The federal government’s ambitious plan to clean up the Chesapeake Bay could cost Virginia, Maryland and the District billions of dollars each and add hundreds of dollars to the annual property tax bill of local homeowners, state and local officials said.
A new study on the Environmental Protection Agency’s plans to reduce pollution flowing to the Bay shows that it could cost each affected city and county between $259 million and $386 million a year for the next 15 years.
The study done by the Virginia Municipal Stormwater Association, a group of Virginia localities that operate storm sewer systems, represents the worst-case scenario for Virginia’s cities and counties. But even states that are able to develop alternative cleanup plans of their own could still be forced to raise billions in tax dollars to pay the bill, officials said.
In Fairfax County, which is expecting to pay as much as $3.75 billion over the next 15 years to meet the EPA’s new standards, property taxes would have to be increased by 14 cents per $100 of a home’s assessed value, Randy Bartlett, the county’s storm water director, said. For an average Fairfax home, assessed at $459,228, the new tax would add nearly $650 to its owner’s annual property tax bill.
And Fairfax is hardly alone. The District will spend $3.2 billion over the next 15 years to reduce nitrogen output at the Blue Plains water treatment facility and control sewage overflows. In Maryland, Montgomery County alone will spend $86 million on storm water improvements over the next five years. The county’s storm water fee rose from $45.50 to $49 in 2010, and will rise incrementally each year to offset the costs. Prince George’s County already spent $28.1 million on similar projects in the last year.
It’s unclear how much money the federal government can offer to offset the cost of its initiative. The EPA has announced $491 million in Bay funds for the current fiscal year, but the money still needs congressional approval, and Bay advocates say a fiscally conservative Republican majority in the House of Representatives could make it harder to find additional federal funds.
The EPA’s plan for Virginia would require communities to reroute their storm water drainage systems to flow through filtration ponds rather than directly into the Bay watershed as some do now. Ponds and other filtration systems would help reduce the amount of sediment and nutrient pollution afflicting the Bay.
Virginia’s one chance of avoiding the massive price tag of the EPA plan is to devise a more cost-effective plan of its own that would reduce pollution flowing to the Bay. The state has until Nov. 29 to complete that plan. The District and Maryland have already submitted their own plans and will likely avoid the burden of the EPA’s expensive retrofits, but alternate cleanup efforts are still costing the states and communities millions of dollars.
For all the work the EPA and states have invested in determining how to aid the Bay, Bartlett said, “they have spent very little effort trying to figure out what the cost would be and the financial impact.”
The notion of spending hundreds of millions of tax dollars a year to rebuild a storm water drainage system at a time when communities, states and the federal government are facing budget deficits could prove financially crippling, officials said.
“This cuts to the head of the line,” Chris Pomeroy, an attorney for the storm water association, said of the EPA’s plan. “These become must-do items in the category of a legal mandate. It’s not an optional funding decision.”
EPA spokesman David Sternberg said the agency has no “illusions that [its plan] is the most cost-effective way to do it.” The agency would prefer that states come up with cheaper alternative plans as long as they still meet EPA’s pollution reduction goals, he said.
“It’s not going to be cheap, it’s not going to be easy, and it’s not going to be quick,” Sternberg said. “But this is an opportunity to restore not only the national treasure that is the Chesapeake Bay, but also local waterways as well.”
