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<\/a> Rain falls on both the just and the unjust, the Christian Gospel notes.The Philadelphia Water Department <\/strong>doesn’t judge; it is demanding more money from all the city property owners on whom the most rain falls.Up at 10th Street and Luzerne Avenue, Stuart Parmet<\/strong> and his 70 workers, mostly residents of the nearby Hunting Park neighborhood, recycle boxes from Johnson & Johnson, Pfizer Inc.<\/strong>, and other drugmakers at the former fire-damaged SEPTA trolley barn that Parmet converted into American Box & Recycling Co.<\/strong> during the last decade.<\/p>\nIt’s a Philadelphia success story. But now Parmet is talking to landlords in Cinnaminson and Deptford, driven to the brink of leaving the city, he says – not by “crime, taxes, dumping, graffiti,” or other urban ills, but by Philadelphia’s new storm-water fees.<\/p>\n
“They want me to pay $50,000 a year for God’s water to go from my roof into the sewer,” Parmet told me.<\/p>\n
That’s more than his yearly property-tax bill, and 20 times what Parmet had been paying the city for maintaining the storm sewers that drain his 200,000-square-foot plant’s roof and his 13-acre truck yard under the old storm-water-fee system, which was based on how much city water each property used.<\/p>\n
That seemed unjust; there’s no obvious connection between how much water you consume and how much rainwater your property dumps into the city’s storm sewers, creeks, and rivers.<\/p>\n
And that sparked years of complaints from the Building Owners & Managers Association<\/strong>, which represents Center City office towers, and other buildings that use a lot of city water but aren’t wide enough to drain much rainwater into the city’s storm sewers.<\/p>\n In the 1990s, the Water Department created a Stormwater Charge Allocation Community Advisory Committee, <\/strong>with representatives from the University of Pennsylvania<\/strong>, community groups, big-building owners, big industries such as the former AlliedSignal<\/strong> and Conrail Inc.<\/strong>, and parking-lot operator Joseph Zuritsky’s Parkway Corp.<\/strong>, among others.<\/p>\n The group’s 1996 report recommended charging for storm-water drainage based on actual runoff, not city water use.<\/p>\n Later, the city hired an aircrew to photograph city properties, estimating building and paved areas, and assessed tens of thousands of commercial properties based on how much water they drained.<\/p>\n Under pressure from Environmental Protection Agency<\/strong> guidelines that force cities to reduce storm-runoff surge, the Water Department also agreed to ease its storm-water rates for property owners who built retention basins, used porous ground covers that let water soak through, and otherwise cut runoff. [Read rest of story]<\/a><\/p>\n