The Santa Clarita City Council approved a fee of $24.04 per household Tuesday to clean out storm drains during the 2015-16 fiscal year.
The rate is a 48-cent increase from last year’s fee of $23.56. The difference, as allowed under Proposition 218, is equal to rise in the Consumer Price Index for Los Angeles, Riverside and Orange counties. It’s roughly equal to the original stormwater fee of $24, approved by the City Council in 1994.
The fee pays for projects to meet the requirements of the 1972 Federal Clean Water Act and to meet future National Pollutant Discharge Elimination System (NPDES) permit obligations imposed on Santa Clarita by the state’s Regional Water Quality Control Board.
The programs include pollution education and prevention, street sweeping, cleaning of storm drain catch basins and state-mandated water quality monitoring.
More specifically, the fee funds the Coordinated Integrated Monitoring Plan, which is used to test for pollutants coming from storm drains and within the Santa Clara River and will cost the city, Los Angeles County and the Los Angeles County Flood Control District $430,000 through fiscal 2017-18.
Meanwhile, city staff is looking to eliminate the requirements to install automatic storm drain outfall sampling equipment over the next three fiscal years, at a cost of approximately $50,000 per station, according to a staff report. The city has identified six to nine stations that could be required to have the equipment.
The city and county are also required to build and maintain large scale distributed infiltration projects throughout the Santa Clarita Valley, estimated to exceed $13.8 million.
The city must also install trash excluder devices inside certain catch basins to prevent trash, litter and debris from getting into the storm drain pipes, according to the report. A total of 87 catch basins were retrofitted with the devices at an approximate cost of $1,000 each to purchase and install.
Revisions to the plan will be required within the next three fiscal years, with an expected cost of approximately $500,000.
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1 Comment
Less impervious pavement and more careful attention to ground water re-charge areas in the planning process would have helped alleviate this issue. But no, the city must allow developers to pave over everything because options that would allow the water to sink in are just too expensive for these poor fellows. So now we must all be charged for to fix the problem.
For years we were charged a fee to increase street sweeping. With nary a street sweeper in site, that money somehow got absorbed into the general fund. Now here we go again.