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State House OKs storm-water management bill, allowing tax

By Alison Hawkes For The 3 min read

HARRISBURG – Ever since storm-water control became a buzzword in burgeoning suburban areas, towns have been the ones almost entirely in charge of stemming floods. That’s led to a patchwork of zoning laws, the dumping of water from one town to the next, and little coordination of effort in what is actually a much larger, watershed-level problem, according to Rep. David Steil (R-Bucks).

After a couple of sessions in the cooker, a bill Steil introduced that would allow certain counties to assume ultimate control over storm-water management and impose taxes on homes and businesses to pay for it passed the House on Wednesday.

House Bill 88 gives some of the most populated counties in the state the authority to develop comprehensive storm-water plans for watersheds within their boundaries. They could then take control of detention basins and other storm-water facilities owned by municipalities or developments, restore streams and wetlands, and build new mechanisms for storm-water control.

The bill does not give the counties any more ability than they already have to take property by eminent domain, Steil said. It applies to counties with populations over 210,000 (Philadelphia excluded).

To pay for this, counties could issue bonds or impose a separate annual storm-water tax as a flat fee on residential properties. Commercial properties would be taxed based on impervious surface coverage, and those containing storm-water-management facilities of a certain size would be taxed less.

Steil said he believes he lost a number of votes because a tax element was included in the bill, which passed 118-79.

“That’s the controversial part of this,” said Steil. “If there was no fee, I bet it would have passed unanimously. But if you didn’t have a fee it wouldn’t happen.”

A state statute from 1978 requires municipalities to implement storm-water controls on new development, but Steil noted that many of the technologies used decades ago are no longer effective, and development that occurred before the statute largely has no storm-water controls whatsoever. This bill would help counties change that, he said.

A similar bill passed the House last year but never gained traction in the Senate. Steil said he believes the bill is more popular this year because of the recent spate of flooding around the state, including two devastating floods in his home district of Yardley, which occurred six months apart.

Bucks County commissioners were unavailable for comment.

Alison Hawkes can be reached at 717-705-6330 or ahawkes@calkins-media.com.

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