Valley Residents May Get Break On Stormwater System Payments

Maybe your basement floods each spring.

Maybe it doesn’t.

If you own property in the Spokane Valley, or elsewhere in unincorporated Spokane County, it doesn’t matter: Your wallet will get hit to help pay for a $63 million county stormwater system.

The size of the bills - which will vary by property size and location - will shock many people, said county stormwater utility manager Brenda Sims. Those estimates will be available within the next few months.

But there could be good news, especially for Valley residents.

County officials have acknowledged that the current stormwater utility fee system isn’t fair, since it draws about 50 percent of its revenue from the Valley and 65 percent from businesses.

This, despite the fact that the most serious, and costly, flooding problems are located outside the Valley, and most occur in residential developments, not business districts.

Eaglewood and Five Mile Prairie on the North Side, and the Glenrose Prairie, Browne Mountain and Central Park areas south of Spokane are some of the areas hardest hit by stormwater flooding and erosion.

A stormwater system funding consultant has recommended ways the county find a more equitable way to fund stormwater system construction.

The consultant recommended a two-tier rate structure, which would charge everyone the same amount for certain costs: administration, routine maintenance, planning, water quality monitoring. But, residents of individual watersheds would pay for their own construction projects and repairs.

Basically, this would mean that areas with problems that are expensive to fix would pay more than areas such as the Valley, where the sandy soils can be used to deal with flooding problems naturally, instead of with underground piping.

If the recommendations go over with county residents and commissioners, each watershed would have an individualized plan for funding its stormwater needs, based upon what the residents prefer and how much time they need to pay off the projects.

Larger landowners, including large businesses such as those in the Spokane Industrial Park, might get a substantial fee cut if they already have an effective system for managing their own stormwater.

Doing this would mean residential property owners would shoulder the brunt of the costs.

“The most serious stormwater complaints we have are in residential areas,” Sims said.

County stormwater utility officials will begin holding public meetings in different neighborhoods around the county within the next few months. They will tell residents how much the owner of an average residential parcel in a particular watershed can expect to pay. They’ll discuss the watershed’s options for funding its needed projects, and collect input on residents’ ideas and preferences.

So far, the county has completed stormwater plans for three of its 14 watersheds. According to those plans, fixing stormwater problems will cost $14.9 million in the Glenrose watershed, $3.6 million in the Central Park watershed and $3.5 million in the Chester Creek watershed, Sims said.

Studies of the remaining 11 watersheds will be completed over the next eight or 10 years, she said.

, DataTimes