Municipal coalition proposed to curb storm water costs
Leaders from several Fayette County municipalities met Thursday to learn about the requirements of the state Stormwater Management Act and discuss the possibility of forming a coalition to help save on associated costs.
Terry McMillen, president of McMillen Engineering of Uniontown, and Joseph Segilia, director of Outreach and Continuing Education at Penn State Fayette, The Eberly Campus, presented to more than a dozen municipal representatives at a workshop at Penn State Fayette aimed to open a dialogue about state-mandated stormwater improvements that will affect every Fayette County municipality.
The workshop comes in the wake of recent pressure by the state Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) for municipalities to comply with the Stormwater Management Act, which requires each municipality to implement a Municipal Separate Storm Sewer System, or MS4, a program to identify stormwater outfalls and treat water pollution that could prove costly for small municipal budgets.
Some Fayette County municipalities have already implemented programs, forced to comply many years ago by the DEP, while most have done very little to implement the costly MS4s, said McMillen.
“The single most important issue is the fact the DEP has recently started doing inspections,” McMillen said, noting that the current round of inspections is focused on compliance assistance, while the next round will focus on violations and repercussions.
McMillen said municipalities with larger populations will likely be prompted to implement stormwater management programs sooner than those with smaller populations, but all municipalities will be required to do the same work and spend the same money to reach compliance.
“If a municipality isn’t a MS4 program now, it will be eventually. It’s for the benefit of those townships to get on board with whatever can be developed here on a cooperative basis,” McMillen said. “It’s going to be expensive. … Rather than duplicate these components over and over and over, have one joint group and do it one time and have all municipalities benefit from that joint effort.”
McMillen and Segilia have proposed that the municipalities band together to cut costs in meeting the six control measures laid out by the DEP.
The specific cost of implementation is unknown, but some residents in other part of the state are paying $50 to $75 a month for stormwater as a result, McMillen said.
Some supervisors expressed dismay at the costs, saying that homeowners have a hard enough time paying for sewage, let alone additional costs for stormwater management.
“I don’t want to justify the requirement of these (programs) by the state,” said McMillen. “I’m just saying, given what the law is, I think there’s a less expensive way to comply with it.”
The first two measures involve carrying out a public education program on stormwater management and asking for public input in the decision-making process, measures that should have been performed years ago, McMillen said.
Most of state is well ahead of Fayette County in developing stormwater management programs and meeting MS4 requirements, he added, providing examples of ways locations throughout the state have decided to tackle the mandate.
Hempfield Township in Westmoreland County, for example, has chosen to implement program on its own, McMillen said, while Chester County is running the program on a county-wide basis with municipalities providing support funds.
Municipalities in the Schuylkill River watershed created a group to oversee the implementation, and municipalities in south central Pennsylvania formed an authority to cover implementation in that geographical area.
North Union Township supervisor Curtis Matthews said his township has been working over a decade to implement the program, for which it has worked to identify and map its outfalls and monitor water flows in preparation for DEP inspections. The township budgeted money each year to perform the necessary steps rather than increasing taxes, said Matthews.
Segilia offered Penn State’s assistance to the group, offering its community outreach, research and education programs to aid in the process.
“It does seem obvious that it’s going to be much cheaper to have partnerships with other townships and share the cost than it will be for your municipality to take on the full cost of the program within your municipality,” said McMillen. “The question becomes, how can we put a group together and how can all of this be accomplished?”
The next step would be to gauge the interest from all Fayette County municipalities and, if warranted, form an official group.
Supervisors expressed that it may be difficult to get townships that do not face immediate responsibility to participate, but McMillen urged those municipalities to look at the benefits of moving forward as a group.
“I think they should look ahead. If they’re going to have to do it at any time, the more people that take part now, the less it’s going to be on each of us. It’s going to be less expensive in the long run,” he said.
McMillen and Segilia agreed to set up another meeting early next year to further discuss the topic, encouraging all municipal leaders, as well as Fayette County commissioners and DEP representatives, to attend.