Norris OKs creation of stormwater utility
Norris residents may soon see an additional monthly charge on their water bills to finance a new stormwater-management utility department that the City Council tentatively approved Monday night.
On a unanimous vote, the council passed on first reading Ordinance 672, titled, “An Ordinance of the City of Norris, Tennessee, Establishing a Stormwater Utility.”
The intent of the council is to set fees for residents and businesses that would finance the operations of the department, which would operate separately from the city’s water works and public works departments.
A public hearing and a workshop to discuss the fee structure has been set for 5 p.m. on Monday, March 11, prior to the regular council meeting at 6 p.m. The council is expected to pass the ordinance on second and final reading during that council meeting.
In its efforts to stop excess runoff of stormwater into the city’s sanitary sewer system – which has caused the city to run afoul of state environmental regulations – the city would set up the new department under control of the city manager, and led by a director hired to oversee the operation.
City Council members held an initial workshop on Feb. 2 to discuss the stormwater department proposal and the possibility of establishing user fees. But the fee structure was not included in the ordinance as passed on first reading.
An initial suggestion was that it could add about $2.70 a month to residential water bills, but the actual charge is still to be determined.
The goal is to create a better system of managing stormwater runoff than what the city now has, which includes some stormwater collection lines mostly along city streets.
But the problem is that during periods of heavy rain, stormwater infiltrates the city’s sanitary sewer system, causing an unmanageable flow to the city’s wastewater treatment plant.
There, the excess stormwater mixes with raw sewage, and because it can quickly overwhelm the treatment facility, this combination of sewage and stormwater ends up bypassing the treatment plant along East Norris Road, and gets dumped into nearby Buffalo Creek.
Since early 2022, Norris has been under a “director’s order” from the Tennessee Department of Environment and Conservation to clean up its discharge of sewage into the creek, since the department found the city in violation of water-quality regulations concerning those discharges bypassing the sewage-treatment plant.
The city hired Cannon & Cannon Consulting Engineers of Knoxville to create the plan to remedy the violations. That plan, submitted to the council in May 2022, called for making the required repairs beginning as soon as possible, with an estimated completion date of late 2028.
Under the engineers’ plan, the price for the bulk of the work was estimated to be $5.488 million, with a potential bill as high as $6.6 million.
That does not include the possibility the city might need to install a 750,000-gallon holding tank for stormwater runoff, at an additional cost of more than $2.1 million.
The stormwater management program would get its operating budget from user fees paid by city residents, businesses and industries. Under state law, utilities are not allowed to be funded by property taxes.
Such a program could be efficient enough to allow the city to limit the size of the storage tank that’s being considered for the sewage plant site, intended to hold the contaminated stormwater runoff temporarily instead of allowing it to flow untreated into Buffalo Creek.
Norris was ordered by the Division of Water Resources to fix the stormwater runoff issue, or end up paying $23,460 in fines – or more -- for violations of state regulations regarding discharge of the polluted water into Buffalo Creek, at a point just behind the Chunky Monkey ice cream shop on Andersonville Highway.
The city already has paid $4,692 of that fine to the state, and would be on the hook for the rest unless its remediation plan is carried out as scheduled.
The city contracted with Cannon & Cannon for $300,000 to study the sanitary sewer system to find out where the stormwater is entering the system during heavy rains, which can add an extra million gallons of water per day to the sewer system.