Norris council votes to approve $3 stormwater fee eyes upgrades
The Norris City Council on Monday night passed on first reading an ordinance setting a monthly fee of $3 per single-family residence that would be added to utility bills to help fund the city’s new Stormwater Utility Department.
This new department was set up last March to oversee the stormwater collection system, with the goal of helping the city avoid future trouble with state environmental authorities over raw sewage spills from the city’s wastewater treatment plant.
Council members also agreed to negotiate with an engineering company, Civil & Environmental Consultants, Inc., of Knoxville, to research and map out the city’s current stormwater collection system as the basis for repairs and upgrades.
On a unanimous vote, the council passed on first reading Ordinance 689, which “establishes a base rate for stormwater user fees, setting the amount of the [single family residential unit].”
The measure would set rates of $3 to $10 monthly for commercial properties.
It still must pass on second reading to be finalized, and there will be a public hearing before the next council meeting to allow public input on the proposed fee.
Last March, 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 measure was 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.
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 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 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.
In other business Monday night:
n The council decided to put its trash-collection contract out for bids, after receiving a proposal from the current contractor, Waste Collections, Inc., which would have raised the city’s monthly cost of waste collection by $2,000, or about $4.29 per residential customer.
That proposal also would reduce collections of recyclables to every other week, instead of weekly, and would stop backyard pickup of trash from cans for residents whose property could allow them to take their trash cans to the curbside for automatic pickup.
A bid package will be up for approval by the council at its next meeting, Feb. 10, and a new contract would need to be in place by the end of the current one, June 30.
City Manager Adam Ledford said the city already has three waste-collection companies interested in bidding on the contract.
Mayor Chris Mitchell said the proposal already submitted by Waste Connections, which has held the contract for several years, would mean “We would be paying more for less.”
