Murrysville officials will move ahead with plans to implement a stormwater fee for residents and businesses, as the municipality’s state-mandated responsibilities regarding storm runoff expand.
Council approved advertising the proposed ordinance and will likely vote on it at their final meeting of 2025 or early in the new year.
Murrysville has a municipal separate storm system, or MS4, and the permits it must secure from the state come with mandated pollution reduction targets. That has necessitated spending money on projects such as stormwater detention ponds, some of which are within private developments.
“The issue is that MS4 has taken a lot of things that we used to put on individual property owners or homeowners associations and put them back on us,” council President Dayne Dice said.
Murrysville Chief Administrator Michael Nestico said the town spends between $300,000 and $500,000 each year on stormwater projects.
Consultants helping the municipality formulate a draft ordinance for the stormwater fee — projected to be set at $7 per month, or $84 per year, for homeowners — estimated it would bring in between $965,000 and $1 million annually. Councilwoman Jamie Lingg noted that is nearly double the amount the municipality spends each year and asked where the additional money would be used.
“It would be for things that we’re already falling behind on,” Nestico said. “We have upcoming (stormwater) work that we’ve delayed and pushed back. We also expect requirements for the (National Pollutant Discharge Elimination System) to change by 2029, and all the communities around here are talking about what that may mean for costs in the future.”
The fee for commercial properties would be calculated using a more accurate formula based on impervious surface and property size, and would be considerably larger than the fee on residents.
Choice Auto Sales owner Kirk Rettger said he’s spent nearly $200,000 adding stormwater features to the property he bought several years ago for his business.
“Moving forward, I hope there’s some consideration given to property owners who’ve already developed stormwater controls,” Rettger said.
Nestico said properties developed over the past couple of decades — when the approval process regularly dictated some kind of stormwater controls, particularly on commercial parcels — will be eligible for the credit, which in many communities is up to 50% of the stormwater fee.
“Some of the decades-old properties in town are just connected to the stormwater pipes, and for some of them we don’t even have documentation,” he said. “Certainly, any newer property that’s gone through the development process has something already in place.”
One thing the stormwater fee will not address is the flooding problems Murrysville has experienced.
“In many ways, this won’t even get to the level of addressing some of the flooding issues,” Nestico said. “It would help, generally, but the specific issues we had earlier this year (along Steele’s Run and Turtle Creek) were part of a unique weather event and amplified issues we’ve had for years in some low-lying areas. We’ll be able to do more to address stormwater with this fee, but I don’t want to mislead people and say that if we implement this, it will solve some of our flooding problems. But we are working with the DEP on how we can address some of those bigger projects.”
Council voted unanimously to advertise the ordinance, which will bring it back onto the agenda for a vote in the near future. Councilman Matthew Olszewski was not present.
Council’s next scheduled meeting is at 7 p.m. Tuesday, Dec. 16, at the municipal building, 4100 Sardis Road in Murrysville. An agenda is available in advance at Murrysville.com.
