Norris sets up utility
Stormwater runoff targeted; fees next
Norris City Council members and other city officials discuss creation of a stormwater utility department for the city during the council meeting on Monday, March 11. From left are Councilman Will Grinder, Councilman Bill Grieve, Mayor Chris Mitchell, City Manager Adam Ledford, and City Recorder Sandy Johnson. (photo:G. Chambers Williams III )
But the council still must set up an administrative structure for the utility, and decide on how much residents would have to pay on their monthly water bills to fund the new department.
Earlier suggestions for a monthly fee have put it somewhere under $5, but the council has not heard any formal recommendations yet from the city manager on how much it might need to charge.
On a 4-0 vote, with Councilman Chuck Nicholson abstaining, the council passed 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 pay for the operations of the department, which would operate separately from the city’s water works and public works departments.
Nicholson from the start has opposed setting a flat fee for residential property for the stormwater utility, instead proposing a complicated formula that would create a sliding scale and/or exempt some property owners from having to pay the monthly fee if their property doesn’t contribute stormwater runoff to the city’s stormwater collection system.
The rest of the council rejected a motion by Nicholson to amend the ordinance to create a system to evaluate each property separately, based on examination of county property records to see how many square feet of structures are on each property.
Nicholson reasoned that undeveloped property should be exempt, using the argument that they don’t have structures that displace the ground that is necessary to soak up rainwater rather than forcing it to run off into the streets.
But City Manager Adam Ledford and some council members, including Mayor Chris Mitchell, objected to that process, saying it would cost the city more in staff time to evaluate all the properties than the eventual fees would ever produce.
Nicholson’s motion died for lack of a second.
The council, on recommendation of several members, did remove a clause in the ordinance that would have created automatic exemptions from the stormwater fee for property owned by any federal, state, county, or municipal government, or any “property that does not discharge, directly or indirectly, stormwater runoff into the stormwater or flood control facilities of the municipality.”
Mayor Mitchell said government-owned property should not be exempt from the stormwater user fees, as these fees are not considered taxes, and because government entities, including the Tennessee Valley Authority, already are required pay other utility fees.
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 will set up the new department under control of the city manager, and most likely led by a director hired to oversee the operation.
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 limit 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.