"Water," a decorahnews.com special series: Decorah Stormwater Utility is preemptive effort against changing Iowa regulations

The Decorah City Council gave its unanimous approval to the second reading of the proposed ordinance to create a stormwater utility for the city earlier this week.

City Administrator Chad Bird disclosed the details of the new fee, which will be charged differently based upon the "quantity" of stormwater on any given property. Residential properties owners would be charged $3.00 a month, with small, large and industrial business owners being charged $5.00, $10.00 and $20.00 a month, respectively. This fee will be applied to the current water utility bill.

After conducting a study with students from University of Iowa Department of Planning over the past two years, the city of Decorah determined that there were areas of concern when it came to stormwater infrastructure. According to Bird, this  proposal comes as a preemptive effort to deal with this concern, as well as other regulatory issues.

"First, it's really a stormwater management fee," Bird said. "What this does is gives the city an alternative revenue source to build, maintain and improve the infrastructure for dealing with storm water. There is a collective concern about increased rainfall events and flooding, so we want the ability to improve what currently exists and build new infrastructure to be able to better manage that stormwater. We found that there are areas that are prone to flooding and places where structures could be improved."

The other aspect of this proposed utility is the increasing regulation by the Army Corps of Engineers in how Iowan communities maintain and inspect their levee systems. 

"This utility gives us the tools and resources to deal with those potential costs," Bird said. "Right now Decorah isn't under any pressure to maintain our levees at a certain level of care but if we ever were to fall under more significant regulation, this would be a way of dealing with it ahead of time."

There are two key improvement projects that this utility would fund directly. The first is a storm intake improvement project on Centrum Drive, which would be co-funded by the Iowa DOT. The second would be the maintenance of a failing retaining wall behind the Decorah Public Library.

This new utility will go into effect after the third hearing of the ordinance, which should happen at the next city council meeting.