Norris adding $3 stormwater fee to residents’ utility bills in April
Norris residents will be required to pay an additional $3 a month added to their utility bills beginning in April to help fund the city’s new Stormwater Utility Department.
After a public hearing on the issue prior to Monday night’s City Council meeting, the council passed on second and final reading Ordinance 689, which sets up the fee structure to support the new department. The measure passed on first reading Jan. 13.
Also passed on second and final reading Monday night, after a public hearing, was Ordinance 692, which modifies the Norris Tree Commissions’ rules on what trees are allowed on city right-of-way, and how close they may be placed to sidewalks and utility lines.
A last-minute change in the Tree Commission ordinance, proposed by City Manager Adam Ledford, also cut the number of members on the commission to five from the previous seven.
That will include at least one and no more than two members of the City Council, appointed by the mayor, with the rest being Norris citizens.
Councilman and longtime Tree Commission Chairman Chuck Nicholson complained that it has sometimes been hard to have a quorum of the seven commission members in attendance at meetings – at least four – so the board can officially conduct business.
Nicholson and Ledford suggested that lowering the number of commissioners to five would make it easier to attract a quorum – at least three members – to the commission’s meetings.
The city also has found it hard to find enough people willing to volunteer to serve on the board to make up the full complement of members with seven.
The council set up the Stormwater Department last March to oversee the city’s stormwater-collection system, with the goal of helping the city avoid future trouble with state environmental authorities over raw sewage spills resulting from stormwater runoff into the city’s wastewater treatment plant.
Council members in January also agreed to have Ledford 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.
Ledford said at Monday’s meeting that he already has had a meeting with the firm, and is working on a contract.
On unanimous votes on first and second readings, the council passed Ordinance 689, which “establishes a base rate for stormwater user fees, setting the amount of $3 for single-family residential units.
The measure also sets monthly rates of $3 to $10 for commercial properties.
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 has set up the new department under control of the city manager.
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 the user fees paid by city residents, businesses and industries under Ordinance 689. Under state law, utilities are not allowed to be funded by property taxes.
In other business Monday night:
n The council approved a bid package to put its trash-collection contract out for consideration by qualifying firms.
The council decided in January that it would rather seek bids on a new contract, after receiving a proposal from the current contractor, Waste Connections, Inc., which would have raised the city’s monthly cost by $2,000, or about $4.29 per residential customer.
That proposal also would have reduced collections of recyclables to every other week, instead of weekly, and would have stopped backyard pickup of trash from cans for many residents – primarily those whose property would allow them to put their trash cans at the curb weekly for automatic pickup.
A new waste-collection contract must be in place by the end of the current one, June 30.
City Manager Adam Ledford said in January that the city already had 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.”
n Changed the date and time of the March council meeting to be at 6:30 p.m. Tuesday, March 4, rather than the regular time/date of 6 p.m. March 10.
The change was made because Mayor Mitchell and Councilman Nicholson said they would be out of town during the week of March 10.
Nicholson said he also would not be able to attend the March 4 meeting, but Mitchell said he would be there.
The council’s normal meeting schedule is 6 p.m. on the second Monday of each month.
n The city’s “no soliciting” list is now available on the Norris city website for residents to sign up their addresses to prevent commercial solicitation at their homes, Assistant City Manager Bailey Whited said.
The council set up the procedure in a revision of the Norris Peddlers Ordinance passed on second and final reading during the January meeting.
