off does not know the tax status or ownership of the property over which it runs,” he said. “If you are really committed to managing it, then it should be blind to ownership.”
Maryland’s ten most populous subdivisions were directed by the legislature in 2012 to create a fee to finance remedial steps to meet federal clean-the-Bay guidelines. But thanks to local political pressures, they have responded quite differently. The result is a hodge-podge.
For example, in Annapolis, the privately-owned Navy Marine Corps Memorial Stadium pays a $500 annual stormwater fee to the city. Yet the nearby Annapolis Mall was billed nearly $35,000 by Anne Arundel County. That fee could be reduced by mitigation credits, but only by half.
Meanwhile, the Chesapeake Bay Foundation paid $2,000 to the county last year on its Bay-front headquarters a few miles away. But the environmental advocacy group is due a refund thanks to a $1 token charge granted to churches that was later extended to all non-profits.
“I think we were trying to be as fair as we could,” said Republican County Councilman Dick Ladd. He acknowledged concerns about the way the fee is applied but said they paled against broad opposition to the fee itself.
The question of who should pay is particularly troublesome in Baltimore, where city Delegate Maggie McIntosh says 33 percent of the buildings are non-taxable structures owned by governments or non-profits—compared to an 11 percent average in the counties. “So, when it comes to storm water run-off, we do have to look to the non-profit sector to be a part of the solution,” says McIntosh, chair of the House Environmental Matters committee.
Churches and synagogues get a break on the city fee, but not for their parking lots or other buildings. Non-profits are assessed on the same square footage basis as homeowners. For the Johns Hopkins medical complex the annual charge—before mitigation credits—could exceed $46,000.
But there’s still the dilemma of state and local government buildings, which were exempted from the stormwater fee by the General Assembly in 2012. Delegate Al Carr, a Montgomery county Democrat, tried unsuccessfully to close that hole in the fee base last year. “It’s a utility,” he said. “Everybody pays according to what they use or what they contribute. So that’s why government agencies aren’t exempt from paying their water bills. They shouldn’t be exempt from paying their stormwater utility fees.”
Governor Martin O’Malley put $2.8 million in this year’s budget to compensate counties for runoff from state property. But Howard County Republican Senator Allan Kittleman, who tried in vain to repeal the fee mandate, said the state should be required to participate. “What’s good for the goose is good for the gander,” he argued.