'Rain Tax' Building Baltimore Sewers

'Rain Tax' Dollars at Work: Baltimore's mandatory stormwater-management improvement plan is out for public review

The City of Baltimore will soon start using almost $80 million in revenues from its stormwater-management fees on property owners—what detractors call the “rain tax”—on 95 projects around the city between now and 2019. The projects are detailed in an 81-page “Watershed Implementation Plan” (WIP) released by the city’s Department of Public Works (DPW) on Dec. 19, and public comments about the plan are being accepted until Jan. 30, according to DPW spokesman Jeffrey Raymond.

The WIP is required under the city’s stormwater permit, which allows discharges from the city’s “municipal separate storm sewer system,” better known as MS4, into streams and the Baltimore harbor. It seeks to reduce stormwater contamination—Baltimore’s main cause of water pollution—by reducing the city’s “total maximum daily loads” (TMDLs) of pollution and trash entering the Chesapeake Bay watershed. The WIP’s stated goal is to meet the MS4 permit’s requirement that the city restore “an equivalent” of 4,041 acres of hard surfaces in the city that don’t absorb the rain, impervious areas where “stormwater runoff is not currently managed.”

“I think it’s important for people to understand that this is what their stormwater utility fee is being used for,” says Alice Volpitta, the water-quality manager for the clean-water advocacy group Blue Water Baltimore, which closely monitors the MS4 process. “Both supporters of the fee and those who would call it a ‘rain tax’ deserve to know how their money will be spent, and that’s exactly what document aims to clarify,” she continues, adding that “DPW is also looking to hire an additional 53 to 75 people for the implementation and maintenance of these programs and projects.”

This is a good use for the "rain tax." I've knocked the rain tax in the past, particularly because of the way it has been applied in some of the more rural of the jurisdictions it's been mandated, where it is often targeted at rural land unimportant to the storm water problem the tax is nominally designed to raise money to fix. This doesn't apply as much to Baltimore, which is essentially all urban, and which has a severe storm water overflow problem, and lots of pollution which runs into the Bay as a result.

Now if only they could apply the tax to government agencies which own impermeable surfaces too.