By Councilmember Dan Carson, Commissioner Elaine Roberts Musser, and Vice Mayor Lucas Frerichs
We call upon our community to defend Davis from a serious potential climate threat. We face the risk that, sooner or later, super-storms like the renowned Pineapple Express will dump extraordinary amounts of rain on Davis. Unless we act with foresight, and vote “yes” on the city’s stormwater initiative, a catastrophic series of storms could someday inundate and disrupt our community and cause loss of life or property damage.
It is time – in fact, long past time – for us to act to upgrade and modernize a stormwater control system with some equipment and facilities that are nearly a century old. If this system is not fixed, expanded, upgraded, and better staffed to conduct maintenance and other operations to proactively manage the system, it could fail, with potentially dire consequences:
- Failure of the Richards Tunnel Pump Station #6, built in 1924 when the city was much smaller, would result in flooding of the Richards Boulevard tunnel that would cut off this route into and out of the city and potentially hinder the ability of our emergency services crews to respond to South Davis. A temporary pump must be brought in by truck sometimes to handle the excess water.
- South Davis Pump Station #5, built in 1966, is subject to major flooding within the station itself, creating hazardous conditions for city staff and even thwarting their access to the pump during emergencies. Failure of the station would result in significant flood damage and flooding that could reach Interstate 80, causing safety and operational issues.
- The H Street Pump Station #3, which has protected Central Davis since 1948, is at risk of structural damage in a seismic event and is inadequately sized to meet the required capacity. Failure of this station would result in significant and widespread flooding within the area from State Route 113 to Pole Line and from just north of Covell to Russell Boulevard.
- Strict new government clean water standards require the removal of pollutants from stormwater before entering our local waterways. This will require additional resources we don’t
have.
If you are a City of Davis property owner, you may have already received a ballot in the mail from the city. It will ask you to cast your vote on whether to adopt an increase in stormwater rates sufficient to fix these problems. We urge you to vote “yes.”
The proposed stormwater fees are reasonable. For a Davis home on a medium-sized parcel, for example, the fee would increase from about $6 to $13 per parcel with future adjustments for inflation. While state law prohibits the city from discounting utility fees, there are several government programs in place to provide assistance for low-income persons affected by the pandemic that could assist in paying their entire city utility bill, including these fees.
In the future, the City Council has the option to limit future increases in these fees that are offset by other revenue sources, such as federal or state grants. However, the fees can never exceed the amounts approved by voters.
The stormwater fees paid by a particular property owner are based on a formula reflecting what proportion of their property is taken up by impervious surfaces such as pavement and roofs that cause water runoff. Commercial properties, which generally have more impervious surfaces, will pay more. This is a fundamentally fair approach to allocating these costs. A more detailed explanation can be found at stormwater.cityofdavis.org.
The roughly $4 million in annual revenue generated by the fees will allow the city to finance $34 million in critically needed capital improvement projects to upgrade the pumping stations highlighted above and improve other facilities. This funding is needed because our stormwater system is a massive and complex piece of infrastructure – with 195 miles of storm drain pipes, drainage channels, and access roads, and 3,400 storm drain inlets that must be inspected and cleared before the rainy season each year.
The fee revenues cannot be used for any other program or purpose than stormwater management and cannot be taken away by state government. The money must be used in Davis to fix Davis’ stormwater problems.
The process to move forward with the fees has been transparent. The proposed stormwater charges are based on a detailed rate study prepared by an independent expert which is available for public review. The study was scrutinized and approved by our independent citizen Utilities Commission in a public meeting and then discussed in a series of officially noticed public forums. Only 18 property owners filed opposition protests.
Following an additional public hearing, the City Council voted unanimously to send the proposal forward for a vote by the owners of 16,000 properties within the city, in keeping with the process placed into the California Constitution by Proposition 218. Proposition 218 specifies that property owners, the parties legally obligated to pay the fee increase, get to make these sorts of decisions. If a property owner has multiple properties in Davis, they will get one vote per parcel. Their ballots will soon arrive in the mail if they have not already done so.
Please return your ballot by mail or deliver it in person to the City Clerk’s Office at 23 Russell Boulevard, Suite 1, in Davis. It must be received by 5 p.m. on June 25, 2021, not just postmarked by that date, so if you are replying by mail it would be wise to get your ballot in well ahead of that deadline to ensure it counts. Call the City Clerk at 530 757-5648 to arrange for in-person delivery.
As we are all learning, climate change leads to more extreme wet and dry years in our region. Right now, another California drought is looming. Fortunately, our city leaders and Davis voters had the foresight in 2013 to approve the purchase of additional water rights on the Sacramento River and to partner in the surface water project with Woodland to bring that water to Davis. Your “yes” vote on the stormwater initiative will show that we will do our part again to protect our community from catastrophic future rainstorms that could also result from climate change.
Let’s take care of Davis. Let’s deal with the realities of climate change. Let’s vote yes for the stormwater fees needed to protect our community from harm.
Dan Carson is a Davis city councilmember. Elaine Roberts Musser is a member of the city Utilities Commission. Lucas Frerichs is vice mayor of Davis.
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If it pumps the Richards Boulevard Tunnel, why is it called the Russell Tunnel Pumping Station? Not a surprise in a City that has a Cowell and a Covell Boulevard, and a Covell Place that is nowhere near either.
A 117 % increase is reasonable on what planet? I am annoyed when the storm-water fee jumps at all on the City Services bill — what’s another 117% between friends? Does the City ever see the need to replace a series of century old pumping stations in advance, and maybe ramp things up slowly over time, rather than hitting us with a mega-project all at once, a la the Sacramento River pipeline? It’s not like these are boogeymen hiding in the bushes – these things are right there in front of us . But, no . . . this is the ‘Davis Way’ 😐
You mean like a year’s long drought due to human-induced climate change?
Nope, not a drought, rather: super-storms. I’m willing to take the risk of a few super-storms about now, with another smoke-filled, lung-killing summer on the way. Maybe the City should invest instead in a dome covering the city with massive air scrubbers.
A pineapple express followed by a significant seismic event in Davis? Sounds like the odds of winning the jackpot at Cache Creek Casino after successfully ripping off a truck-load of weed from a Capay Valley pot farm.
And the plan to deal with the cleaning of the stormwater – is what now? Is it even included in this fee increase, or is that being saved for another separate fee increase for the future?
And . . . will this address the fact that we are allowing so-called homeless people to camp along our ‘local waterways’ (such along north F Street), with the associated consequences of having humans camping along waterways without proper plumbing and therefore no sewage treatment? If not, treating storm-water only to have it contaminated after treatment is not a sane strategy.
Oh, isn’t that special! Taxpayers all over California and/or the U.S. will subsidize the storm-water fees of ‘privileged’ Davis. Could someone call Ohio and Susanville and see how they feel about this? Always there, dangling the magic of free federal money. Isn’t God (the feds) a wonderful and omnipotent being?
What if the water ‘runs off’ into an onsite percolation basin? Do they get a waiver? Sounds like people with tennis courts and impervious driveways are gonna hate this.
And, there they are . . . . . The ‘Evil 18’ – probably rich white people with tennis courts who live on high ground. Oh, that’s right, there is no high ground in Davis, unless you build you house on the Pole Line over-crossing.
Rich people get to make the decisions. Typical 😐
Super rich people get to vote more than once 😐
Everything else goes by postmark. But now that Trump dismantled the post office to mess up vote-by-mail (so the theory goes), we need to have these in the mail by some unknown date so they can slowly make their way through the mail system . . . to cross Davis.
As we are learning, the sun rising in the east, and wind and sun and rain a fog and snow and pretty much ‘weather’, is evidence of climate change.
As we are also learning, politicians use ‘climate change’ as a liberal-heart-strung-tugger to manipulate a vote on pretty much anything and everything that suites them.
I don’t think it’s looming. I think it’s already loomed.
And you are paying for it, along with all that nutritious, delicious farmland pesticide runoff from the northern Sacramento Valley!
Or from ‘weather’ . . . and your “yes” vote will show that Davis never saw a tax increase it didn’t like.
Take care, Davis!
Let’s deal with the realities of weather.
Let’s show our politicians that we believe anything and everything is evidence of climate change, and therefore we open our wallets. Thank you for manipulating our minds 😐 Here’s the money!
What’s next for Davis for 100%-plus fee increases to suddenly repair long-neglected infrastructure? Readers?
And don’t forget when someone once wrote:
Council members Carson and Frerichs should know better than to make that incorrect statement. As was clearly stated in Wednesday night’s Utilities Commission meeting, STATE WATER RESOURCES CONTROL BOARD WATER QUALITY ORDER NO. 2013-0001-DWQ includes provisions for rate adjustments when a parcel implements and demonstrably achieves a meaningful level of water management practices and water waste prevention for existing landscapes.
During Wednesday’s meeting, members of the Utilities Commission expressed a desire to look at the possibility of adding a rate adjustment once the Proposition 218 rates have been approved by the voters. Such a Low Impact Rate Adjustment would be modeled on the Low Impact Development (LID) Rate Adjustment detailed in The Stormwater Rate Study materials prepared for staff and the Commission by the City’s rate consultant Jerry Bradshaw.
The Low Impact Rate Adjustment in stormwater takes much the same approach as the Model Water Efficient Landscape Ordinance (Title 23, Division 2, Chapter 2.7 of the California Code of Regulations), which has been in effect for over 10 years. That program also allows cities and other jurisdictions to discount water utility fees.
To be clear, implementation of a Low Impact Rate Adjustment, modeled on the Low Impact Development (LID) Rate Adjustment, is not mandatory. City Council can choose not to do so, but in addition to the interest shown by several Utilities Commission members on Wednesday night, staff members indicated their support of exploring such an economic incentive program as long as the program:
1) establish clear provisions for water management practices and water waste prevention for existing landscapes;
2) promotes the efficient use of water; and
3) it is the responsibility of the property owner to provide proof of how the implemented water management practices achieve meaningful water waste prevention and thereby reduce the property’s burden on the Stormwater system.
There was plenty of time between Wednesday’s Utilities Commission meeting and the publication date of the OpEd in the Enterprise and the Vanguard. That time could have been used by the three authors to eliminate the errors in the OpEd. Unfortunately, they chose not to do so.
With all the above said, I strongly support a “Yes” vote on the proposed rates. Alan Miller is correct that it is a 117% increase over the current rates, but it has been close to 20 years since the last Stormwater fee increase. That amounts to an increase of less than 4% per year if spread out over the period.
To ease the burden of the Stormwater fee increase, the Utilities Commission (of which I was a member until December 31, 2020) has recommended no annual increase in Wastewater fees or Water fees for the next 12-month period.
So, vote “Yes” on the Stormwater fee … and please be sure to send your ballot in.
Vote Yes. Unfortunately we have to make up for the deferred spending to date. The stormwater system has been running a depreciation deficit of almost $2 million a year for quite a while, and has no real financial reserves if something goes wrong. It’s an increase long overdue.
Yep!
We already cast our ballot (a “yes”)… the cost is de minimus… 117% of a small # is still a small number… deferred maintenance/upgrades of ANY infrastructure, particularly roads, utilities, is not a particularly wise idea… the concept of “penny wise, pound foolish” comes to mind… or, ‘pay me now, or pay me a heck of a lot more later, or suffer the consequences’… both apply…