City finds solution to stormwater problems

After receiving numerous complaints from local residents whose neighborhoods were flooded during the recent 12 inches of rain that inundated the city’s stormwater drainage system.

City Administrator Betty Taylor-Webb started looking right away for ways that city officials could fund improvements to the system, and at the Oct 6 commission meeting, she presented a proposal that called for establishing a stormwater utility fee.

If commissioners approve Webb’s plan, the city will charge a small fee to all utility customers that will go toward fixing and improving stormwater drainage throughout the city. The fee will show up on customer’s utility bills as a stormwater utility surcharge.

City Commissioners agreed to the concept and consented to hold a public workshop in the near future to work out details of the proposal. In the interim, commissioners approved the expenditure of $25,000 from reserves to start immediately addressing some of the city’s most pressing drainage concerns.

Webb’s plan for funding stormwater improvements couldn’t have come at a better time.

On Wednesday, October 8, Webb received a memo from Florida’s Speaker of the House Larry Cretul. Cretul announced in his memo, that for the second year in a row the Florida Legislature would not be accepting any Community Budget Issue Request System (CBIRS).

The City of Apalachicola along with other Florida communities often use CBIRS funding to pay for large infrastructure projects such as the construction and rehabilitation of water, wastewater, and stormwater related facilities. Without the funding, rural communities with small budgets often have to find other ways to fund these special infrastructure needs, if at all.

Speaker Cretul is rightly concerned over Florida’s budget; economists have repeatedly warned that the state’s budget will face a deficit of as much as $2.6 billion next year. The governor and legislators were able to plug the huge hole in the current year’s budget by using federal dollars received from President Obama’s onetime stimulus package.

“The fiscal challenges continuing to face our state have maintained our need to focus on solutions to balance the state’s budget. Accordingly, as we determined last year, we will again not be opening the Community Budget Issue Request System (CBIRS) this year. We again hope to avoid creating unrealistic funding expectations in our communities given the continuing decline in expected state revenues”, wrote Cretul.

If nothing else, the continued budget woes that the state and federal government find themselves in, should serve as a wake up call to us all that we are going to have to start finding ways to pay our own way.