As we head into winter, we should feel grateful for the rain. But San Francisco’s aging water infrastructure makes each big storm potentially a big stinking mess, with commutes snarled and sewage backing up into homes.
If city officials have their way, the murky costs of dealing with all that stormwater will soon become clear.
In our heavily paved environment, rain runoff, saturated with debris, oil, and other road pollutants, costs money to filter and clean before it goes back into the Bay and the Pacific Ocean. Starting in 2022, utility bills will show a new charge — a stormwater fee — to reflect the real cost of treating rain from roof gutters and driveways. Currently, the price of managing stormwater is hidden within the generic “sewage” fee, which is calculated based on water usage alone.
The SF Public Utilities Commission, which expects to approve the fee in early 2022, says most homeowners shouldn’t see an increase, since the added stormwater fee will be balanced by a reduction in the sewage fee.
But large property owners may well see a jump. “Right now, if you are a big-box store with one bathroom, you’re just paying for sanitary sewage, but you might have a huge roof and a giant parking lot that has tons of runoff going into the system,” says Erin Franks, rates administrator at the SFPUC. “The whole idea is to make sure that property owners are paying their fair share of the charges that we are incurring.”
As a first step, the SFPUC started charging a stormwater fee in October 2018 to owners of vacant lots, parking lots, and other properties without metered water service.
Catching up
Many cities across the U.S., including Los Angeles, charge residents and business owners for stormwater management. They often use aerial photos of roofs and other paved areas to get a bead on the square footage of impermeable surfaces, which the SFPUC also plans to do.
“The fee will help people become aware of how their property directly contributes to stormwater runoff.”
— Ellen Hanak, director of the Public Policy Institute of California’s Water Policy Center
San Francisco is playing catch-up in part because it has an antiquated wastewater system that combines sewage and stormwater. Everything goes into the same aging infrastructure and is treated together. San Francisco spent $350 million in the last fiscal year on wastewater treatment, and the SFPUC estimates stormwater accounted for 17 percent of that cost. In other words, San Francisco paid $60 million to treat rainwater that went down the drain.
Making that cost more transparent by charging a separate fee could have wide-ranging benefits. “Right now, there’s no incentive built into the system to manage stormwater in a sustainable way,” says Laura Tam, sustainability and resilience director at think tank SPUR, who coauthored the 2012 policy paper Stormwater Fees: An Equitable Path to a Sustainable Wastewater System. (SPUR first recommended a separate fee back in 2006.)
“Breaking out the rate [from sewage fees] could be a driver for multiple ecological and community benefits,” says Tam. “It would give people a chance for savings, which they don’t have access to right now.”
Nudges and mandates
Since metering water results in less use, the idea is not only to charge more fairly but to change behavior. Along with the new fee, the SFPUC plans to unveil credits for good rainwater stewardship, modeled after successful programs in Portland and elsewhere. Options include installation of a rain barrel to catch rainwater for irrigation and other non-potable uses (available for free, thanks to city subsidies), permeable paving, rain gardens or swales, underground cisterns capable of storing thousands of gallons, and the poster child of green infrastructure — living roofs.
“The fee will help people become aware of how their property directly contributes to stormwater runoff, and opens the door to creating incentives for people to actively manage their stormwater,” says Ellen Hanak, director of the Public Policy Institute of California’s Water Policy Center.
While the SFPUC hopes to nudge home and business owners toward improvements, developers of large new or redevelopment projects with more than 5,000 square feet of impervious surface area have no choice. Upgrades are required by the city’s Stormwater Management Ordinance. Two city schools, Lafayette Elementary and Bessie Carmichael Middle, are the first to qualify for SFPUC grants to retrofit older properties with green infrastructure.
Naturally, if there is less runoff, the sewer system is less likely to be overloaded when a storm hits. San Francisco’s combined system is more vulnerable to sewage backups, and heavy rains like those last winter or the recent Thanksgiving-week downpour are expected more frequently with climate change. “Stormwater management will become a bigger priority even in relatively arid California,” says Hanak.
Lydia Lee is a freelance writer in the Bay Area who covers urban design. Her previous story in The Frisc was about SF citizens using an app to blow the whistle on bike-lane blockers.
